I’ve spent what seems like decades of my life with my hands immersed in wet, sloppy pumpkin goo, scraping out the endless insides of orange gourds, shearing away at the rind to get that front wall thin enough for my magnificent carving to come. Pumpkin poo under my finger nails; pumpkin glop in the big bowl next to me; pumpkin rind in my dog’s mouth as she settles down to eat the contraband piece she grabbed off the newspaper when I wasn’t looking, contraband that will disappear into her stomach only to reappear later in another form, all over her dog bed and the carpet and my couch.
But not this year.
This year I’m in a tent in the Himalayas with Raoul, and there are no pumpkins for sale. My bag of Halloween stuff — carving tools, Carve O’Lantern kits, creased paper patterns from years past still with bits of Scotch tape adhering to the corners — is in the closet in my study. Or maybe in the garage. Or possibly in my little storage unit. Wherever it is, it’s not here.
I want to post pictures of my past masterpieces, but I can’t find them. I can’t find anything anymore. You want to know what my life looks like? Picture a mountain — picture Everest, since it’s right outside my tent as I type this: a giant jutting monster rising 12,000 feet above the Tibetan Plateau. Now imagine this mountain is made of paper. Paper, books, journals, books, sketches, books, bills, books, special offers, 0% APR on balance transfers until December 1, accept our gift today, your national forests are at risk, hurry offer ends November 16, dare to compete, pre-approval notice, please respond within 4 weeks, cash back, you’ve been selected, it’s time to renew, free shipping for the holidays. Annual reports. Sierra Club newsletters. Special Notices. And catalogs — Holy Chomolunga, the catalogs. Plow & Hearth Jackson & Perkins Metropolitan Museum Plow & Hearth Smithsonian Fire Mountain Plow & Hearth Land’s End Travel Smith Foster and Smith Plow & Hearth Victorian Trading Co.
Somewhere, deep inside this paper mountain, is my life.
I did find this one picture, and only because it was on my old computer:
I have no idea when that was. Five years ago? Ten? Who the hell knows.
At any rate, this year I’m going to be doing my carving online. No pumpkin poo for me and Raoul, by god. Thanks to the power of the inner tubes, I’m now hipped to the new, poo-free way to carve:
Pumpkin Simulator
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Holidays, Raoul on October 31, 2007, 2:56 pm EST
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Left: An FBI sketch of “D.B. Cooper.” Right: The late Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper, who, despite his strong resemblance to a doofus elf on quaaludes, may have been the notorious hijacker.
Raoul and I had a fake fight last night so we could make up later, and while he was out of the tent I passed the time reading the D.B. Cooper story in last week’s New York magazine. Damn. Could it be? Probably not, but it’s a good piece anyway. Read it even if you think D.B. is just spattered DNA somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
If you’re a young whippersnapper and don’t know about D.B. Cooper, or if you’re an old whippersnapper but you’ve forgotten a lot of the case (or never gave a hoot in the first place), Crime Library has a good review. My hatred of Crime Library burns with the heat of a thousand suns (just how many ad views do you need from each article for crying out loud? What next, a paragraph per page? The greed, the greed, people, it’s destroying you) but their rundown on the Cooper case includes a bunch of details about the hijacking that didn’t make it into the New York piece.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry, Raoul on October 29, 2007, 4:26 am EST
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Sorry for the light posting this week. Raoul and I are on an astral backpacking tour of the Himalayas.
My new favorite drink: Sherpa tea, with salt and rancid yak butter. Out of this world.
Update for Sis: Here’s one of Raoul with fewer clothes on.
We’re still experimenting with different heads.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Raoul on October 25, 2007, 9:25 pm EST
27 Comments »
I’m gearing up to post the continuation of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which I’ve been too busy to do proper justice to this week, but in the meantime here’s a news item that will set the stage.
First, a quiz.
- What allows ev-psychos to get away with their cartoonish, Flintstones view of life in the Pleistocene, in which men controlled the resources and women were passive lumps trading sex for food?
- What allows morons like Roy F. Baumeister to deliver a lecture on the topic “Women Have Never Contributed Jack-Shit to the Human Species Except By Giving Birth And Even That They Couldn’t Manage Very Well” without being shouted off the stage by an irate audience, disgusted by his ignorance?
- What allows old-fashioned (read: sexist) archaeologists and museums to still get away with their obsolete “Man the Hunter” depictions of Paleolithic life?
The answer to all three questions is the same: the overwhelming cultural silence about the real role of women in our evolution and history.
