PAgent’s Progress

I ran across the following article over at linkfilter:

“My instant boob job from 36A to 36DD – and the effect it had on men (and women)”

As an experiment, a Brit named Clover Stroud had a makeup and special effects expert create “a pair of perfect 36DD silicone breasts” for her to wear around Oxford, to see what effect it had on men. Her observations are kind of entertaining, not just as she relates how the men around her pay her more attention, but also how her new bust changes how she feels about herself, and changes how other women treat her.

However, Ms. Stroud seems to go out of her way to make the men she meets come off like drooling idiots.

I wandered off, dismissing him as some saddo with an overt breast fixation and probably a complex Freudian relationship with his mother. But what I didn’t realise was that my experiences with my new chest were about to prove that he was, in fact, just a very normal man.

He stuttered when I asked him to show me how to use the new IT system. He flushed beetroot as I sat down. As he pointed to the screen, I noticed that his hand shook. He seemed incapable of a simple sentence. Eventually, muttering something about going to find his assistant, he fled completely, and sent a (female) colleague back in his place.

But then, after pointing out what buffoons these men were, she explains that they were also somewhat menacing:

Friendly smiles at the supermarket checkout might be fun, and quite flattering, and it might get you home sooner with your groceries, but this was something else. It verged on menacing. And it was completely out of my control.
I realised that a whole lifetime of being checked out, and commented on, like some prize heifer, would drive me quite mad. I stomped home, angry and confused. I found myself longing to rip off the silicone.

Apparently we men are alternately stupidly leering, or overtly threatening. And then some of her “male friends” dump a load of absolute horse hockey on her:

One told me: “I know it’s not right, but when a girl has large breasts, I naturally assume that she must be more interested in sex than someone with a flat chest.”

Oh, for God’s sake.

That’s just stupid beyond belief, and implies a level of conscious thought and calculation that is utterly absent in most breast-staring situations.

Faced with a choice of lumping myself with either drooling idiots, menacing predators, or lecherous oglers, I’m at a bit of a loss. Way back, when it was fashionable to be an ’80s-era sensitive male, I used to ponder such questions — “What is it about breasts that I like so much?” Now, not so much. I quit worrying about it for the same reasons that I don’t spend time trying to explain why I like the flavor of chocolate, or the sight of a beautiful sunset.

I just do.

When I think about it at all, I think that it seems reasonable that sexual attraction would be a matter of basic biology, tied into drives that are wired deeper than anything short of the instinct for personal survival. An animal can’t pick and choose what parts of their genetic birthright they accept or reject, and despite our huge brains and opposable thumbs that’s what we are — animals.

And knowing the male animal the way I do, I think that rather than agonizing over the effect massive mammaries have on us, you should just be grateful that we males have stopped flinging poo when we get upset.

Believe me, some days it can be pretty tempting.

Here’s a thought.

Well, a bit of a suggestion, really.

If you are engaged in a cell phone conversation, and the topic of the conversation is such that you feel uncomfortable continuing the conversation while you are in an elevator full of strangers, maybe you should consider NOT HAVING THAT FREAKING CONVERSATION ON THE CELL PHONE IN THE ELEVATOR.

As opposed to, say, repeating “Um, I’m in the elevator… Yeah… Just a minute. Yeah… I’m in the elevator… Hang on.” while the elevator stops at EVERY SINGLE FLOOR on the way down.

Maybe you could wait the three or four minutes it will take you to get to a restroom, or a utility closet, or a filthy rat-infested back alley, and call them back. Or maybe you could cut that damn digital umbilical cord and actually live inside your own skull for the relatively short time it will take you to walk from your car to your office.

Really. It’s just a thought.

This is a 12-minute black-and-white film by Paul Robertson. If you misspent your youth playing platform games, it will be eerily familiar. But PBCBSF-2006 goes beyond being an animated video game homage, into territory that is truly disturbing and often entertaining.

It is a beautiful thing. In fact it may be Art.

If you are at all squeamish, PBCBSF-2006 is not for you.

Paul Robertson’s LiveJournal

It’s nothing short of astounding how quickly the scenarios in Zoo Tycoon 2 evolve.

Last night in just a few games I went from goals like:

“You need to keep your animals happy, and increase visitor donations”

to situations like:

“You have no money, no staff, PETA is picketing your zoo, and half of your animals have the plague. If you don’t turn the zoo around in six months, you will be arrested for animal abuse and spend the rest of your life in prison.”

I don’t know if I can handle the pressure.

Actually, there’s damn little treachery involved. But as far as sayings go, I like that one. There’s got to be some advantage to getting this gray hair in my beard, and having all these memories rattling around in my head. Here’s another quote, one of my favorites:

Good decisions come from wisdom.
Wisdom comes from experience.
Experience comes from making bad decisions.

When we got our iMac, we got the kids a copy of “Zoo Tycoon 2″, mostly because the Girl was (and is) animal crazed. She and her brother have played it quite a bit, but their idea of playing is to set up a freeform game with an unlimited budget, and build zoos.

OK, that’s fine. That’s a perfectly valid way to play the game. But when I finally thought I’d take a crack at it this weekend, I wanted to take a shot at the “Campaign” mode. That means working under a budget, and meeting specified goals. Hey, I used to play SimCity, once upon a time. I could do this.

So I went to my profile and started working through the tutorials.

This was a revelation to my kids, who had either ignored or dismissed the tutorials as irrelevant. In short order I had gotten the hang of the player interface, and was able to start playing the simpler scenarios. My daughter, seeing that I was able to actually get a zookeeper to take care of a particular animal (something which had long frustrated her), decided that maybe she would look at the tutorials as well.

Heh-heh. If all else fails, read the directions.

Emmett Chapman was a guitarist who, in the late 1960s, began playing the electric guitar by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Although some guitarists had played with a two-handed tapping, keeping the fingers of the right hand parallel to the strings, Chapman’s “Free Hand” method placed the fingers of both hands perpendicular to the strings, one hand on each side of the fretboard.

This technique permitted many more notes to be played than most stringed instruments, and Emmett Chapman developed a new instrument, the “Chapman Stick”, to take full advantage of the new style of playing.

You can now purchase a number of different models of the Chapman Stick from www.stick.com. That site also has much more information on Emmett Chapman, his innovations, and how to play one of his instruments.

Why do I care? Because this performance impresses the hell out of me: