The Rawness

As everyone will be putting up the same Michael Jackson videos from the Thriller and Bad albums to pay tribute to the man, I figured I’d put up some of his more obscure ones. Last one was “Stranger in Moscow.” This time it’s a video for “Liberian Girl,” from the Bad album. This song was only released as a single in Europe, meaning the video as far as I know never got played in America. Or if it did, it was rare.

But the real great thing about this video is that it features a Who’s Who of all the major 80s players. See how many 80s celebs you can spot and name:

I’ve been killing flies with my bare hands my whole life. I have always kept quiet and never bragged about this fact, not because of any humility but because I was totally unaware of what an awesome feat this was. But apparently it is. Little did I know that I have been all this time a veritable Superman, with the reflexes of a cheetah and the bravado of an alpha ape. And I have Obama to thank for this discovery.

See, Obama killed a fly during an interview recently. I saw the headline reported in an oddly prominent fashion all through last week, which I found off given how there seemed to be more important Obama-related things to focus on like his wishy-washy responses to North Korea threatening to launch a nuclear missile in the direction of his hometown of Hawaii and the fallout from the Iranian elections. But no, despite all that, the media reassures us Obama is a badass tough guy because…he can kill a fly.

Seriously. It’s no news that the media will jump on any attempt to furiously fellate Obama, but this is ridiculous. Observe these grown men gushing.

It was a Dirty Harry ‘Make my day’ moment.

Then the next guy even praises him for having such great weather and rainbows at his speeches, as if Obama was somehow responsible for the weather. Oh wait, liberals think he’s God so maybe they actually do think he controls the weather for his speeches.

CNN chimed in:

When it’s appropriate he carries the big stick.

Mind you the reporter is saying this during the very same week he won’t respond to the Iranian situation and is responding weakly to North Korea. But no, fly killing is the measure of carrying a big stick. Truly the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt.

Here is a roundup of the rest of the media:

You just have to appreciate the concentration and the precision. There’s just a few things going on in the world, but it’s as if everything was just stopped and at a standstill for the President to lower the boom….apparently he wanted to shore up his credentials as being a tough guy!

I’m 95% sure Meredith Viera left a wet spot in her chair. I’m 100% sure her male co-anchor left a bigger one.

If it was Bush who did this I’m sure they’d accuse him of human rights abuses, want him to stand trial before a tribunal and even accuse him of racism and hate crimes if it turned out to be an African horsefly.

Some more great stuff in the media:

The media reports on scientists’ findings regarding how impossible it is for mere mortals to kill flies.

Swatting a fly with your bare hand is no easy feat either, as Caltech scientists Michael Dickinson and Gwyneth Card recently determined.

The researchers used high resolution, high speed digital imaging of fruit flies faced with a looming swatter. In the instant before a fly can usually zip to safety, its tiny brain calculates the location of the impending threat, comes up with an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction. All of this action takes place within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter.

“This illustrates how rapidly the fly’s brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response,” Dickinson explained.

Fleet-footed flies even tweak the escape technique, depending on the direction of the threat. Keep in mind that these insects possess a nearly 360-degree field of view, so they can see behind themselves. If a swatter comes in at a 50 degree angle, a fly can move its middle legs forward and lean back, raising and extending its legs to push off backward.

If the swatter comes from the back, no problem. The fly simply moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards and leans its whole body in the opposite direction just before it jumps.

“We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat,” Dickinson said. “When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly’s body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture. This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose.”

So what is the optimal way to swat a fly?

“It is best not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,” he advised.

Staying a step ahead of one’s opponents isn’t a bad skill for a leader. President Obama is also clearly a hands on, take charge person.

Seriously, you could compile all these clips and excerpts without changing a single word and you would have the script for a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch. You wouldn’t have to exaggerate a thing.

And I’m sure longtime readers remember how I discussed the obsession he and the media have with comparing him to Abraham Lincoln? Well, guess who else also had a run in a with a fly according to Associated Press?

President Obama launched his campaign from Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, used his Bible to be sworn in and quotes Lincoln at the drop of a stovepipe hat.

Now it seems the two share something else: an encounter with a fly.

Daniel Weinberg, the owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, has a photograph of Lincoln with a house fly on him.

Weinberg doesn’t know if the fly survived the encounter or if it suffered the same fate as the one that had the audacity to land on Obama during a television interview Tuesday and found itself on the business end of a presidential hand.

Remember, there is no liberal or pro-Obama bias in the media. None.

In parting though, allow me to share some Obama jokes from Rush Limbaugh:

How does Obama differ from God?

• God does not think he’s Obama.
• Liberals love Obama.
• God asks for only 10% of your money.
• God gives you freedom to live your life as you choose.
• God’s plan to save us is actually written down for people to read.

This is a question I get so often in emails, I decided to just make it a blog post.

Women expect men to be emotion readers, not mind readers. However, since a woman’s mind is so much more ruled by emotion than a man’s mind, reading her emotions gives you the most insight into her mindset and logic as well. Reading her emotions is basically the same as reading her mind.  That is why I always tell guys that the best way to change a woman’s mind is to change her mood and her logic will change accordingly. To change a man’s mind on the other hand, you must attack and change his logic, and his emotions will react accordingly.

The reason men can’t read women’s minds the way women expect them to is twofold:

1. Men treat women like men and try to gauge their mindset by reading the linear logic of the interaction and basing their conclusions on that, because that’s how they correctly analyze interactions with other men.  So even when they are using linear logical analysis flawlessly, it doesn’t help because they are approaching the job with the wrong tools.
2. Even if men did focus on trying to read and analyze the emotional progression of the interaction rather than the logic, they are much worse at this than women are and will miss most of the emotional “tells” anyway. So even when they are approaching it with the right tools, they do a worse job using those tools than a woman would because they aren’t as well equipped for using those tools.

