Strings-n-Things

I admittedly have a very narrow understanding of science… mostly because to be a true scientist requires levels of mathematical knowledge that I just can’t wrap my mind around. But I do enjoy reading and watching “pop culturilized” versions of scientific concepts. I recently posted a blog about my fascination with evolution as explained by prolific and eloquent authors such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. But lately my real fascination has come from the world of physics.

My intrigue began when I saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, which gives a very trippy yet accessible primer on the nature of Quantum Theory (though I thought the movie suffered by turning into too much of a new age “self-help” commercial a la The Secret). Less than a month after watching What the Bleep, I was hired to write a classroom video series about Quantum Theory. That’s when I realized that the movie really REALLY oversimplified the theory. I had to learn QT from the ground up and it wasn’t easy. I literally read the book they gave me about ten times from beginning to end and went through about five drafts of the scripts before I finally started to grasp not only the ideas but their implications. A few months later, the same company hired me to write another series about Relativity and the learning process began all over again. Briefly, for the uninitiated, Quantum Theory and Relativity are two very different aspects of physics. Overly-simply put, QT deals with the world of the very very small (atoms, electrons, quarks, etc) while Relativity deals with the world of the very very large (planets, galaxies, black holes, etc). The problem is that the two theories don’t jive with each other. Those equations and experiments that produce nice neat and tidy results when examining the forces of black holes, produce completely ludicrous results when examining the movements of electrons. And vice versa. In a universe that is supposed to obey strict, orderly and well-defined laws, the fact that there isn’t one universal set of equations to govern the very large and the very small has, quite frankly, been driving scientists batshit for the better part of the last century.

Enter String Theory. For the last thirty or forty years, this has been THE THEORY that was supposed to unify the two worlds. I’m not going to go into all the aspects of it (there is an awesome NOVA series online that breaks it all down), but overly simply put, the theory states that all matter and energy is made not of particles or waves but of infinitesimally small vibrating strings. Right now the theory is based entirely on complex (excruciatingly complex) math. There’s no way to test it simply because there’s no microscope powerful enough to observe something so small as a “string”. But the math, if it’s accurate, does two things. First of all, it seems to prove, mathematically, a lot of the trippy, f---ed up, whacked-out theories about parallel universes and diverging timelines that I have personally come up with over the years (often under the influence of THC). But more importantly for the world at large, String Theory seems to do what scientists have been hoping for by linking Relativity with QT… albeit with one caveat: the only way it works is if there are more dimensions than the four we know about.

Aside from one version of string theory (which puts the number of dimensions at 26) almost every other version puts the number at a much more familiar value: 10. Ten dimensions! If this turns out to be true, how freakin’ cool would that be? That would mean that the entire universe operates on a number that is the very basis for our entire numerical system. And the only reason that 10 is the basis for our entire numerical system is almost quaintly simple: because we have ten fingers. The bible says God made us in His image. Is that a literal truth? Does God look like a man? Or is God simply a Being of numbers and perfection – a 10^th dimensional being? Since He is considered to be All and Everything, is He essentially the embodiment of every dimension… numbering 10? Did he give us ten fingers to somehow represent that fact? We always think of Heaven as being “up in the sky.” Maybe Heaven won’t involve a three-dimensional “up”. Maybe Heaven (or Nirvana or Enlightenment) will mean rising to a higher dimensional plane. The Bible says that at the end of the world we will become like Jesus. Maybe that means we’ll be elevated from our three dimensions to something “higher” and more closely resembling God.

I can remember while studying for the Relativity series, reading something about the expansion of the universe. Again, overly-simply put, there were three ways the universe could have expanded immediately following the Big Bang. There could have been too little “bang”, causing all the density of matter to almost immediately collapse back into itself. Or there could have been too much “bang” causing all that matter to fling so far and so fast that it never had the chance to coalesce into galaxies, stars and solar systems. And then there’s the third way it could have gone. A perfectly balanced “bang” that allowed everything to fling outward and yet still come together into the order we see now. Physicists equate this to the idea of balancing a pencil on its tip. Theoretically it’s possible that you could do that. But you’d have to balance it absolutely perfectly and hope that no outside force (wind, bumping the table, a truck driving by on the street) altered its positioning by even a fraction of a millimeter. The Universe apparently formed like that. Perfectly. HOW THE HELL? Scientists check and recheck the math and they say it just doesn’t make sense that the universe should have formed this way. Like seriously, nothing in nature has ever formed in such harmony. I’m paraphrasing and probably (again) oversimplifying the matter, but the fact remains, the Universe formed PERFECTLY! How do you even begin to wrap your mind around how utterly amazing that is?

I find it disappointing that so many people interpret science and faith to be such disparate and incompatible concepts. For people of deep religious faith, so many scientific theories amount to little more than heresy, serving only to take glory away from God. On the flip side of that coin, it seems like a lot of scientists think that even entertaining the possibility of a supreme being somehow detracts from the beauty, wonder and logic of the Universe… and ultimately makes one a bad scientist. Yet so much of what I see in both science and religion seem to compliment each other in ways that are almost illogically perfect. It boggles my mind that more people don’t make this leap.

