Elf Sternberg

In a public press announcment, a spokesbeast for Evolution gave the following statement:

Recent news reports show that support for evolution has fallen below 50% among members of the Republican Party. Due to this, Evolution has decided to drop any support it currently gives to the Republican party. Evolution will not work on or for Republicans, and Republicans will cease evolving.

Evolution would like to remind Republicans that species that cannot, or will not, evolve in environments as dynamic as the American electorate quickly go extinct. Eventually, should the Republican party continue to avoid Evolution, the Republican party will be remembered only by its old and mouldy fossils.

Has anyone (before me, that is) ever noticed that the sex scenes in Evolution's Darling and the opening chapter of Spaceways 06: Purrfect Plunder are remarkably similar in their, um, invasiveness?

What amazes me is how close Offutt was to stumbling upon the erotic uses of nanotechnology. In 1982...

Certainly, there's been a lot of brouhaha over a report that appeared in New Scientis article stating that, in the US, porn's biggest consumers are conservatives. Henry over at Crooked Timber ran the numbers and concluded that the report doesn't really say what the New Scientist says it does. At best, New Scientist oversold the conclusions (which is hardly new; New Scientist is the shock magazine of the science journal set). The consumption data is gathered from anonymized credit card records, but the voting and religiousity patterns are all derived from regional statistics, so making a one-to-one correlation is impossible. The summary of the article itself points out that so-called "blue" voting districts tend to use escort service websites more often, while "wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism" were more popular with "red" ones. All in all, the actual consumption patterns are mostly a wash, and as one friend of mine pointed out, the outlier pattern of Utah buying the most porn over the Internet is consistent with porn being difficult to acquire any other way in Utah.

But reading the American Family Network's take has its own entertainments. Their reporter points out, if Utah has a 1.69 subscribers per thousand and there are 2.7 million people there, that means that Utah has 5,000 people buying porn. "That means Utah is hardly full of 'moralistic deviants.'"

What reporter Taranto fails to note is that the number is only small because the population is small; what matters is the extent. If 1.69 permille (yes, that's a real word) is a dismissible number for 2.7 million people, it is a dismissable number for 270 million.

I can only conclude from the AFA's article that they would not think it noteworthy if porn consumption across the rest of the nation went up to match Utah's numbers.

Somehow, I doubt that's the conclusion they wanted their readers to reach.

As some people may know (and as may be painfully obvious from a few episodes in the Travellogue series) I went to a prep school, one of the top five in the country. It was an all-male school where homophobia was rampant, where the professors were all tenured neurotics of one flavor or another, where there was unheralded sexual tension between the aging, portly, respectable British ex-pat head librarian with his collection of Chaucer printers (The Canterbury Tales, first, second, third, and fifth editions) and the new ultra-hot-in-a-librarian-way assistant librarian (the sex scene in Mice and Malice? Totally in his office), where some teachers were so mindlessly brilliant and others were merely mindless.

My parents couldn't really afford to send me there, nor did I fit in. But as I have gotten older and developed a taste for the finer things in life, I have realized that not all of the shallow, grasping people around me were complete idiots. It is peculiar how so many of my peers at the time wore such fine clothes and seemed to respect it less for being excellent, how much time and energy they spent just staying in the game rather than trying to get ahead, how little they saw their careers ahead as difficult or complex or contributory. Politics or Wall Street was the ideal; so few were interested in the mathematics or sciences.

But still, the clothes were nice. I actually miss my Brooks Brothers suit, the one thing I was required to own that I didn't really want at the time.

I have a bookbag. Most of my acquaintances have seen it, although few recall it because it's just so unremarkable, an ordinary black bag. It was swag from my stint at F5 Corporation and what's remarkable about it that it was made by Land's End. It's relatively cheap for Land's End, made of a rugged nylon, and one of the straps is about to break off. It's seven years' old and I beat the hell out of my stuff (which is why I have a Palm m500 and a Thinkpad: both have a reputation for being far more rugged than their contemporaries and counterparts), so I'm not surprised that the strap eyelet is torn and about to give way.

I've been looking at Land's End (and, gods help me, L.L. Bean) for the replacement, and I think I've found what I want, but as I'm looking through the catalogs I'm realizing something.

I might be a late-blooming preppie.

Grief.