Doing the jobs cypress sticks won't do

Prior to the easy-money fueled housing bust, Steve Sailer noticed a contemporary reliance on "human directionals"--people hired to walk around twirling signs at intersections in an effort to direct traffic to whatever it is said directionals are being paid a couple of bucks under minimum wage in cash to promote. Steve presciently realized we were moving diametrically away from Ben Franklin's promised land. And organized labor, instead of trying to turn the caravan around, was driving the oxen full speed ahead. Uh oh.

Comprehensive as he tries to be, though, Steve has consistently failed to mention the working-conditions angle in this whole story. See, standing up for long periods of time while being subjected to the elements is physically taxing and potentially hazardous to worker health. With this concern as their guiding light, labor leaders in several communities across the country (like my own, incidentally) pushed for legislation forbidding the use of free standing marketing materials. Wooden and metal posts had been taking all the jobs that hard-working, new dues-payers should have been doing, while these same dues-payers were being exploited in inhumane conditions. By disallowing the use of stationary signs, businesses had little choice but to look to the menial backbone of 21st century cutting edge technological progress to fill the void.

Before:

Child slavery

After:

The American Dream

Things just keep getting better all the time.

Modest suggestion for Radio Derb

I'm a week behind, but at last listen the Derb's research assistants were working for the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan on slogans for the upcoming campaign against Emmanuel Goldstein's ragtag coalition of seditious rats. He should allow them indefinite leave there and find some new assistants. Aged 36, 41, and 34, respectively, Mandy, Candy, and Brandy, are surely losing their suppleness along with their sagacity. Spring chickens they are not.

Derb--if I may so audaciously address you directly--to inject your vessel with some warm, youthful energy, I modestly suggest you bring Miley, Riley, and Kiley on board as replacements.

There's a remunerative bonus to boot. As millennials, they're perfectly content to take nodes, er, notes and deliver massages, er, messages, for zero compensation. In fact, they'll fall all over themselves just for the opportunity. Ah, the benefits of living in the age of open borders and zero marginal productivity workers!

It's a ...

Depending on who you ask or what source you trust, generally the sex of a child can be determined with certainty via ultrasound (that is, by sight--we're not talking about chorionic villus sampling, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or any other futuristic methods of cheating here) at somewhere between 17-20 weeks into a pregnancy. We found out at 15 weeks. Don't get hung up for long on what this says about the sex of the kid.

Va jay jay

Upon seeing pictures (requires being logged into a facebook account) of a recent protest in Virginia against the big government conservative-style ultrasound bill passed by the state legislature and soon to be signed into law by the governor, I have a reaction and proposed solution.

Reaction: God those women are ugly.

Solution: Male sobriety. It's all the birth control those harpies need. Problem solved!

Sayonara sucker

A couple of months ago, I experienced a personal first--a wart on the inside of my right pinky finger. Never having had to deal with such a hideous thing before, I just ignored it for several weeks. It was small and only noticeable at all when my fingers were spread out. I'd heard that the solution involved freezing it off, which isn't something I figured I'd be able to do on my own, and it wasn't something I was going to bring to the attention of anyone else if I could help it.

And help it I did! I'm happy to report that two weeks ago I placed the wart between the fingernails of my left index finger and thumb, pinched as hard as I could, and tore the sucker right off. It bled profusely for several minutes, but now it's all healed up and there is no outward remnant in the form of scar tissue or the like to show where it had been. I was worried it might grow back, but so far not even the slightest bump is detectable.

AE's doing his part to keep cosmetic health care costs in check!

Highwind

Like riding a bike

More social justice, please

There probably isn't a phrase that gets under my skin more than "social justice" does. It's wielder gives me an immediate impression of being pretentious, supercilious, accusatory, and self-promoting. And the future promises more of it than even the present does. It's frequency has been doubling every decade for the last three, and it's apex is in the future, not in the past:


The contemporary manifestation of "social justice" must have Thomas Aquinas spinning in his grave.

PNSer PNSing

... to describe someone who is pointing and sputtering, er, pointing 'n sputtering. Orally, each of the first three letters are pronounced individually, followed by the appropriate suffix. It fits--they do tend to be whiny little bitches, after all.

