Obvious Things

There's an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" where the holographic doctor tries to teach Seven of Nine how to date. He tries to teach her about social skills and small talk and flirting and all that. It's supposed to be real cute. As unrealistic as "Star Trek" is, particularly "Voyager", the very notion that someone who looks like Seven of Nine, and walks around in a skin-tight outfit, would need any instruction at all to get someone to date her is absurd.

I guess it all goes back to this idea that men are intimidated by smart women. It may be true in some cases, but most men are shallow enough to overlook intimidation if it was a really really good-looking smart woman. When they look like she does, it doesn't matter how smart they are, how socially adept, how talkative. Guys don't care about that stuff. Well, most guys don't.

But I watch this on TV and it's so obvious to me that she needs no instruction, why can no one on that show see it? It's like one of those studies that some government agency or university would spend billions of dollars trying to prove and then announce with great fanfare:

Scientists Prove Men Prefer Good-Looking Women To Smart Ones!

You see headlines like this all the time. They do these studies for years and spend millions of dollars to "prove" stuff that everyone knows already. Like I saw one today in the paper that said some researchers have found that, as women age, their sense of smell tends to be much keener than men's. That's why a man will wear the same shirt 150 times without washing it. Duh.

This is why we don't have cities on the moon or cars that fly. Because all the people who should be figuring this stuff out are putting cotton swabs under people's noses and going "You smell that? You smell that? You smell THAT?"

I think part of the problem is that scientists get too much freedom. Scientists just want to test and measure everything. Why is it that, for the most part, a strange dog will bite you but a strange cat will run away? What would "ultraviolet" look like, if we could see it? Why do bald men grow thick beards, but men with thick hair don't?

Have you ever wondered these things? Scientists have. The difference between you and a scientist is that he (or she) can spend millions of dollars trying to answer these questions. And the one thing that they rarely have to ask themselves, apparently, is "How can people benefit by my knowing these things?"

Let me tell you why this happens. There was a headline in the paper today that said that the leading cause of death for the county in which I live is heart disease. Now say somebody high up with a lot of influence starts getting all worked up about this and starts putting pressure on some politician, saying "What are you going to do about this?" And then he says "I'm going to devote all these public resources into trying to cure heart disease, the number one killer in this county!" And then all these scientists get all this money and after years of research they determine that heeart disease is caused by eating too much red meat, smoking, caffeine, and old age. And so the politician then commits a hundred bajillion dollars of public funds and 20 years funding "education initiatives" and in the end it's determined that no one, no amount of education, and no amount of research is going to stop people from eating red meat, smoking, drinking coffee, or growing older...and maybe it's not the government's job to try to get them to.

But see, I read the headline and I think, why is heart disease the leading cause of death in this county? Is the rate of heart disease higher in this county than in other counties, or is it just that people aren't dying by other means in my county? Is the general population older? And isn't it a good thing that the leading cause of death isn't AIDS, drive-by shootings, random violence, elephant attacks, "Thunder" the feral bunny at the petting zoo, accidents at the International Bull-Fighting College, or simply bursting into flame?

I don't want to say this out loud, though, because it might make headlines. And then some politician will get all up in arms about it, and some scientist will spend 20 years studying it.

Writing Workshops

A lot of folks who read the stupid crap that I talk about and write about ask me "Where do you come up with this stuff?" I don't usually have an answer, so usually I make one up. But let me give you a free writing workshop.

Here it is:

I was up at 5:00 am watching "Supergirl" with Helen Slater. Two things I remember about this movie when it came out in the summer of '84 were 1) Helen Slater was a total babe, and 2) This movie totally sucks. Both are still true. I briefly wondered if this movie was as horrible as "Superman IV: The Quest For Peace" and decided that, since this movie at least had Helen Slater in it, it's probably at least marginally better. (Note: I also notice at this point that Supergirl's love interest is played by the guy who got killed by terrorists by pretending to be friends with Bruce Willis when he really didn't know him in the first "Die Hard" movie.)

Once the movie was over, though, there was absolutely nothing on TV, so I got out a "Star Trek" tape and I was watching the "Voyager" episode that I talked about earlier and just reading the paper. And it just occured to me that the entire premise of the episode was totally ridiculous and that Seven of Nine probably had very little need or use for social graces. So now, go back and read the first two paragraphs from today and see what I wrote.

See, at this point there are many different directions I can go with this. I could write more about "Star Trek". I could talk about dating. I could talk about breasts. I could say men and women are different. I could say men are pigs. But I've covered all that ground. Well, except for breasts.

(I don't write a lot about sex stuff. I figure there's enough of that out there. They say a man thinks about sex like once every seven seconds, but I don't think that's so. For me anyway, it's not something that I consciously have to be thinking about; it's more like one of those Windows programs that's always running in the background.)

See, I decide to go a different way when I see this headline in the paper about a woman's sense of smell. That was just so obvious to me. Just the same way it was obvious that no one needed to teach Seven of Nine how to date.

This sounds really organized and well thought-out, but trust me, it totally isn't. I just write about whatever I'm reading or watching. It also helps that I have opinions on everything, even things I know absolutely nothing about.