Do you think articles like the following help?
Seafood led Early Man to come out of his shell
Ancient shells left in a cave 164,000 years ago suggest that a love of seafood and daytrips to the beach date back to the earliest days of mankind.
The discovery is so early in the history of Modern Man that the shellfish may mark the time when Homo sapiens first developed distinctive human behaviour.
~
The discovery of several species of shellfish in the cave puts back the date where mankind first treated the oceans as a larder by 40,000 years from 125,000 years ago.
Coastlines are recognised by scientists as likely migration routes and the discovery of how to exploit the shore for food would have been a factor in Man’s ability to colonise the rest of the world.
Researchers identified 15 types of marine creatures in the cave, which would have been about three miles from the coast when it was occupied. The remains of ancient fires indicate that the molluscs would have been cooked in their shells. The international team of researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Nature, said that it was likely that the transition to using beaches as a source of food was crucial to Man’s survival.
When our very language erases the existence of women, is it any wonder that our mental landscape is equally bereft?
It’s always offensive when ancient women are “disappeared” in this manner, but it is especially galling in this case since the behavior under discussion is shellfishing. Shellfishing, for chrissake, which is almost as strongly correlated with women as plant gathering — just as big-game hunting is correlated with men.
Look: everybody needs to be very careful about reading a gendered division of labor into the ancient past. But if ethnography is any guide at all to our Paleolithic ancestors, then gathering plants and shellfish has long been the kind of thing women typically do, just as big-game hunting is the kind of thing men typically do. (Let me note parenthetically here that net hunting, on the other hand, is a group-wide activity — men, women, young, old, everybody. And it’s a hell of a lot more productive than big-game hunting.) There are exceptions to these patterns, yes. Absolutely. But the patterns are still there.
These patterns are what enabled an earlier generation of blinkered archaeologists to create the myth of “Man the Hunter,” wherein everything really important in human evolution happened because men were getting together to hunt. Those old archaeologist dudes may have been right about men doing most of the big-game hunting, but they were wrong about said hunting being some all-powerful engine of change. After all, chimps hunt too. And real big-game hunting, with spear-wielding humans going after big animals, probably didn’t happen until long after our ancestors had become very, very smart.
The great reassessment happening in anthropology is the realization that the complex of behaviors that seem to mark the emergence of highly intelligent Homo are those activities that have always been associated with women: plant gathering and processing, communal resource acquisition and provisioning — including shellfishing.
More and more, when anthropologists think about intelligent hominids making the transition to modern humans, they’re thinking about women — women figuring out how to dig up tubers and prepare them so they’re edible, how to smash hard seeds and grind them into a mush the baby can eat, how to roast shellfish and turtles so the meat is easy to get to. How to get along with each other, talking things over, sharing tasks. How to work out the provisioning so new Mom can nurse the baby while Grandmother and Aunts pitch in with the tuber-digging and babysitting. How to exploit the environment and harness the power of group effort in a way our simian cousins never do.
Women’s work, people. Women’s work.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 19, 2007, 12:43 am EST
60 Comments »
NYC Woman Finds Python in the Toilet
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on October 18, 2007, 9:57 am EST
12 Comments »
From the Creek Running North news desk: Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says.
Further study by Mann-Esser’s team found a surprising commonality among the five percent of subjects showing clinical signs of susceptibility to evolutionary psychology, which the team refers to as “Desmond Morris Syndrome,” or DMS. Ninety percent of the DMS-positive subjects shared a single allele, first isolated by researchers at the University of Lucerne. The recessive allele, named luz-R, was absent from the remaining 95 percent of test subjects. (The corresponding dominant allele, luc-ID, has been tentatively linked to critical thought faculties and penis size.)
Evidence also suggests that Nice Guy® Syndrome, a condition thought to be strongly correlated with the luz-R allele, may have been present in human populations as long ago as the Upper Paleolithic:
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 18, 2007, 8:51 am EST
4 Comments »
The headline reads, China’s Leader Closes Door to Reform.
I guess so. Check out these two pictures from the accompanying slide show of the Communist Party Opening Day in Beijing:
“Hostesses for the Communist Party’s 17th National Congress played a game Monday outside the Great Hall of the People.”
“Party delegates — 2,200 in all — attended the opening ceremony of the week-long event, which is held once every five years.”
