b l o g o s

trending evolution

A couple of recent lifestyle articles in The New York Times have me thinking about the limits of evolutionary logic. The first, on the "caveman lifestyle," details a trend by which young, healthy folk hew as closely as possible to a pre-agricultural diet. The second, in today's paper, spotlights people who live indoors, in the winter, in the north, with little to no heat. In both pieces, the subjects use arguments based on evolution: in the caveman article, this logic is in fact the basis for the lifestyle itself--from its promotion of subsistence on large sides of game to its practice of "Evolutionary Fitness," which as far as I can tell means a lot of long-distance running and jumping. I didn't see anything about wrestling boars, but maybe that's in there as well.  In the cold article, the primary motivation seems to be aesthetic: these people don't want to muck up their loft/stone home/little school house with heating ducts. And yet the evolutionary logic creeps in: one woman is quoted as saying “we didn’t evolve to sit on a chair in a temperature-controlled environment staring at a screen all day.”

It strikes me that this is possibly a rare instance--though maybe people know of more--in which evolution is brought to bear not as an explanation of residual and enduring and otherwise inexplicable human behaviors, but as a prescription for weird human behavior. Call me a bourgeois wimp, but I find both of these lifestyles a little untenable. The odd thing, though, is that both lifestyles themselves seem to hinge on a kind of bourgeois-sponsored asceticism. The cold people probably wouldn't be so upbeat and cheerful if they didn't know they could move or return home or stay with a friend or otherwise access living quarters with heat. The cavepeople wouldn't have too much fun if they didn't equip their apartments with gigantic meat lockers or otherwise have their "paleolithic" food at the ready. 

This isn't really an attempt to say "gotchya," because none of the subjects of the stories deny the incongruent mix of contemporary amenities with physical sacrifice, but it is rather a head-scratching response to the use of evolution as an argument for a return to extreme conditions. I rather wish that the next article on neanderthal lifestyles would include commentary by an evolutionary biologist. Because when I read the statement that "we haven't evolved to..." the Lamarckian in me wants to wonder just a little bit whether it's wholly true.

pastiche

time warp

This morning on my run, I saw a guy struggling to push his dead car in the opposite direction, so I tied my running buddy Tillie to a tree and jumped in to help only to be informed by the out-of-breath fellow that he didn't "believe in making females work." "Call me old fashioned," he added while heaving. To which I responded, "well, then, it's time for a little lesson" and started pushing anyway.

A bit later a colleague and I had a lunchtime appointment with a downtown publishing business. So I met her at her parking garage and we drove to lunch.    Our hosts wanted to show us around their office, and so we took a little tour. The place was cool--it kind of looked like the warehouse in The Office, except, alas, no Darryl, and no big scale for the entire staff to weigh themselves collectively (JM and I just watched this season's premiere).

But then we went into the office part, where my colleague and I sat on one side of a big desk. There were two of these big desks in the room, and I kept thinking something was off, until it hit me: these desks didn't have computers on them. No power strips or a/c adapters or cleared-away spots to suggest the use of laptops either. Nothing. Just a phone, pictures of family members, and horizontal blinds. I felt like I'd stepped from an episode of the Office to an episode of Mad Men, only without the martinis for lunch. 

flash

It's discombobulating enough to come out of an animated science-fiction movie set seven or eight hundred years in the future into the brightness of the now. But to have that movie snap off mid-credits because a massive thunderstorm is rolling by, and to walk out into the generator-lit hallway with an alarm blaring and teenaged movie workers dashing around asking each other what to do, this is another thing altogether. It was, in two words, and to invoke my friend e!, cuckoo bananas.

JM and I were on a little date, and the plan had been to head to Luna, the fancy and tasty tapas place in Champaign. But alas, we did not make it there, because the storm that sparked pandemonium in the movie theater was about to do the same on Neil street, the main road that connects the movie theater to Luna.

Let's just say that yesterday I learned some things. First, flash floods: now I see what all the fuss is about. This shit is dangerous and it happens in minutes. Second, I respond well in a mini-crisis, or at least I did in this one. I became focused and deliberate and drove us off the flooding Neil street, sneaking past a stalling mazda, into the parking lot of a small business called i-power, a place that appears to sell nutrition supplements and whose workers were gawking at the street outside. At that point, for about a hundred-yard stretch of street, the water was rushing above car wheels and rising fast. JM was sweet and encouraging while I maneuvered the car. He is so g.d. awesome. (But I knew that.) I also learned that there is such a thing as "high ground" here in the flatlands. We snaked around the building next to the train tracks--this was higher ground, and then up into the furthest north-east parking space. Even higher.