Magic: The Gathering and Sabin, Edgar, Umaro, Cyan, Relm, Locke, Gogo, Shadow, Strago, Gau, Celes, Terra, Mog, and Setzer

I've been having fun with custom card creations for vintage RPGs for a few years now. In looking back on what I've come up with in the past and comparing it to this latest addition, it's hard not to notice power creep among my cards over time. It is, no doubt, the result of the same sort of power creep WotC has allowed creatures to enjoy since M:TG's infancy to adolescence, spanning Alpha to 4th Edition. The following three comparisons illustrate this phenomenon well:

Old	New

The creature progression has been contrasted by an enfeebling of non-permanent spells:

Old	New

This has been especially detrimental to blue (additionally, compare Time Walk to Time Warp, Counterspell to Cancel, and Brainstorm to Ponder) which rules the vintage world but despite claiming one of the most powerful cards ever printed as its own, is the only color in standard currently unable to fly solo without a heavy dose of brown.

AE muddles on

It's almost so stereotypical as to be beyond parody, but I've been hooking up with a girl over the last few weeks who constitutes my first interracial experience (no home base, though). She's black, 18, great body, but she's not relationship material for a host of reasons that I won't bore you with (and are pretty predictable anyway). I haven't been as straightforward about my lack of interest in anything commital as I think I should have been, but I've been frustrated over not being able to attract any interest from a gorgeous, Jesus-loving all-American 22 year-old former college cheerleader who lives in the house next to the one I spent my adolescence in (I babysat her a decade ago, but only recently got to know her after she returned to her parents' house upon graduation). Like a pretentious brat, I've justified screwing someone over since the world's screwing me over.

The last exchange I had with the black girl, before seeing her one more time and then cutting off follows. We've always done the typical 'black friends' back and forth, so it's not really as crass as it appears to be.

---

Chanara: Are we not talking anymore?

AE: What's this royal 'we'?

Chanara: What the fuck is your problem?

AE: 99 problems but I guess this bitch ain't one of them.

Chanara: You guess? Your [*shudder*] ass was pose to have me over a long time ago. We should just get a hotel room and call it a day

AE: I don't do prostitution. Don't mix me up with your customers.

Chanara: Dont make fun of me. You never told me when to come over

AE: YOU'RE wrong, I said you could get in line but YOU'RE too prude.

Chanara: What are you talkin about? You mad cause we havent fucked?

AE: I don't get mad, I just get on. Rolling stone gathers no moss.

Chanara: Ok your disappointed we didnt fuck. your the one thats always working

AE: YOU'RE. God, it's "you're", not "your".

Chanara: Your not going to tell me how to talk

AE: Fine, talking is not what I want to do with you ;)

Chanara: lol let get together soon

AE: Seriously?

Chanara: What

AE: Never mind, we'll let that one slide.

Chanara: What are you talkin about?

AE: Abuse of the English language.

Chanara: Ill show you abuse

AE: On the way :)

[A couple days later, after not responding to multiple texts]

Chanara: You better not be tryin to talk to another bitch because it wont be good

AE: Look, I told you not to wait for me. I think you've got the wrong idea. I really need to sleep now, it's late

Chanara: omg Fuck you. i cant believe this shit

[She's sent a few other texts since, but I've decided not to respond, at least for awhile. I genuinely feel bad about leading her on.]

---

I'm kind of a mess right now, if the post doesn't make that obvious enough. My first serious high school girlfriend, who got married three years ago, just had a baby. I'm not getting any younger. I'm doing the open book thing here for my own benefit, hoping maybe to tap into the wisdom of readers who've been around a bit longer, whatever their reactions might be. Stop aiming for the stars, secure and invest in something on a mountaintop, stop jacking around, and realize you're a few years from thirty and need to stop jacking around, perhaps?

Chanara:
Cheerleader:

I'm reasonably certain that's where we're at

By nitpicking, I'm opening the door for "pot calling the kettle black" and SWPL quips. Further, I'm of the opinion that commentators who add substantively meaningless phrases designed to show humility when making assertions are unnecessarily making their readers read more than they need to. We know you're not the ultimate arbiter of all things to all people. It's your take based on the reason you've employed, the data you've marshaled, and the passion you've embedded in your delivery. The "in my opinion, ..." is stating what is already assumed unless you've indicated otherwise.

That said, I listened to two podcasts today, one via EconTalk with Bryan Caplan and the other via AltRight Radio with Trace Mayer. Caplan said (starts at 54:25) the following in a discussion about F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit:

It's not that businesses need certainty about the rules, but a reasonable amount
of certainty.

