The world's last non-porn website

I was at a campus coffee shop this morning, and had decided to purchase a "chocolate with white chocolate chips muffin." Think black & white cookie, but in muffin form. I commented to the cashier that muffins aren't quite what they used to be, health-wise. A very pretty girl behind me in line said "yea, they're pretty much just cake these days." I replied: "then how are muffins any different than cupcakes?" "Well," said the girl, "it's just an ignorance thing. There is no actual difference, but who's really going to eat a 'cupcake' for breakfast?" Touche, hot girl! So, the logical extension of her thought is that "Muffin" and "Cupcake" are terms that denote when you are eating, and not so much what. "Breakfast" typically operates similarly, in that it doesn't so much define what you're eating, but when (in literal or relative terms, ie. in the morning,...

Feeling awkward yet? Let's denote for a moment, rather than connote. I'm fairly certain that everybody is pro-life, generally speaking. I'm also certain that we're all pro-choice, in a broad sense of the term. The reason that people of all stripes use these phrases in dialog to describe themselves, is that the phrases position them into moral favour by very definition: "Well, I'm pro choice, so anyone who disagrees with my stance on abortion is anti choice." Or, conversely, "I'm pro life, meaning that my naysayers must be anti life." And thus the trick has been played. According to the very terms of the debate I must either be anti life, or anti-choice! How can such a framing possibly end well? Perhaps it is the language itself that prevents consensus. Apply this to other words, and consider the ways they are often appropriated from their formerly amoral denotations and used as 'attack word...

From "Election": Jim: Paul, what is your favorite fruit? Paul: Pears. Jim: Okay, now... Paul: No wait! Apples. Jim: Great, now say that everyday you had an apple. An apple, an apple and more apples. You probably thought that apples were pretty good, even if you got a rotten one every once in awhile. Then one day there was an orange. Now you can choose, do you want an apple or do you want an orange? That's democracy. Paul: I also like bananas. Jim: Exactly!

I, and people near my age (early 20's) really did grow up alongside the word wide web. I remember being about 10, 'surfing' the web on dial-up with my father. The dial-up took forever, it made all those weird static and beeping sounds, and of course tied up the phone line. Any time I was online, and a person called, my internet would disconnect! Those were the days. Today, it has become something entirely different! More later.

"This scheme is bound to get me rich, and quick!" - Homer Simpson I intend to write an extremely popular non-fiction book. Ideas out of it may pop up in blogs here every so often, but I will not reveal the thesis or the 'whole' of it until it is completed and sent to publishers! Yes, I do have a thesis, sortof. Yes, I do have chapter ideas, and I'm just beginning chapter outlines and an introduction. It will begin at full steam when I graduate (though I will be planning it until then), and shall take me roughly one year to bring to fruition. By my 24th birthday (01/09) I shall be a retired man. But, more importantly, I will achieve my lifelong goal of appearing on The Daily Show and engaging in silly banter with Jon Stewart!

... to die of awkwardness? Well, if it were, the following scenario might come pretty close to that: I /can't stand/ purchasing condoms at the store. I don't know why, but every time I have to go buy them (which, ironically, isn't as often as I'd prefer), I fear it; standing at the counter while the cashier rings them in and gives me that smile... not quite the usual smile cashiers give you. So I go into Shoppers Drug Mart... my hope is to find the condoms and purchase them quickly via one of the many senile old women who seem to staff drug stores these days. But, as per usual, my luck turned horribly, horribly south. First, I couldn't find the things, as they'd been moved to a different part of the store, under the heading 'family planning.' They can't be over there, because condoms are the opposite of that, right? "That must be where the fertility drugs are," I figured. I asked an employee after several minutes, and was directed to the pr...

According to several surveys: among all those people whose basic amenities are met (food, water, shelter etc), material wealth is completely uncorrelated with happiness. That is, the rich aren't any happier on average than Joe six-pack. However, surveys also show that most people who aren't rich seem to believe more money (and all the fancy stuff money can buy) would make them happier. Why? Very simply, we believe what we've been taught. The grand irony is, the very sources of this teaching are the same sources that have convinced us simultaneously to save less and spend more. Since, typically, goods depreciate in value over time, while money itself appreciates, our desire to 'be' rich in status is making us poorer. As my uncle once said: "Money just makes you more of what you already are."

I've been thinking a lot lately about what seem to be a nearly infinite series of conflicts between bodily urges and 'rational' inclinations. The more psychology I read the more impressed I am with the human body and brain, but at the same time the less impressed I am with just how alike all people are in their quirks and limitations. The bizarre part of all this is the way in which modernization is having somewhat of a backward effect on this little play between the human and the human-animal. The rampant availability and advertisement of food, sex, and violence (which stimulate our primal wants of survival, reproduction, and power) is in a way pushing us modern humans back into a monkey-like psychology, as fast as the expansion of knowledge and information mediums are pushing us ahead into creatures who may eventually have immense brains and completely invalid bodies. The basic set of rules by which creatures have survived and reproduced throughout all of Earth...