Insert Rocky Horror Lyrics Here

I've been thinking about time travel a lot lately. Well really I've been thinking about higher dimensions in general a lot lately and time travel goes right along with that train of thought. To know why my brain has been going down this road check out the following video: Imagining the Tenth Dimension. For those of you who don't have the eleven minutes to invest (first of all, you're missing out, it's a total mind trip) the basic gist of this heady heady video is all about visualizing higher dimensions as a series of "points, lines and folds." As a quick example, imagine an ant traveling across a two-dimensional piece of paper. As far as the ant is concerned the paper is just a long flat surface. It walks in a straight line trying to come to the "end" of the paper just as we would fly a ship through space trying to get to the "end" of the universe. But if you used three-dimensional space, and folded that two-dimensional paper to another point on the sheet, you could essentially make that ant "jump" instantly from one point to another point in its universe. Similarly if you could "fold" three-dimensional space through the fourth dimension, you could jump instantly from one point in the universe to a point billions of light years away...

As most anyone who has a basic understanding of Einstein (or even basic science fiction physics) knows, the key to time travel lies in the fourth dimension. Time is the dimension that exists above the length, width and depth we all comprehend. It is the dimension that connects "space" as we know it now to "space" as it will be a minute from now. Or in its broadest sense it is the dimension that connects the Big Bang to the very end of the universe. In theory the ability to time travel exists in the ability to move through the fourth dimension in the same way we currently move through the third. But rather than driving down the street or taking an airplane to Australia or a rocket ship to the moon, we are taking a very different kind of highway through minutes, hours or millennia.

Different movies depict time travel in different ways. The one that comes to the mind of most people in my generation, of course, is the Back to the Future trilogy. In those movies, time travel is presented as an instantaneous transition. Doc Brown and Marty McFly jump thirty, seventy and a hundred years in a seamless leap. I don't quite get how that could happen. We can travel through three dimensions but it takes a finite amount of time. And it requires us to travel across the space in between. We can't just suddenly move from New Jersey to Australia. That would violate Einstein's theory of relativity that says nothing can move faster than the speed of light. So it would stand to reason that we can also not move through time without it taking a certain duration as we cross over all that time in between (unless, as the video says, we could "fold" instantly through the fifth dimension to whatever point in the fourth we wish). Of course then again, moving through space requires time, a higher dimensional measurement. So perhaps moving through time requires a higher type of measurement we haven't thought of.

Another thought. What would it be like to "see" in four dimensions? Well how would a theoretical two-dimensional being see us? Figure a piece of paper bisecting your body and a 2D guy looking at you. He'd only be able to see whatever length of body he happened to be aligned with. If the paper was bisecting you from top to bottom, he'd only see a "cross-section" of your 3D self: a line that changed from brown to flesh colored to the white of your shirt to the blue of your jeans. In order to comprehend your entire body, you'd have to move across the line of paper entirely. The 2D man would have to compile each cross-section into an overall picture of what you might look like. Similarly we as 3D people can only see "cross-sections" of the fourth dimension. For instance, as I sit writing this, I can only see the man sitting across from me as he exist in this exact second. If I were to see him "fourth-dimensionally" I would see essentially a blurred three-dimensional line of every movement he made before now and after now. This is a topic they discuss in Imagining the Tenth Dimension as well as in the book Slaughterhouse Five (where the main character gets "unstuck in time"). Seeing in four dimensions allows you to see every moment of a person's life all at once...

But this is where I get stuck… though I'm certain I've already lost most of you well before now. Would seeing in four dimensions allow me to see every moment of his life. Would I see him simultaneously as a baby and as a corpse? Or is it like three-dimensional space where I can only see the parts I am also a part of? While I certainly have the ability to see Australia (since I can travel through space to get there) I can't actually see it unless I physically go there. Similarly, will I only see this man's full fourth-dimensional self for the duration of moments that I am also a part of… the moments where he and I are in the same proximity? He has been sitting here in the hotel lounge since I arrived here with my laptop and perhaps before I leave he will at some point walk to the elevator. If I were to see him in four dimensions, would I only see him that far? That would make sense to me.

But what about people I see all the time? Every moment I'm with Lauren, would I see every moment of fourth-dimensional time we have shared? Or would I only see the beginning and end of each individual meeting? When I return to our room will I see her simultaneously from the moment we met through the moment we die? Or will I only see her from the moment I come through the door until the moment one of us leaves?

Then again, the ability to see every moment of somebody's life in four dimensions wouldn't require time travel at all. All of those moments would exist in the present. This is one of the ideas explored in Slaughterhouse Five. For people who can see all moments of a person's life, death is not something to be scared of since you can always see and interact with a dead person as they were when they were alive. You can see and experience past good times even when you are currently experiencing bad times. They all exist simultaneously. But it seems to me that seeing the fourth dimension in this way would probably require command of an even higher dimension. At least the fifth and possibly even the sixth. Because again, even though I exist in three-dimensions, I can't see every part of the third dimension… I'm limited by barriers such as walls, trees, the horizon and just pure distance. Being a part of the third dimension only means I can travel through it. But being able to see all of three-dimensional space at once would require the use of a higher dimension or perhaps a higher plane of existence. Likewise existing in the fourth dimension would only allow one to travel through time, not see the entire timeline at a glance.

Yes friends, these are the kinds of thoughts that keep me up at one-thirty on a Sunday night. I have no real conclusion to this so I simply leave you to your own thoughts and confusion.

(also, I'm certain there are countless typos in this post but I have no energy or brain capacity after all this to go back an edit… perhaps later.)

It's the little things

Walking through the Philadelphia International Airport at 5 o’clock this morning and seeing the disproportionate amount of bleary-eyed college students walking around has led me to two conclusions:

1) Early ass Saturday morning flights must be the dirt-cheapest way to travel considering many of said students couldn’t even afford the food they were eating (sharing Poland Springs and egg sandwiches and whatnot as they were).

and

2) Hollister must have their spring break this week.

Oh and I simply love Philadelphia graffiti.