I think there is one woman in the second picture. She probably has a penis in a jar under the desk.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on October 17, 2007, 6:00 pm EST
2 Comments »
I saw this in the news a few days ago, but didn’t post on it because it upset me too much. It upset me so much, in fact, that I had to spend two hours googling dolphin pictures in order to calm down.
But Shakespeare’s Sister is a better woman than I, and so she’s posted on the story of the prostitute who was gang-raped at gunpoint, and of the evil judge who reduced the charges to “theft of services”:
So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.
The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”
Folks, you know my theory. Pretty soon they’ll start purging the dictionaries. Take the word “rape” right out.
One thing Shakes didn’t mention, but I will: Jill Porter, the Philly columnist who reported this business, isn’t exactly a paragon of enlightenment herself. In her original column she wrote:
Certainly the victims don’t inspire much sympathy.
Why waste taxpayers’ money for what some people consider an occupational hazard?
There are enough sympathetic victims without wasting time on prostitutes who ask for trouble, right?
But crimes are prosecuted not out of sympathy for victims, but to maintain the rule of law in a civilized society, to punish a criminal and prevent further crime.
Has feminism not made it to Pennyslvania yet? What the hell is going on up there? It’s bad enough that Judge Asswipe thinks prostitutes are sexual vending machines; now we’ve got the Voice of Conscience saying, why yes, prostitutes are unsympathic sluts who are just asking for trouble, but still, we need to hold the line on rape prosecutions in order to maintain the rule of law for the greater good.
Are people in Philadelphia walking around in bustle gowns and tailcoats and shit? Is it like 1889 up there? Horse-drawn carriages? Little boys in short pants? Is Dave Lennox standing on the corner in pair of overalls?
Dolphin pictures. Dolphin pictures.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Rape on October 16, 2007, 12:17 am EST
28 Comments »
Well, do ya, punk?
‘’
via Coturnix.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Godbags on October 15, 2007, 1:37 am EST
9 Comments »
The Vatican has suspended a senior official who was caught on videotape propositioning a young man.
Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a capo ufficio, or section head, at the Vatican ministry responsible for the clergy, insisted yesterday he was not gay. He said he had posed as a homosexual to research a plot by satanists.
Every time I read that it makes me laugh.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Godbags on October 15, 2007, 12:22 am EST
4 Comments »
It started with a blurb I saw in the New York Times for October 5:
“Evolution’s Secret Weapon: Grandma. Far from burdening society, aging women may have ensured our survival.”
“Grandmother hypothesis,” I said to myself. “But why is it in the paper now?”
I clicked on the link and was surprised to see that the article was in the Health section. Not Science? Then I read on and realized that the slant was about menopause, with the hook being the recent talk given by Kristen Hawkes at a meeting of the North American Menopause Society (who knew there was such a thing?). Hawkes is the anthropologist behind the grandmother hypothesis, and the article helpfully included a link to an older piece in the Times that reported on the theory in more detail.
A much older piece, in fact; ten years old. The linked piece is from 1997, when the grandmother hypothesis (or rather the current Hawkesian version of it) was brand-new. And that piece was also in the Health section — actually the Women’s Health section. Not Science.
Maybe I need to stop for a moment here and explain just what the grandmother hypothesis is and why it’s important.
In a nutshell, the hypothesis is that grandmotherhood is a crucial development of our species. By remaining active for decades after menopause, our ancestral grandmothers were able to channel their energy into helping to provision their daughters’ children. From the standpoint of making sure their genes continued to propagate, this was an extremely effective adaptation. It also made it possible for women to have helpless infants (think big-brained human babies) and to have them fairly close together, since the young mothers could rely on their own mothers to help out with provisioning and childcare. Hawkes and her colleagues believe that this change in life pattern may have been the key adaptation that allowed Homo to flourish.
The grandmother hypothesis has been one of the most productive and influential theories in anthropology in the past 10 years. Hence my surprise at seeing it covered in the Health section of the Times, rather than Science. I mean, sure, menopause is part of women’s health and all that, but it’s a little like putting a geology piece on the Weather page.
Curious, I decided to search the Times archive to see if any of their other articles on the grandmother hypothesis had been run on the Health page instead of Science.
Guess what?
There haven’t been any other articles on the grandmother hypothesis. Not a single one. There’s just the one piece from 1997 in the Women’s Health section, and now this piece from last week, also in the Health section. One of the most exciting current theories in anthropology and human evolution, and the Times isn’t interested.
