In an important new contribution to the medical understanding of the root causes of crime, a research team at Fox news has concluded that men who breath air are almost 200 times more likely to commit burglary.
The researchers interviewed 400 known burglars, and, says Dr. Michael Shithead (pronunced shi-theed), “100% of them had blood levels indicating marked exposure to oxygen,” an accepted indicator that they’ve been breathing. Further, 20% of them admitted to paying for a half hour at an oxygen bar “when drunk in Las Vegas,” the study reports.
The critics have been pouring in, with many, including Dr. Frank Michener, arguing the old idea that “Correlation is not causation.” Michener added, “It’s important to continue research into the subject, but this is the wrong way to do it. I’m not convinced by this study that breathing contributed specifically to the criminal acts.”
Another researcher on the team, Dr. Jane Smedley, explained the groups interest in breathing: “We became suspicious of breathing when we realized that burglars are often running—through back alleys, for example— and that we might be able to use blood oxygen levels as an indicator of such behavior. I think it’s safe to say every one of us was completely shocked to find that 100% of our sample set did, in fact, manifest such oxygen levels.”
Shithead responded to arguments about correlation and causation this way: “There’s no question that more research needs to be done, and the concerns brought up are important ones. We’ve never claimed that this study is the definitive one on the subject, and I think we’re all in agreement that it doesn’t fully prove correlation.” Still, he noted, it ought to “raise a few eyebrows” or even “cause some alarm in the world community” to find that such a marked percentage of burglary criminals have been engaging in breathing. If researchers were in fact able to prove causation, Shithead concluded, “we’d then have the justification for regulating breathing, but until then, despite our inclinations, we can only recommend that….” At this point, Shithead’s face turned a dark hue of purple and he went unconscious.
USU’s Hard News Cafe has published an article about ME. I think it’s my favorite one. Thanks Storee Powell, who wrote it, and who interviewed me in December or something. (All such articles, which mostly only I care about, are listed under “Hey News!)
Here’s the link.
English major wins $10,000, buys vacuum cleaner
one minor clarification: The article says I’m writing an essay for Tin House magazine—more accurately I’m writing an essay I started with them in mind, an essay I intend to submit to them. I won’t actually get published there, realistically, before 2026.
[UPDATE: the creators of the mentioned group have expressed that they want to keep their facts straight and are disappointed about the error I mention here. See comments below.]
A new facebook group is going around: “Fight the New Drug.” It’s about pornography.
They claim to be nonreligious, but the founders are all in my town of Logan, Utah. It’s a very safe assumption they are LDS (mormon). One of the founders states that he is on his facebook page.
This is a non-issue. The issue is that the first video on their page makes the bold claim that pornography makes people more violent. Here’s a link, and here is a screenshot of the page:
Now, the copy here reads:
Pornography Causes Aggressive Behavior, by Tyler Neal
“Frequent pornography use has been associated with sexually aggressive behaviors.”
Tyden T, Rogala C. Sexual behaviour among young men in Sweden and the impact of pornography. Int J STD AIDS. 2004; 15(9):590-3.
Tyler Neal, in his video, says,
It’s interesting that we’re fighting the new drug, because some of the facts you might not know about pornography is that it makes people who watch pornography and view it more aggressively actually. They are the ones that become more sexually aggressive. Percentages of people who have raped, been the rapers [sic], almost up to 80% of them have been involved in pornography, at some time in their life. It’s interesting that even though people think that it doesn’t do any harm to themselves or to others, by watching pornography it actually is one of the biggest things that makes them aggressive toward others, and hurts other people.
The quote to the side: “Frequent pornography use has been associated with sexually aggressive behaviors,” is clearly suggested to be a quote. It’s not in the video. Of course, the implication is that it comes from the listed academic article.
Here’s the article about Swedish young men and their sexual behaviors as they relate to pornography. Click “Full text/PDF” at the top right to read it.
That quote isn’t in it. Am I crazy? I read the whole thing once and skimmed it a second time and searched for the idea and can’t find it anywhere. I was really interested in seeing this, because it would be enormously useful for my own thesis if it were true. I can’t even find the word “associated” in the article. The article is about use of protection and different sexual behaviors. The video clearly claims that watching porn makes people more aggressive. Porn viewers “are the ones who become more sexually aggressive.” The article says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about this. The words “Aggressive” or “Aggression” are not in it. It doesn’t talk about it. Read it.