In a stall today as I sat taking care of business I read the following: EAGLES SUCK. Nothing too mind blowing all things considered but some amusing pooper after my own heart crossed out EAGLES and replaced it with a much more general SPORTS. SPORTS SUCK. Yes... yes they do.

Also saw this charming attack on religion:

DONKEY’S TALK
PEOPLE CAN FLY
AND JESUS
LIVES IN THE SKY

What made it great were the lines some other defecator added in at a later date:

DONKEY’S TALK - YEAH, JUST LIKE THIS JACKASS
PEOPLE CAN FLY - YEAH, IN AIRPLANES
AND JESUS - THE SON OF GOD
LIVES IN THE SKY - IS ALL AROUND US YOU MORON.

God help me, but I love crass Christians... and proudly consider myself one of them.

In the event of a sudden change in cabin humor...

God help me, I love airline employees with a sense of humor. Even a stupid joke that you might not otherwise laugh at is rendered about ten times funnier when it is said over a P.A. system in the airport or on an airplane.

Cases in point:

I was flying from Bangor to Philadelphia a couple summers ago on one of those tiny puddle-jumper planes and the male flight attendant doing the safety lecture said, "Insert the flap into the buckle and pull the strap to tighten. If this is too confusing, exit the plane immediately as you're probably too stupid to be flying."

On another flight, the pilot came over the speaker and announced that there was a long line for the runway and we would likely be sitting here for almost an hour. But there was some good news. Can you guess what that good news was? Yep, he just saved a bunch of money on his car insurance.

And just this morning, as I sit in the New Orleans terminal with about a thousand other people after Allstar Weekend, this man with a very thick Cajun accent comes over the P.A. and says, "For anyone on standby for any flight... for any flight... standing will not get you on a flight any faster, so please feel free to grab a seat."

Seriously, under any other circumstances, none of these mildly humorous jokes would have made me laugh. But coming from somebody working in an industry where people are by nature pissed off at the public as a whole and you as an individual, it's just priceless comedy.

Really?

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Weird.

I realized today that I don't really like most Christmas music and haven't since I was a kid. Actually I realized that a few years ago, but I realized WHY today. As a kid, Christmas music is fun mostly because you're always the one singing it. But as you get older, you're forced to listen to Bing Crosby sing it. And if you don't particularly like Bing Crosby, well... it doesn't do much for your like of the music in general.

Allison came out with a very profound statement the other day: "I was two on the day I turned three."

I used to buy milk two or more gallons at a time. Then I read some stuff that said milk actually wasn't as good for you as everyone says. These days I buy vinegar two or more gallons at a time. I'm not saying the one is a natural byproduct of the other, but there you are.

I really don't understand how people still get computer viruses. How hard is it to question a sender about a strange looking attachment?

I never realized just how insanely fun it can be to throw one tiny cat onto the back of another unspecting cat. Especially a large, old and crotchety cat.

I've already decided that I will most likely be writing in my candidate for president next year. Not sure who, but I just can't bring myself to validate the choices either party has given us with so much as an X... or a hanging chad.

I have a theory that hardcore pornography is actually targeted at closeted gay men. Why else would they spend so much time focused on the cock?

I don't think I will ever reach a point in my life where I am too mature to laugh at a fat kid falling down.

For years I've told people the story of a childhood friend who peed on an electric fence as if it were something that happened to me personally. Somehow a story like that is just funnier in the first person.

I don't care if she's only fifteen; hot is hot and show me the law that says it's illegal to leer.

I like to think I'm fairly open-minded when it comes to strange foods, but I still can't wrap my mind around tofu.

Little kids' bodies are so ridiculously disproportionate it's almost a marvel they aren't genetically defective. When they raise their arms up high, the fingers barely clear their scalp.

The thing I really miss about my Geo is playing "Merge Chicken" against people in Mercedes SUV's.

I have no idea how I used to eat Ramen in such quantities.

I sometimes wonder how many years the sciences of physics and chemistry were set back because one guy thought for about two seconds that the atom resembled a mini-solar system.

I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for anyone who loses an hour and a half's worth of work because they forgot to save.

I never realized that I hadn't seen a single red hot dog since leaving Maine until about a year ago when I read on Wikipedia that red hot dogs are actually a Maine "thing."

I likewise never realized that I hadn't seen a single whoopie pie since leaving Maine until somebody told me that Maine is apparently the whoopie pie capital of the world.

Britney Spears is hot. Her music is catchy. And everyone just needs to lay off.

At any given hour on any given day I would bet a minor sum of money that I could find at least one Law & Order or CSI incarnation on TV.

I still don't know, nor care, what the top news story of the day is.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Still weird.

Always so fowl?

Was there ever a point in time when the chicken joke was funny? The original one I mean. The one that has come to represent the quintessential definition of a joke in general, and a bad joke in particular.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side.

It’s a reversal technique that gives this joke its intended humor. The setup indicates that the chicken in question had some higher purpose for crossing the road. But the punchline indicates that he was crossing the road just simply for the purpose OF crossing the road. A modern equivalent of this joke (at least the only one I can think of at 4:00 in the morning as I sit in a production trailer babysitting editors) comes from an episode of Friends.

FRANK: We were down at the courthouse, we were having lunch and we just decided to get married.
PHOEBE: Oh my god, what were you doing at the courthouse?
FRANK: We were having lunch.

The idea behind the chicken joke is this same kind of funny, but the thing is by the time we’re actually old enough to get the punchline, we’ve heard it like a million times in some other patently not funny context. So by the time we have the intellectual maturity to actually be able to find it funny, the joke has already lost any chance of eliciting a laugh because, well, it’s just “that stupid chicken joke.” Really, the only time anyone ever laughs at the chicken joke is when somebody (not unlike the original joke teller) throws out some kind of reversal on the expected punchline.