What the Times is interested in, apparently, is ev-psych pseudo-science about how women evolved to like men with flashy sports cars because life in the Pleistocene was exactly like The Flintstones. They’ve got lots of stories like that. Real anthropology? Actual science that offers groundbreaking new views of human evolution? Not so much.
Okay, screw the Times!
In Part 2 I’ll talk more about the grandmother hypothesis, what it is, and the impact it’s had on studies of human evolution.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 14, 2007, 8:29 pm EST
12 Comments »
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on October 12, 2007, 3:11 pm EST
15 Comments »
It’s been a tough week here in the Spirit Lounge, what with the state of humanity being such a goddamn clusterfucked trainwreck of horror and all. So when I came across this old Onion article from 2000, my heart leapt with an irrational wild hope. Let it come true, I thought. I’m a Spirit, I’m in the Spirit Lounge, God stops by for tequila shots every now and then — maybe I can talk Her into it!
Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
‘Oh, Shit,’ Says Humanity
August 30, 2000 | Issue 36•30
One of the evolved dolphins, whose opposable thumbs
have struck fear into the hearts of humankind.
Delphinologists have reported more than 7,000 cases of spontaneous opposable-digit manifestation in the past two weeks alone, with “thumbs” observed on the bottle-nosed dolphin, the Atlantic humpback dolphin, and even the rare Ganges River dolphin.
“It appears to be species-wide,” said dolphin specialist Clifford Brees of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, speaking from the shark cage he welded shut around himself late Monday. “And it may be even worse: We haven’t exactly been eager to check for thumbs on other marine mammals belonging to the order of cetaceans, such as the killer whale. Oh, Christ, we’re really in the soup now.”
Of course this wouldn’t actually be evolution, but rather a kind of synchronized mass mutation. But I’m sure God could handle that.
Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins – believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man – to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems.
“They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing,” said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California–San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. “Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry.”
See? It could go fast! They could be ready to take over the U.N. by this weekend if God got started tonight!
It is unknown what precipitated the dolphins’ sudden development of opposable thumbs. Some dolphin behaviorists believe that the gentle marine mammal, pushed to the brink by humanity’s reckless pollution and exploitation of the sea, tapped into some previously unmined mental powers to spontaneously generate a thumb-like appendage. However, given that 95 percent of the world’s dolphin experts have committed suicide since learning of the development, the full story may never be known.
“You must believe, sleek ocean masters, that many of us homo sapiens weep with shame and disgust over the degradation to which our species has subjected our All-Mother, the Great World-Sea,” read the suicide note of Dr. Richard Morse, a Brisbane, Australia, delphinologist and regular contributor to Marine Mammal Science. “If you are reading this, I estimate that it is the day we know as August 31, 2000. Please be decent and kind masters to our poor ape-race. Oh, God, I’m so sorry about the tracking collars.”
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on October 11, 2007, 3:07 pm EST
4 Comments »
I’ve written before about how the rape of women is an indissoluble part of war, but Professor Shortell makes the same point in about one-twentieth of the space. He quotes from this article in the New York Times about the war in Congo:
Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
As Prof. Shortell says: “Rape and torture aren’t accidents that happen on the fringes of war; they are the essence of war.”
It is a conservative myth that men pay the price for war; that our brave boys are the ones who bear the burden of defending our whatever-the-fuck. I’m going to quote myself here, from a piece I wrote in February 2006 about Iraq:
Of course, the bigger point to be made here is that war exerts a profound and particular violence on women. Civilian females raped by maruading troops, female soldiers raped by their own comrades, military wives at home killed by their returning husbands — war and militarism hit women hard. This runs contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that war is the special burden of men, the great sacrifice that males give for their country. Anti-feminists make a sort of fetish of this, claiming that war casualties are overwhelmingly male. That is, to put it politely, bullshit.
Despite the glorification of “our brave boys in uniform,” soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Civilian populations are. In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were unarmed women, children, and men.
I put that statement in bold because I think it needs to become a permanent fixture of everyone’s mental furniture. When we think about war, we need to think about its real effects. Forget John Wayne and Rambo; remember, instead, the citizens of Dresden, the women of Bosnia, the ash heaps/former humans of Hiroshima. Let’s say it one more time: soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Innocent civilians are.
Let us add now to that roster of raped and maimed civilians; let us add the Congo women lying in hospital beds with colostomy bags — colostomy bags, I tell you, because they have been so brutally raped their plumbing doesn’t work anymore.
That’s what war is.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under War, Rape on October 10, 2007, 4:53 pm EST
5 Comments »