A "reasonable amount of certainty"? The standard definition of certain being "free from doubt or reservation; confident; sure", the question of certainty is a dichotomous one. Something is either certain or it is uncertain; it cannot be somewhat certain.

In a span of less than 40 minutes, Mayer demonstrates poor English language usage not just once, or only twice, but thrice, in each case saying "...that's where we are at" instead of "that's where we are".

While we're on the topic, a couple other frequent errors I regularly come across:

- "Nevermind" instead of "never mind". The former is close to an antonym of the latter. Used correctly, it is approaching obsolescence. Parenthetically, I was made aware of this several months ago by an astute reader who called me out on my frequent use of "nevermind" when I meant "never mind".

- "Peruse" as an indication of brevity when it should be expressing the giving of great attention to detail. When I peruse an article, I'm not just skimming it but instead am reading through it thoroughly.

And yes, despite being guilty of it, I'm aware that freely switching between first-, second-, and third-person is considered bad, er, poor form.

* In the Steveosphere, that is. In the texting and Facebook worlds, these complaints would be dwarfed by far more elementary mistakes such as the use of "your" as the contraction of "you are" and "there" as the contraction of "they are".

Androgynous names and which gender they're closer to

I recently got into a dispute with a friend over whether or not Skyler was primarily a boy's or a girl's name. Based on my own experience, I told her that the reason she thought of it as a girl's name was purely anecdotal; I, on the other hand, was not so subjective (of course!).

Of course, indeed. Turns out I was wrong. Well, technically I am still able to argue that I was correct, since I had the spelling above in mind when we were talking about it, but Skylar is a more common homophone variant of the name. While Skyler is 56/44 in boys' favor, Skylar is overwhelmingly feminine at 79/21.

I've spent a fair amount of time in onomastic contemplation about the children it seems I'll never get around to having. To add a little rigor to that vain pondering, I turned to Baby Naming Wizard, a neat site that shows the frequency of baby names given over time and by sex. The following table shows how relatively masculine an arbitrary but fairly inclusive list of androgynous names (based on those I've known to be given to both boys and girls) are by showing the percentage of each name given to boys during the name's most popular point in time for boys compared to the name's most popular point in time for girls*. Thus those on the top of the list are most skewed in favor of males; those on the bottom are most heavily female:

Name	% Boy	% Girl
Christian	94.8	5.2
Sean/Shawn	94.8	5.2
Logan	94.1	5.9
Drew	88.7	11.3
Cameron	88.0	12.0
Lee	84.1	15.9
Dakota	72.9	27.1
Jordan	70.0	30.0
Justice	51.8	48.2
Casey/Kasey	50.4	49.6
Alex	46.7	53.3
Riley	42.9	57.1
Skylar/Skyler	37.9	62.1
Payton/Peyton	34.2	65.8
Dominique	31.6	68.4
Taylor	30.9	69.1
Sidney/Sydney	30.3	69.7
Campbell	30.2	69.8
Jamie	29.7	70.3
Jessie	26.2	73.8
Kendall	24.7	75.3
Bailey	20.9	79.1
Shannon	17.9	82.1
Pat	17.1	82.9
Reagan	12.5	87.5
Morgan	9.9	90.1
Lauren/Loren	7.0	93.0
Kennedy	5.9	94.1
Lindsay/Lindsey	2.0	98.0

Two-thirds of the androgynous names on this list are primarily girls' names. I'm not sure if that's simply the result of the list being based on my own personal experience, or if most names (at least in English) applicable to either sex tend to be given to females.

Despite long, successful acting careers, Morgan Freeman, Drew Barrymore, and Cameron Diaz have not been able to affect a shift in the feminine and masculine tendencies of their respective first names. Peyton has rocketed upwards among boys since the turn of the century, in concert with Peyton Manning's decade-long position as one of the best quarterbacks in football. However, it also hasn't been enough (at least not yet, and at best Manning realistically only has another five years or so at the top of the pile).

Lindsey/Lindsay, Loren/Lauren, and Sean/Shawn probably don't merit inclusion on this putatively androgynous list. The guys I know named Lindsey and Loren and the girls I know named Shawn, Logan, and Christian (not short for anything) are apparently all aberrations. Setting the androgyny threshold at no fewer than one in every ten names being given to the minority sex, Kennedy should also go.