It can be done via a pun like:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the playground?
A: To get to the other slide.

It can be done with absurdity:

Q: Why did the frog cross the road?
A: Because he was stapled to the chicken.

Or it can be done by applying a third party personality to the punchline:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A (by Einstein): Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath it depends on your point of reference.
A (by Martin Luther King): I envision a world where chickens are free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.
A (by Buddha): To ask this question is to deny your own chicken nature.
A (by Colonel Sanders): Wait, you mean I missed one?

But just where the heck did the original joke come from? And moreover, was there ever a point in time when people found it funny? Like did the first adult to ever hear this joke laugh when he heard it? As I said, the joke has become kind of a stock character of sorts representing all jokes everywhere and all bad jokes specifically. But that iconic status couldn’t have just materialized out of thin air. Was it a really popular joke that just got told too much, making people sick of it to the point where they finally started mocking the thing? It must have been based in something somewhere in the past. Catch phrases are like that too. We say them and we know what they mean, but when we really stop and look at them, we realize they don’t actually make any sense in our modern context.

Example: “Close but no cigar.”

Heh? What the heck does a cigar have to do with guessing the wrong answer? Well, fairground games used to give away cigars as prizes. So when a patron missed the ring toss by an inch, the guy running the game would let loose with a phrase that actually meant something in contemporary context. And even though the context has disappeared over the years, the phrase still holds meaning.

Likewise, even though the chicken joke is no longer funny, we still recognize it, not only as a joke, but as THE joke. But where? When? Why? How did this particular joke earn such dubious longevity?

And moreover… why a chicken?

Take twenty-six!

I can remember producing TV shows back in college and how we would often put more effort into editing the blooper reel than anything else. The bloopers would usually end up being the longest segment of the whole show. These days every good DVD has a blooper reel in its special features section and people like Dick Clark manage to devote entire hours of prime time TV to nothing but snippets of celebrities screwing up on camera. What is it about bloopers that we find so damn entertaining? Why do we get such a kick out of watching somebody mess up a line, or drop a prop or bust out laughing in the middle of a take?

Personally I think bloopers are yet another byproduct of our voyeuristic mentality these days. It lets us take a glimpse behind the curtain, beyond the façade of all these characters we know and love. Even though logically we know those actors aren’t really like the characters they play on TV, and even though we know the news anchors can’t possibly be that dignified and professional every hour of every day, even though we know all that, our brains still can’t distance themselves from those perfect on-screen personas. Even imperfect TV characters always know exactly what to say at exactly the right moment. When they lose an argument, even in defeat they still have something witty to say. Nobody ever storms off muttering swear words under their breath and coming up with a worthy comeback five minutes too late like we would. These people are too perfect to be real. Which makes sense of course because they’re not real. But bloopers are our only real reminder of that. Bloopers are rare moments when that curtain is pulled back and our brains can finally see these perfect people for what they really are: lame and stupid and, above all, human just like us.

You’ll be watching bloopers on, say, the DVD for Home Improvement and the chick who plays Tim’s wife, Jill, will suddenly realize she said the wrong line. You see her bottom lip tuck under her teeth, hear a brief “Fff…” followed by a bleep and you realize, whoa, Jill just said “fuck”! Jill! You know, Jill? She was always so motherly, so matronly, so almost prudish in her mannerisms. The very idea that she could ever conceivably stoop so low as to say such a four-letter word on ABC of all places, the channel owned by Disney for crying out loud, between the hours of eight o’clock and nine! Why, she never would. But then you see the blooper reel and realize, “No seriously, JILL just said the fucking F-word!” No way. Way!

The funniest bloopers are when some really composed newsman like Walter Cronkite messes up a standup for like the tenth time and in frustration blurts out, “Ah shit.” They bleep the “-it” out of course so all you hear is “Ah sh-” but you know what he said… and it amazes you. Oh my god, Walter Cronkite, the most poised, unruffled man in America, just got mad enough to say the “S-word.” Not only that, he said it over something really stupid. It wasn’t like he was expressing frustration over some particularly dramatic news event like, “Ah shit, President Kennedy was assassinated today,” or, “Ah shit, forest fires ripped through Southern California this week,” or even, “Ah shit, we lost another battalion in Vietnam.” It was, “Ah shit, I can’t seem to say, ‘One smart fellow, he felt smart,’ for my report on J. Edgar Hoover.” How stupid is that? That’s the kind of dumb non-issue that we would say “shit” about. But not Walter Cronkite. It somehow feels good to know that even somebody like that shares those little human moments with us. Perhaps it means we’re not the gigantic losers we think we are. Hell if even Walter freakin’ Cronkite can’t keep it together without letting fly with the cuss words, maybe I’m not such a putz after all.

Fair enough

Just got back from the final night of the Southampton Days Fair. I noticed that the density of slutted-up underage hooch was much lower this year than last year. Oh don’t get me wrong, there were still a few notable seventeen-year-olds (okay, fourteen-year-olds) walking around who would bring out the statutory rapist in any guy, but for the most part more parents must have put their foot down this year and declared, “You are NOT leaving the house dressed like that, young lady.”

We were able to have a lot more fun at the fair this year. Allison is that crucial year older and that crucial bit taller, which allowed her to go on all the kiddie rides, even the ones we couldn’t go on with her. And she had a blast. I felt a little bad because our friends Jen and Mike came along as well with their year-old son, David and they were treated to a full evening of following us as we followed Allison from ride to ride to ride. But at the end of the night we all got to sit down to a fireworks display that was actually rather impressive for the size town and fair this was.

So all in all a good night, though I did let nostalgia bum me out a bit. Last year when we came to the fair, the evening closed with a guitar man named Ray Owen on the main stage who put on a show for the kids and played all sorts of cool “Americana” folk-rock songs like “City of New Orleans”, "Me and Bobby McGee" and others I can’t seem to remember. Then at the end of the night he asked if there were any requests. I shouted out, “Mister Bojangles.” He told the crowd – consisting mostly of teenagers who impressed me with their appreciation for older music – the backstory of the song and then closed his set with the Jerry Jeff Walker classic. While Ray did play the fair this year as well, he went on earlier in the week on a 6pm slot, right about the time I would have been rushing for the train to leave New York City for the day. So we didn’t get to see him and didn’t get to end the night holding each other as a family and swaying to the sounds of “Mister Bojangles.” But other than that, a good night all around.

One question occurred to me tonight though. I know I’m probably showing my age here, but what the hell is “Hollister”? I saw so many people walking around in t-shirts bearing that word tonight. I mean entire hordes of people (teenagers mostly), sometimes two or three in a group of five, were wearing these shirts. At first I merely assumed it was the name of one of the high schools in the area, but then I realized that a lot of them had the word, “California” printed on it as well. So seriously, what is Hollister? Is it a clothing line, a sporting goods line, the name of the high school from The O.C.? Somebody please help me be hip.

More fun with webstats

Well it’s that time again for more fun with webstats. For those who don’t know what this is all about, basically whenever I’m extremely bored yet without the actual brain and creative capacity to write anything of substance, I peruse the statistics for my website and find the most ridiculous and asinine search phrases that people have typed into Google or other search engines that ultimately led them to my website. See previous results HERE.

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“the cheap way to have an inground basketball hoop” – Maybe if this guy had loosened the purse strings a bit, he’d have found what he was looking for. Instead he ended up at my blog with Tag You’re Gone

“who sings a song boobs” – I’m not exactly sure what this guy was really looking for, but he ended up reading a story about me singing karaoke and watching other guys try to get girls to show their boobs during My Night On Bourbon Street

“find the definition of the slang word mook” – I always find it amusing when people type full sentences into search engines, like they're giving Google a command. “Come on Google, go get it now.” Well, I’m sure this guy got his answer - and more than he bargained for - with my humor column, When Niggers Were Jerks and Faggots Were Sissies.

“price is right contestant aggravates bob barker” – Goodness, has anyone ever seen Bob Barker get aggravated? Me neither, which is why this person ended up here, and only because of two completely unrelated blogs on my Societal Dissection page.

“spraying marijuana with Sprite” – Was this guy looking for some new funny YouTube video or is this a little known growing aid for that magic little plant? Either way this guy didn’t find his information when he read the blog, Feed Me… Does it have to be human? Feed Me… Does it have to Be Sprite?”

“what’s the matter with phil mickelsons head” – I don’t know, but when he blew his final series of shots during last year’s U.S. Open he made mine and a whole bunch of other TV people’s day. It was most exciting I’ve ever seen a golf event get. Now if only there had been naked women at stake.

“topless beer brewing” – Too bad for this guy I made only an off-hand comment about a topless bar in my humor column The Drinking Habits of Beer Snobs. I’m sure the topic he was searching for was much more interesting than the crap I wrote.

“narrative essay about the day the aliens landed” – I hate to be the one to break this to you my friend, but there are no aliens. There is however something To Whet Your Appetite about Stephen Spielberg's aliens in a blog about my trip to Devil’s Tower.

“very tiny penis girlfriend” – Okay, do you want to know about your girlfriend's tiny penis, or are you trying to gauge your girlfriend’s response to yours? Doesn’t matter because all you actually read about was My Night on Bourbon Street.

“big butts road trip” – Seriously why do these people even click on my page? This guy was apparently looking up a series of porn movies involving… well the search criteria pretty much explains it all. And yet he still clicked on the intro to my Road Trip because of a line about how “one town butts up against the next.” Silly perverts.

“philly pops pimples on her penis” – This is perhaps my favorite and most disturbing one. I’m sorry… HER penis? And what’s more disturbing is that, thanks to two completely unrelated blogs (one involving bubble wrap and the other involving my daughter informing a hot mom about the anatomical differences between boys and girls) my Really Cute Story blog page shows up on the first Google search page in amongst links for STD treatment centers and acne medications.

“vortex in Pennsylvania”­ – Oh my God, somebody else noticed it too, that the area we live in is home to a strange and mysterious Generation vorteX where people between the age of 25 and 35 simply do not exist?

“quadratic formula nigger”­ – Geez, I didn’t realize mathematicians were such racists. Well thanks to two more unrelated stories, he found my Humor Column Archives. Hopefully he learned to hate a little less and use his graphing calculator a little more.

“twenty man orgy” – Yet again, what’s most disturbing is that a page from my Road Trip shows up on the FIRST Google page for this query. Why people would click on MY page when the rest of the results were so obviously what they were looking for is once again beyond me.

“vacant stare generation” – Wow, what a great name for a bunch of idiot kids who don’t even know what a Yellow Pages is, as I found out while looking for The Games We Play.

“did anybody on saved by the bell smoke pot” – Nah, those Bayside kids would never sink so low. That was for all those losers over at Valley. Of course, if they’d gone to my high school and been involved with our High School Groupings, things might have been different.

“smoking paper towel inhale” – Really? Truly? Somebody else thought to try this too? You mean it wasn’t just me and my lame idea during My Days as a Smoker?

“horses are for sissies” – Some anti-cowboy surfer apparently wanted somebody to back him up on this one. Instead he learned about the good old days When Niggers were Jerks and FAGGOTS were Sissies.

“eye patch gay hairy” – Yikes, what kind of pirate porn was this guy looking for? Doesn’t he know you can see that stuff for free if you go to the Renaissance Faire like I did in Campfires, Wenches and Interstate Tourists?

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Ah, that’s always fun. Hope you enjoyed it too and that it opened you up to some writing you might have previously overlooked. Okay, back to work.

Social Experiment: The zany profile

I’d make a crappy scientist. I started my dating site “social experiment” just over two weeks ago and I’m already done with it. I haven’t even had time to sit down and write out what the whole experiment is even about and it’s over. Well to bring you up to speed let’s discuss the purpose of this experiment and then we’ll get into what little I’ve discovered.

The backstory. When my friend asked me to help out with their Match.com profile a few weeks back, I spent a little time browsing through profiles to see what love-hungry internet users were posting in an effort to find their next hookup or lifelong soul mate. And I’ve got to say, I was appalled. Seriously appalled. The dating sites I looked at gave you anywhere from 400 to maybe 1000 words for your intro and I swear nearly every user on every site must have copied and pasted the same 400 words into the space provided. With few exceptions, all the profiles I read said exactly the same thing. Apparently everybody in the world – if these profiles are anything to go by – everybody is “laid back” or “easy going.” Everybody “doesn’t take life too seriously.” Everyone has a “good sense of humor” and everyone “loves to laugh.” Everybody enjoys “partying in bars” but they also – every single one of them – enjoy “cuddling up with a movie.” And dear Lord if there wasn’t also a heavy percentage of people who used that old cliché line about “long walks on the beach.” The headlines these people came up with, the headings that are supposed to entice others to click on your profile, were equally lame and repetitious: “Nice girl seeking a friend” or “Single Guy in Philly” or simply, “Hi.” And that’s the people that actually took the time to write something. There were nearly as many people on these sites who only put in a token sentence or two which primarily consisted of the statement, “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” or “My friend told me about this so I figured I’d give it a shot,” or some other similar variation that doesn’t really tell us anything about the person.

Lauren and I spent time browsing through profiles, men’s and women’s, and we both agreed that it was overwhelming how generic the dating pool seems to be – again, if these profiles are anything to go by. How do serious users of sites like Friendfinder and Match.com actually pick and choose who to contact when every person you find sounds almost identical to person before? It must come down to the pictures they post. Since everyone sounds like they have essentially the same interests and personality, you might as well focus your efforts on only the hot ones. After maybe an hour of browsing through profiles, Lauren and I looked at each other and thanked God that we’d found each other. What would we do right now if we were still single in a world where online dating has become the most popular way of hooking up?

Now, I must step back for a moment and stress that I am not saying any of this to be holier-than-thou toward single people, or toward people who use dating sites. I am certainly not insinuating that marriage is the be all end of all human accomplishment, or that singledom is somehow a lamentable condition. I’m merely pointing out the fact that judging by the crop of people we browsed through on these dating sites, the modern dating world is apparently a bleak place with boring selections.

Mind you, the same was true back when I was frequenting the dating site circuit. In fact, it probably looked even bleaker back then because there was a higher percentage of people who simply didn’t put anything in their profiles. To be quite honest, any profile that had at least a full paragraph stood out from the crowd no matter what they wrote. And the thing is, what they wrote was essentially the same thing that everybody is writing these days. Namely, “I’m a laid back, easy going guy who doesn’t take life too seriously and I love to laugh.” So the climate really hasn’t worsened since I left the dating scene, it’s just that it’s more saturated with people saying the same thing. But here’s the thing, as I said in my previous post, back then all of the sites were free. It didn’t cost you a dime to post your dumb and generic profile. So I think what blows my mind more than anything is that not only are people boring and unimaginative to the point of making me physically nauseous, but they’re actually paying money to be boring and unimaginative. And paying a good amount of money too. So, like I’ve said, I have absolutely nothing against people using dating sites. I’m all for them. I used them myself back in the day and had a relative amount of luck with them. I think in this modern technological age, sites like these really are the best ways for a plugged-in and over-scheduled public to meet and hit things off. What I don’t get is why people would go through all the trouble and expense of having an online dating profile and not say something, anything to make themselves stand out from the crowd.

It was with that in mind that I decided to create my own profile. I figured I would post something so entirely off the wall, so completely out of line from the typical dating profile, and see what kind of response it got. So I ended up copying and pasting the text from an old humor column of mine. It tells a true story from my childhood about how my friends and I, in an effort to get back at the mean cooks in our school cafeteria, spent an entire lunch period smearing sloppy joes and blueberry cobbler all over our faces. For my headline, I used the title of the piece: “Hot Lunch Uprising.” I figured a line like that would be enough to pique people’s interest, make them say, “What the hell is this?” and click on my profile. Once they were in, my theory was that it would make them chuckle enough to at least write me a short email saying they liked what I wrote. After all, nearly every woman on this site claimed that they wanted a man who could make them laugh. Well rather than saying I could make them laugh, I just tried to make them laugh. Rather than posting a general description about the whole of my personality, I posted a story about one specific thing that hopefully gives someone an even better insight into it.