Other cars kept driving through the water, each one creating a dirty wake, the shore the middle of a parking lot. Later when the water got even higher, SUV drivers charged through, fast enough (I swear) to pull a water-skier. And so the other thing I learned, though this shouldn't have surprised me, is that people can be really fucking stupid. Driving into water in a mid-sized sedan while construction cones are floating past? Not a good idea. When their engine dried out a little, the stalled mazda people tried to make it back out of the parking lot, only to reconsider and stall again, across two lanes of traffic. The woman parked next to us got out of her car and began obsessively flattening the median bushes with her sandal, presumably to clear the way to drive over all that concrete into the AAA parking lot, which was on even higher ground.  When we got out of our car to peer down the street, a man in a black slicker asked us the best way to get to the other side of campus. Later, across the street at T.G.I. Friday's, where we rode out the storm, and dinner, we heard that a kid had to crawl out his back window. His car was still sitting there, askew, the water lapping his door handles.

ha! and wha? best and worst quotes about the spitzer swan dive

Seth Greenland, writing for the Huffington Post: "Frankly, I am amazed he got his wife to appear with him at the news conference, given the media frenzy. If I recall, James McGreevey, the part-time homosexual former Governor of New Jersey had his wife glued to his arm when he faced the media during his excoriation. Do these guys drug their spouses? My wife would knee-cap me."

A response from Spitzer's brother Daniel Spitzer, a neurosurgeon, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal: "If men never succumbed to the attractions of women, then the human species would have died out a long time ago."

media blitz v. media retreat

When we got our NYT on Sunday, I was shocked--shocked!--that there wasn't a single story on the shootings at NIU. I know they produce the paper in advance, and so I hadn't expected there to be new news, mind you, only some kind of report. In talking about this with John and his mom (who visited this weekend), I decided it had to be because unlike the VaTech shooter, this guy didn't make his own PR machine and have it delivered.

Thankfully, IHE has a short piece today about the disparity in coverage on school shootings, and how disparate coverage correlates to race and region and also other factors such as the slowness of the news week, etc. It's also true that the Va Tech tragedy took more lives.

Some think that viewers and readers are becoming inured to school shootings, and maybe that's partly true. But now I'm wondering whether what we have here isn't just a case of a story fizzling because it doesn't immediately and resolutely open up other issues. The Va Tech shooting, you'll remember, opened a whole slew of issues about gun control, mental illness, teachers' responsibilities, creative writing-as-warning sign, etc.

But Steve Kazmierczak is no Sueng-Hui Cho. Or at least the stories are quite different. By all accounts Kazmierczak was mild-mannered and smart and worked hard in school. A long time ago he spent a year in an institution for "unruly behavior" and according to his girlfriend had been taking prozac. Aside from the weird stuff that Kazmierczak mailed to his girlfriend, including an upbeat and encouraging note about her future with lots of cheerful exclamation points, there isn't much of a story here, except one of befuddlement. And befuddlement is not an occasion for arguments.

      

thoughts with NIU

Not sure what one is supposed to say after another hideous and terrifying campus shooting like the one that happened at Northern Illinois yesterday afternoon. As with the Va Tech shooting, I've spent the morning reading account after same account in disbelief. And we just received an email from our chancellor telling us that the gunman has been identified as a student from here at the U of I. Sympathies to our friends in Dekalb.

a conversation about "old age"

During the normal course of trick-or-treating, a band of girls, age 13 or 14, rings the doorbell. One of them is wearing a banner that gleams "MISS UNIVERSE 1987." This confuses me.

Me: Miss Universe, 1987?

MU1987: (rolls eyes) I'm supposed to be dead.

Me, finally noticing her death makeup and silver-streaked hair: Oh. But that was only 20 years ago. Did you die in a freak accident?

MU1987: panics.

MU1987's friend, some sort of sexy superhero: Yeah! That's only 20 years ago! (slugs the dead MU1987 on the arm)

Me: here, have some more candy.

dear person sitting behind me at the tea shop whose laptop keeps yelling "You've Got Mail!" in AOL's distinctively cheerful computer-man voice, circa 1997:

Are you fucking kidding me?

Sincerely yours,
the person in front of you

file under signs of bad

1. a gigantic high speed industrial fan directing air away from the women's room at the train station
2. the words "ladies and gentlemen" over the loudspeaker on the train
3. men who, upon seeing that I am traveling alone, offer to help me with my (tiny) bag. wtf? (I admit this isn't bad as much as it's just plain weird, especially when, while standing, as I was each each time a (different) man offered assistance, I can see the tops of everyone's luggage on the overhead rack--including theirs.)
4. the words "did you ever watch Benny Goodman?" from a fellow passenger, who is trying to reach over me to plug in his laptop

5. a waiter who sits down at the table with you to take your order. (though hell, maybe his feet hurt.)