The only women named Pat I've known are old enough to be my grandmother, but in tribute to the infamous SNL character, I looked it up. To my surprise, Pat has historically been a feminine name. Only in the latter half of the 20th century did the name Patrick rise in popularity, displacing female variants of Pat that all began falling off precipitously in the forties to such an extent that by the time Julie Sweeney began sketching the unappealing creature in the early nineties, Pat (or some extension of it) was being given to boys at a 5-to-1 ratio.

If some sick bastard wanted to reincarnate a contemporary Pat-like character, Casey/Kasey would be the best name to give it (although the audience would necessarily never have view of its written name).

Until the early 1900s, Sidney/Sydney was a masculine name, but by the 1950s, the Sydney variation had nearly gone extinct, and Sidney continued to decline steadily. Until the early 1980s, it was virtually unheard of for a girl to be given either variation of the name. Since that point in time, it has exploded in popularity among girls. Consequently, among those born in the last three decades, the name should not be considered androgynous at all--it is now almost exclusively a girls' name. And for the better, I say. Sydney Carton is one of the most pitiful male characters in all of English literature (Dickens couldn't even give him the decency of being named "Sidney")! Let the ladies have it.

* The following table shows the distributions for androgynous names and their variant spellings. For the two names included in the list that are frequently used as shorthand for something fuller, those frequently occuring fuller names are counted in the shorter name's total tally. "Pat" includes Patrick for boys; Patty, Patricia, Patsy, and Patti for girls. "Alex" includes Alexander and Alexis for boys; Alexandra, Alexandria, Alexus, Alexis, Alexa, and Alexia for girls.

Name	% Boy	% Girl
Casey	56.3	43.8
Kasey	23.5	76.5
Casey/Kasey	50.4	49.6
Lauren	0.8	99.2
Loren	74.9	25.1
Lauren/Loren	7.0	93.0
Payton	28.0	72.0
Peyton	37.8	62.2
Payton/Peyton	34.2	65.8
Sean	100.0	0.0
Shawn	90.9	9.1
Sean/Shawn	94.8	5.2
Skylar	21.3	78.7
Skyler	56.5	43.5
Skylar/Skyler	37.9	62.1
Sidney	80.0	20.0
Sydney	4.7	95.3
Sidney/Sydney	30.3	69.7
Lindsay	1.5	98.5
Lindsey	2.5	97.5
Lindsay/Lindsey	2.0	98.0

How common is the 40 year-old virgin?

I'm talking to a friend (yeah, via M:TG, predictably enough) the other day and he comments in resignation that he's going to be a 40 year-old virgin.

"Becoming one in a million, baby. If you didn't have that damn Y chromosome, being able to say as much would give you a little extra luster." (To try and help him avoid that oh so 'terrible' fate, I should've quipped something along the lines of "if you envision it, so indeed it shall be." Oh well).

Later, I wondered how exaggerated the one in a million presumption was.

Thank triviality for the GSS! Turns out the 40 year-old virgin isn't a mythic rare, but at one in fifty, he's at least an uncommon. Of the 2,288 respondents surveyed*, 49 identified themselves as cherries. Because of the stigma attached to sexless men, this probably understates the true prevelance of middle-aged male virgins existing in our midsts. It could plausibly be as high as 5%, or one in twenty.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), SEX(1), NUMMEN(0), NUMWOMEN, AGE(40-89)

* Limited to straight men at least 40 years of age who participated in the survey between 2000 and 2008.

100 / 40 = 2.5 ?

From a report on Williams syndrome, excerpted and then discussed by Steve:

Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.

Solomon must have had his way with one of those kids!

A diamond saved, a (lot of) penn(ies) earned

Gents, before you pop the question, netflix Blood Diamond and make it a date night at home on the couch. It might just save you three months' salary and net you a small SWPL status boost to boot. "T. I. A."

Quip of the day

I didn't quite time things right on Christmas eve, so when I came up from downstairs after working out, a few extended family members were already at the parents' house. I was in grey boxer briefs and a beater, so my arse was noticeably wet. My least favorite cousin--a shrill leftist in her early thirties who's back in school on the east coast (on my uncle's dime) for disparate degree number three, this one in elementary education, who proceeded later to share how while student teaching she'd elected to have her kids make "winter holiday" posters instead of Christmas ones as suggested in the teacher's lesson plan--cried out from the living room, "Ew, that's disgusting," as I flew up the second flight of stairs otherwise unnoticed.

She's a plump one, and time isn't making things any better. So I stopped, turned, and shot back "Some people call it disgusting. Others would say not doing it is what's disgusting."