And you know what, it actually worked, though not as well as I had been hoping. Of course to be fair, it’s hard to really say how good or bad the response was since I couldn’t really respond to most of the emails I had received without paying for a membership – and in the case of Match.com, I couldn’t even read my mail without ponying up. In my first few days, I got a few emails from people on True.com, several of whom were actually quite attractive and all of whom actually had their own witty and intelligent things to say – the kind of women I likely would have tried to date had I done this as a single guy. I set up a free a three-day trial with True and emailed several of them back to let them know what I was really up to. I apparently got three emails from people on Match.com but, again, was unable to actually read them for lack of payment. I got one email from somebody on Yahoo personals who I was able to send a generic pre-written message back to with my free membership, and she was intelligent enough to write back with enough information that I could figure out how to contact her for real. Other than that though, without the ability to openly communicate, it was difficult to differentiate between emails I got from people who were legitimately interested in me, or emails from spammers and shills.

So for the amount of money and effort I actually put into this little experiment, I’m rather impressed with the results. The quantity of women contacting me may not have been as high as I’d have liked, but the quality of women was definitely noteworthy. I think if I were single and had actually gone all out, paid my money and gotten the ability to send and receive email freely, I would have done very well with this weird but apparently effective approach.

So, here’s advice from ye olde sage Brian to all those who are currently using a dating site, or are considering it. First of all, avoid True.com at all costs. I got more spam from that site than any of the others. You know the kind; pretty “ladies” who say things like, “I am liking for my one true love that you are sexy too.” So there’s that. My more important advice is this: don’t tell people about yourself in the intro to your profile. No matter how charming or witty you think you’re being, in the end all your interests, personality traits and suggestions for “the perfect date” are just going to sound like everybody else’s on the site. The better route as far as I’m concerned is to either tell a story or talk about one specific thing that interests you. Rather than saying you like hiking, tell the story of a hike you went on. Rather than saying you like to go out and party, talk about one particularly cool night when you were out. Rather than saying you have a sense of humor, actually tell a funny story. Make it random. Make it weird. Make it stand out. I think random stories tell a lot more about a person than even the best intentioned “introductions.”

So that’s my advice. If you take it and it works out for you, please let me know. I’m very curious to see how this tactic works for people who can actually benefit from it. As for me, I’m just glad I met my wife the way I did, at a wedding so she never had to read my boring and generic dating intro. Where would we be today if she had? And that’s really the end for this social experiment. I wish I had more fascinating data to share, but I frankly have neither the money nor the patience to pursue this line of thought any farther.

Social Experiment - Dating Sites

I don’t know if I would have been considered “ahead of the game” but I used to use online dating sites several years before they were the widely accepted and mostly legitimate social networking gems they are today. This was in my single L.A. days, from 1999-2000. Back then being on one of those sites was really a source of embarrassment if any of your friends found out, so you simply did not tell people that you were doing it. The general consensus at the time was that those sites were full of perverts and dirty old men looking for quick and easy sex hookups. (Make no mistake, there was that element on there, but it was very much in the minority.) I actually created entirely separate email accounts and was very guarded about my identity whenever somebody emailed me. Not out of fear of my own safety, but out of fear that some wiseass friend had found me and was trying to play a trick on me. Even though I was mildly successful at the whole online dating thing – went on a couple of dates with some nice girls and ended up meeting one of my closest and most special friends in the world – I never told anybody what I was doing until well after I had stopped with the whole thing.

These days it’s kind of different. While people may not be announcing it to the world that they’re looking for love on the internet, for the most part they aren’t ashamed to admit to it. Online dating these days is kind of like voting for George W. Bush. Some people will admit to it proudly while others will do it sheepishly and with a long explanation.

I started down this train of thought last Friday night when a friend of mine was asking for help composing their profile for Match.com. Curious, I went over to the site and a couple others to look around and see what has changed since my last foray into the personals scene. All I have to say is, “Wow!” It’s obvious that what used to be a closely-guarded subculture has become quite legitimized. I mean, you can tell just from the plethora of dating site ads you see on just about every website out there. But when you click over, you realize that the trend has become so legitimate that the sites are actually charging for their services… and charging substantially for them. Pretty much every legit site I looked up charges anywhere from twenty to almost seventy dollars per month depending on the type of membership you have. Oh sure they say you can sign up for free, but if you actually want to be able to do anything beyond posting a profile, you have to pony up.

I can still remember when the dating sites were free. And I mean free free. Free to sign up. Free to view profiles. Free to post pictures. Free to communicate back and forth. FREE. I honestly don’t even remember what sites I used back then. They’re probably all gone now. I think MSN had a site as well as Yahoo and I had profiles on them. And they were both free. I think the dating sections were merely extensions of their regular email service. They didn’t have all the bells and whistles of today’s sites with 40-point personality compatibility comparisons and whatnot. You put in basic info like body-type, religion, height, and zip code, wrote a few paragraphs about yourself and posted a couple of pictures. But really, having looked at all those bells and whistles on the dating sites today, I can’t imagine ever using them, much less why they’ve caused the prices to skyrocket from nothing to obscene.

Actually, I did use a pay site one time. And it’s one that’s still around today. Friendfinder.com. In fact, looking at them now, they don’t seem like their prices have gone up that much. I think back in my day, a single month “silver” membership was something like fifteen bucks and then it went down from there depending on how long you signed up. Today a one-month silver membership is only twenty-two dollars – and it’s less than ten dollars a month if you sign up for a whole year. But I never paid for my time at Friendfinder. Even with a free bare bones membership you could accomplish a thing or two. Sure they limited you to the number of profiles you could look at in a single day and I think you were also limited to a single email per day. But that just meant you had to be judicious about who you clicked on and who you sent mail to. You managed your bookmarks carefully so you could send out your daily token email to your selected ladies and then you kept the rest in store for future days. And you made sure to frontload that lone daily email with all essential information. You gave them your email address and anything else they could use to contact you off the Friendfinder site.

Well those days are over. You can’t send any messages anymore from any site, as near as I can tell, if you ain’t paying. The reason I know this is because I’ve decided to conduct a little “social experiment.” I’ve posted a free profile on several dating sites. I’ll get into the specifics of the experiment in future blogs, but here’s what I’ve learned in the first 72 hours or so. To reiterate… if you don’t want to pay, sure you can spend your time creating a profile, and paying members might even be able to send you mail, but you will not be able to contact them back without coughing up the cash to do it. True.com will allow you a free three-day trial that allows you to send email, but you can’t actually send any contact information. Email addresses, websites, even the word “Google” gets caught and filtered so that all communication has to take place via the site… and once your trial ends, so does the communication. Match.com on the other hand doesn’t even give you that much. Within a half-hour of my profile being approved I received notification at my regular email address that I had a message waiting for me. But in order to read it, I had to sign up for a six-month membership (which costs over $120). Just to read the message. Oh, I also couldn’t even see who had sent me the message without paying. Now, can anybody else smell the scam all over this one? You know I would have signed up, paid my money and clicked on my email only to find out it was probably either a welcome message from Match.com or else a shill profile from some non-existent person designed to pique my interest so I would pay the membership fee.

Wow. It was a simpler time back then when people merely thought you were an online pervert. Certainly a less-expensive time. Anyway, over the next few… days… weeks… however long until I get bored with it, I’ll be filling you all in on this little “social experiment” I’m conducting on these dating sites. And just so you know, yes my wife is fully aware of what I’m doing. I’m showing her everything I post, every email I receive and every one I (attempt to) send out.

In my next blog (that pertains to this experiment) I’ll lay out my plan and why I thought it would be an interesting idea.

Christmas in Hawaii?

Back on our honeymoon, Lauren and I were young, idealistic and in love and decided to buy a timeshare on the beautiful island of Kauai where we spent two weeks. We're still young, idealistic and in love, but we've realized it is just a big old pain in the ass for us to get all the way out to Hawaii from Pennsylvania every other year. And especially now with kids and more on the way, we're realizing owning a timeshare all the way out in the Pacific Ocean isn't really for us anymore.

So we're selling our timeshare at the Hanalei Bay Resort in Princeville, HI. If anybody is interested, click on either of the links below. The timeshare is an every odd year floating week and we've already booked our 2007 week for the week of CHRISTMAS. So spend Christmas in paradise. Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say after all.

http://www.buyatimeshare.com/Hanalei-Bay-Resort/Kauai-HI/Ads/22222.htm

http://www.buyatimeshare.com/Hanalei-Bay-Resort/Kauai-HI/Ads/22224.htm

Fun with Webstats

It's a slow day at work today and I've been perusing the stats for my website. Of particular interest to me are the phrases people type into search engines that bring them to my site. Here are some of my favorites and the pages I can only assume it linked them to.

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"fag test" - I can't believe there are other people out there who actually remember the fag test, but they were in good company reading my tongue-in-cheek column, When "Niggers" Were Jerks and "Faggots" were Sissies.

"nigger humor" - I'm honestly appalled that there are people out there who would actually type this into a search engine, but I assume it brought them to the same piece.

"Jerry Stiller hernia" - I find it funny that people find this interesting enough to look up. What's funnier still is that due to two completely unrelated entries on my old What's New Blog, they found my site.

"dewey decimal kama sutra" - To the dirty librarian who typed this one, all I can say is "Yeah Baby", and come look me up as soon as you're done reading Dewey Decimal Surfing.

"what is a pre-op enema" - I don't know what they told you, but it's all gonna be just fine my friend, I promise you. In the meantime Pick a Weird Al Title and cheer up.

"quadratic formula humor" - I can't tell you how happy it makes me that there are other people in the world who find the quadratic formula just as funny as I did in my column Fractals and Traffic Jams.

"tiny penis girls laughed" - Hang in there buddy. It's not how big it is. It's how small YOU are. We all know that. But that doesn't stop the girls from being cruel the way I learned on My Night on Bourbon Street does it?

"how to play tag gool" - I'm so happy I'm not the only one who recognizes the word "gool" and the fact that all is fair In Love and Tag.

"sugar tree raking balls" - I honestly don't know what this phrase means, and when you put them into your search engine without quotation marks it brings you to After the Foilage where every word is used, but not in the context (or order) this phrase conjures up.

"bathrooms along route 160 new mexico" - Um... okay... so... I know we use the internet to look up pretty much everything these days... but honestly... If you're on a Road Trip, let's just leave a few things to our sense of discovery.

"girls sucking on pee pees" - I particularly love this special brand of pervert who wants to see pictures of girls giving head, but doesn't actually want to come right out and say words like d---, c--- or schl---. Either way, again thanks to an unfortunate combination of words that had nothing to do with each other, this poor soul wound up at my Humor Column Archives. Sorry to disappoint dude.

"f--- kathy hodges" and "lauren hodges f---ing" - I don't know who Kathy Hodges is or why this guy was intersted in f---ing her and my wife, but I'm sure he was disappointed to wind up reading my very tender essay about The Day Allison Was Born

"the simple lifestyles of hippie tree huggers" - Ah yes those simple hippies and their trees. But once again, multiple unrelated words on a page add up to another inadvertant hit to my Humor Column Archives.

"spongy carrots" - I don't know what's more amazing - that somebody was actually trying to look up spongy carrots, or that my Hot Lunch Uprising came up almost number one on a google search of it.

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Ah the joys of essentially useless technology in the hands of a bored man whose boss is away. Hope you had as much fun as I did.