It’s implied that rapists are part of this “sexually aggressive” group. Anyone over about seven will recognize that, even if we had a source for the statistic about 80% of rapists being involved with pornography, the only thing that means is that the rapists were clearly not reporting accurately, since the number is almost surely closer to 100%, as it is with the general body of men.
Why would an organization do this? Why would they so blatantly manipulate the sources and the facts? My suspicion is that they have a preconceived belief that pornography is bad, and their commitment to sharing that message overwhelms their commitment to actually proving it, despite the entire branding of their organization as being “fact based,” “science based,” etc.
So, is this merely annoying? There’s one thing we can be certain of: manipulating the sources and making things up will necessarily lead us further from a solution to any problems that do exist with pornography and our culture, if those problems do, in fact exist. This preconceived notion that pornography is bad (because they KNOW it is), is not what makes this group problematic; it’s their decision to brand themselves as rational and non religious, scientific, while actively deceiving. But I believe that when someone holds a religious belief so strongly, it’s easy to justify such manipulation of the facts. It’s not even really manipulation, they might think. It’s Reconfiguration, elimination of the inherent biases of the worldy world. God needs a little extra room to make his points.
This is one reason I think my thesis needs a personal narrative. I need to express my biases to the reader, and show them my own track, my journey of feeling so confused about all this. Is it really destructive? Is it merely the belief that it is destructive that makes it destructive?
Doing like this group is doing makes their own platform look really, really, really, really weak. Really. Intriguingly, their name bears a striking resemblance to the book, “The Drug of the New Millennium,” a book written by another Utah man, which I read several years ago and again recently. That book makes a lot of the same errors. Saying things, citing things occasionally, and then, when I checked the sources, they were really sketchy. Not as bad as this, but bad.
So, Fightthenewdrug.com relegates themselves to being nothing more than a social club for people who also hold the preconceived belief that pornography is bad (“evil,” the video calls it). Join our hip site, and we will talk about how much we don’t look at porn. How it’s really bad. How it turns people into rapists. This, I think, is actually horrible for a movement intending to quell the demand for porn (they are anti-censorship, of course, which is only sane). I think it makes the problem worse. Instead of talking about human sexuality, we try to make science conform to our belief, and we further vilify pornography. The pornographers will love that. That’s how they sell it.
Water is what we don’t have. Watching the water, we think of leaving, of movement, and discovery.
Land is what we have and ignore. Noticing the land, we feel accepting, satisfied, and full.
When someone you love is this sick, the present begins to feel like the past, you imagine today being described as “three days before,” or “that day.”And your fingernails get so short that touching anything at all is painful.
I was wondering about that question, and then became interested in my history as a writer.
First was the book I wrote and illustrated when I was perhaps eight—about a yellow reindeer, I think, whose reindeer friends wouldn’t let him play with them because he was yellow—and this reindeer saves the day on Christmas by being different. (And so, I guess, we can see it began with imitation.)
(It continued with imitation.) In eighth grade, I wrote alternative lyrics to the song by Smash Mouth titled “All Star.” This is perhaps because I’d developed a habit of listening to Weird Al Yancovic, who rewrote (rewrites? oh dear) lyrics to old songs. In a better world, I would not have to clarify that I grew out of listening to both of the aforementioned “musicians.”
By the end of eighth grade I’d written at least two original songs. One was titled “Orange,” and about the girl who I had a crush on and who had a pair of orange pants. The other was, I think, about not showering. My failure to capitalize in the relationship at stake in the first may have been related to the issues explored in the second.
At the beginning of ninth grade, the anti-angst, happy pop-punk trio Too Lazy formed. It was me, Mckay, and Miller, and we got to work playing horrible songs which developed, throughout high school, into horrible songs that were at times funny:
I don’t know what to do,
I don’t want this to end
You’re too good to put behind me
It’s nothing against you
I just hate your best friend
lose her and come and find me
Then, in the spring of my junior year of high school, I made that uncomfortable (and absolutely unacceptable, socially speaking) shift into being the sort of person who takes himself (almost) seriously. With this came an attempt at writing poetry.
My senior year I created perhaps the first writing that is almost readable—including an eight pager titled “Ophelia’s Soliloquy” in which we learn—in iambic pentameter—from the woman herself, that it was an intentional suicide.
I began at USU in journalism. I soon became aware I was at significant risk of spending several hours (at a minimum) of my existence doing sports writing if I didn’t find another path, so I switched into English, and then Creative Writing—drawn in by a poetry class I took that first semester. I intended to go on with poetry, but was sort of stolen away into nonfiction writing by my realization that research and literary nonfiction might just provide for me a way to accommodate my complete lack of focus on any one particular subject.
The first good essay I ever completed won the Norman Mailer award. Now I’m attempting to finish up an essay about Pupusas (Salvadoran food) and dealing with death obsession through art and a cannibalistic native american tribe called the Pipil. I mean, why not. Also, two pieces for a trade magazine. Also, two pieces of fiction that suck.
The thing I’ve realized though, the only thing that might have been a bit different for me than the general population, maybe, is that I learned to read really young, at about age four I think, when my mom spent time every day going through reading exercises with me and making our way through what amounted to a child-reading text book. Then, every morning before school, my dad would wake us for scripture study and we’d stumble into the living room with our blankets and read aloud a page from the Book of Mormon, verse by verse (and I can’t remember if it was just me who was always asleep by the time it was my turn to read a verse, and then asleep again by the time it was my turn to read the next verse…).
Then my parents made a chart we could fill in on the wall for our own personal scripture reading, and I really liked filling out charts, so I read the Book of Mormon through on my own at age seven—which now seems like an impressive feat to me, since it’s 531 pages of King James style English. For example:
Now Zeezrom, seeing that thou hast been taken in thy lying and craftiness, for thou hast not lied unto men only but thou hast lied unto God; for behold, he knows all thy athoughts, and thou seest that thy bthoughts are made known unto us by his Spirit; And thou seest that we know that thy plan was a very asubtle plan, as to the subtlety of the devil, for to lie and to deceive this people that thou mightest set them against us, to brevile us and to cast us out— Now this was a plan of thine aadversary, and he hath exercised his power in thee.
Then I kept reading the book through, especially once I was 14 and in ninth grade seminary, so by the time I was eighteen, I realized I’d read it seven times in its entirety. By the end there I could finish sentences in my mind without turning the page—and it wasn’t so much that I could remember verses word for word as that I could remember the rhythm and the cadence and the style of the prose.
I’ve started to suspect that reading is perhaps the best way to learn how to write, and I was thinking that I didn’t read very much growing up. And then I realized I did read a lot—that’s at least 3,700 pages of rather difficult reading, and I read the New Testament through twice and the Old Testament—about half of it (I think I was told to skip certain books) once. (I remember all this stuff because I formed my identity based on this sort of thing, and how fast I could run a mile, and how many speeds my bike had, and how much profit I could make on candy I would buy and resale on the corner after school.) And I have to consider also that in first grade I got a trophy for reading the most books in the class (275) and in fifth grade I got my first ever demerit for reading Watership Down while I was supposed to be watching Mr Slim Goodbody with my class.
I’ve read about 1,200 pages so far on winter break. I’m making note of that because I keep on feeling like I’m not getting anything done, and yet, that’s substantial, no? I’ve also taken detailed notes (using keywords on zotero) on about 497 of those pages.
Here’s what I’ve read. You’ll see it differs from my original intent (mostly because I shifted my spring semester writing plans):
1. The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here by Carmine Sarracino
2. The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars by Christopher Cokinos (I’ve read half the book — then I left it at my parents house on Christmas)
3. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
4. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
5. Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families by Pamela Paul
6. Lots of goodies from the current issue of Tin House.
go ahead and pretend you are surprised.
I love that they have an html box so you can tell all your friends.
But, I can’t imagine, even though I assume a psychiatrist could happily diagnose me and prescribe some pills, that I would want to kill all those awesome thoughts bouncing around in my skull. Oh no no no no.
It’s nice though to have considered this. I’ve never once considered it before. Especially because I’ve always done well in school. Yet, my memories of my young young youth have made me wonder if I am bound to end up schizophrenic, as I experienced a constant and permanent torrent of thoughts, tied together and disparate all at once, flying back and forth, jumping from one thing to the next like that BING.com commercial (search overload?), until once my mother invited me to make a list of everything on my mind, and I ended up with like six pages of single items my mind had thought of, all of it coming quicker than I could write, and without additional effort.
And then I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my senses severely impaired, or inversely impaired, as in, apparently heightened. I’ve never taken a hallucinogen, but I sort of imagine what I experienced is a bit like that, as my thoughts jumped out into the scenery, and the qualities of objects, like their distance from me, their size, their quantity (as in a shelf of books), became terrifying to me. I curled up once on the couch and whispered over and over to myself that “I don’t have to read all the books, I don’t have to read all the books.”
And the audible effects! Sounds became thunderous and whispered voices echoed again and again as shouts, except they sounded just as they had — the quality of a whisper being somehow carried now with the experience of a shout. And so forth (I just finished Slaughterhouse Five).
And now I think that perhaps this is indicative of something like ADHD. Although I find the entire idea rather boring, for my purposes, since I suffer no depression and seem to, in fact, be doing ok. Sure, I annoy all my friends, but I could just glue my mouth closed instead. Maybe that would make me smarter, with all those malformed thoughts stuck in there, festering, sprouting, blooming.
The Norman Mailer Writers Colony has finally updated their page about the 2010 summer Fellowships. (I’ll be headed there as part of having won the nonfiction award in 09.)
It used to say “In 2009, Don Delillo visited the colony….”
Now it says, “. . . distinguished writers, such as William Kennedy, Gay Talese, and Don Delillo, will visit the Mailer home during the Fellowship program to share their professional experiences with the Fellows.”
UPDATE, Jan 17 2o1o
Changed again, Delillo and Kennedy appear to not be a sure thing, since the recent mailing puts it this way: “In 2009 seven Fellows spent four weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they wrote, discussed their work, and were visited by writers such as Don DeLillo; editors and writers from leading publications such as the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. In 2010 Gay Talese will visit the colony as well as other leading writers to be named.”
Surprisingly, that’s not really disappointing. One can never know if good writers will be good mentors or teachers of writing anyway.
End of UPDATE
That’s in addition to the entire month being staffed by James Magnuson and/or Greg Curtis. Magnuson is the director of the University of Texas at Austin MFA program—the Michener Center—which is the most selective MFA (fiction/poetry only) in the country with a yearly acceptance rate of 10-12 out of 800 applicants or so. That’s because they offer the best fellowship in the country—25,000 dollars a year—and don’t require their MFA students to teach undergraduate courses. Three years, 25 grand a year, no teaching. Almost makes one want to take up fiction writing.
Greg Curtis has some big magazine awards and credentials, wrote a book that grabs my attention called The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists, and is the “humanities coordinator” at the University of Texas at Austin. (U T Austin is where the Mailer archives are located.)
The Mailer Colony is currently accepting applications for the 28 day summer fellowship, and for the 12 week-long workshops on various topics (everything from “young adult fiction” to “Biography: Identification with the Subject”). Go here, and click around. The page is in flash or something, so it’s hard to link directly to each section. The fellowships are paid for aside from food and travel, and the weeklong workshops are mostly paid for, aside from a $225 administrative fee. In other words, housing and tuition is covered.
Applications due by March 13.
Dear President Obama,
I wanted to personally thank you for helping me realize in such a quick manner that I cannot make a difference. I promise I’ll never vote again. How naive were we all to think that knocking on doors and making calls and writing letters and leaving voice messages for senators could actually earn us the things we voted for — public option health care, recognition of gay rights, higher taxes on the rich?
Seriously, how very naive of us.
Protesting was fun. Making signs is really a kick. Chants are fantastic. Love chants. The joy of being hung up on by all five of Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s offices! Seriously, it was all fun, fun and games, and I realize that now. Oh, the silly things people say about “having a voice” and “being an informed citizen.” I mean, come on. It’s embarassing. It really is embarassing. And I’m just really, really, really glad that you, President Obama, absolutely squashed every last bit of it out of me at least before I was 25. At least no one I meet from here on out has to know I actually took the time to vote in my ignorant past.
Enjoy your champagne after signing the biggest excuse for a health care bill that could be potentially conceived.
Should have voted for Hill—ah! the stubborn habits of youth—of course it doesn’t matter who I should have or could have or would have or might in the future vote for. One person cannot make a difference. Not in America.