Now since women can read other people’s emotions so well, they expect men to be able to do the same, therefore when a man is unable to do so they get frustrated and feel he’s being insensitive or not trying hard enough.  And since men analyze the logic and expect their opponent to argue linearly from a logical standpoint, they get frustrated when women seem to just not make sense and are unable to just say what they mean and do what they say.

Women are better at reading emotional states than men for two reasons.  First, as the physically weaker sex, they need to compensate for this physical weakness by being better in other areas, like reading and manipulating emotions.  Remember, for most of human history women didn’t have the legal and societal protections they have now.  They were subject to the whims and physical brutalities of the men they encountered.  By being good at assessing the emotions of men, they could tell when emotional states in the men they encountered were escalating and a hostile situation was developing.  And by being good at manipulating emotion they had a weapon they could wield against men that made up for what weapons they lacked physically.

Second, as the ones most expected to nurture children, they had to be better at reading the emotional, nonverbal needs of the children.  The natural division of labor for most of human history made this the woman’s job while the man focused mostly on security to the family in the form of fighting off threats and providing resources.

Women who were not superior to men in emotional intelligence had their genes weeded out of existence because they not only lacked the physical tools to protect themselves from men but also the emotional tools to assess and defuse threats from men.  And in addition, these women of low emotional intelligence would be worse at properly nurturing their children and reading their moods correctly in order to properly attend to their needs.  So the women alive today descended from women of superior emotional intelligence, and as a result also have inherited this superior emotional intelligence.

And thanks to our society’s current cultural marxism where everyone is assumed to share the same strengths and weaknesses, we are less likely than ever to consider that some people are just naturally built for some things and some people naturally aren’t.  Therefore women expect men to read emotions as well as they do, and men expect women to use logic the way they do, and most relationship headaches originate from this disconnect.

Chris Rock touches on this dynamic in the clip below, when you reach about 2:18.

Men, don’t argue–you cannot win. You cannot beat a woman in an argument–it’s impossible. You will not win. Because men, we are handicapped when it comes to arguing, because we have a need to make sense. Women aren’t going to let a little thing like sense screw-up their argument.

As a man, you have two options. (1) Adapt and train yourself in emotional intelligence so that you can communicate better on her level, thereby learning to read her emotional state, recognize when it’s changing and intensifying and nip the argument in the bud before it even starts, or (2) teach your woman to understand that you are not as good an an emotion reader as she is and to communicate better on your level by being more forthright with you about what’s bothering her in a calm fashion. If she insists on escalating into argument anyway, just playfully deflect, dismissively ignore, or just leave. Whatever you do, don’t waste time arguing logically. It just doesn’t work.

In the last installment, I discussed how I met a beautiful half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl at a nightclub back in 1997.  I pull a bold move and call her over while she’s dancing with another guy, and to my surprise it actually works.

She comes over, and I play it cool.  Long story short, we exchange numbers.

I call her later in the week and we arrange to meet.  I pick her up in Brooklyn, where she rents a room.  In her room she has a cheesy calendar of muscular half-naked, waxed black men of dubious heterosexuality.  Kind of like a bunch of Shemar Moores on steroids.  That already makes a terrible first impression.

The plan is to go back to my place and watch some movies and eat some snacks.  As we get in the car, she’s asking me a bunch of questions.  It’s like 20 questions, she has a ton of them, but none are particularly insightful.

“How tall are you?”  “How much do you weigh?” “Are you mixed with anything?” “Are you part Chinese?” “Are you sure?” “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” “Do you like big girls?” [Wait what?] “Are you really Haitian?”

This last question she keeps coming back to.  In the 80s and a good part of the 90s, many people had very little exposure to Haitians.  And the few Haitians they often did have exposure to were a very specific subset, the poor immigrants and refugees settled in the urban centers or the ones they saw on TV when they were showing clips of starving folk.  So I’d often meet people who claimed I didn’t look Haitian, even though there are tons of people in Haiti who look just like me.  They’d expect me to look like one of the refugees or impoverished people they saw on newsreels or like one of the taxi drivers they encountered in Brooklyn.  It’s similar to how people who’ve never met many Ethiopians expects them all to look like extras from the “We Are the World” music video, when in reality many of them are quite cosmopolitan, healthy and good-looking.  Nowadays with a lot more Haitians everywhere from all walks of life, this doesn’t happen to me anymore, but back then it would be an annoying recurring conversation.  But this girl takes it to a whole other level.

“So you’re half-white?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“Chinese grandparent?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean am I sure? I think I would know.”

“Is your dad Puerto Rican?”

“What part of full Haitian don’t you get?”

“No, I mean was he maybe Haitian nationality but racially Puerto Rican?”

“Listen….Mom? Haitian.  Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Haitian.”

“You seem really touchy about your race.  What’s up with that?”

“I’m not touchy about it.  You’re the one who keeps harping on it.  I’m touchy about answering the same question over and over again.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

“So what movie did you bring to watch?”

” ‘Money Talks’ with Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen.”

“Oh.  Really?”  That sounds like a really bad movie, I think to myself.  “Do you own anything else?”

“No, this is my favorite movie.  My favorite! It’s so funny.  Sooooooooo funny.  You’ll love it, I promise.  We have to see this one, pleeeeeeaaaasse?”

I think about it and realize that it might actually turn out to work in my favor if it’s a shitty movie.  If the movie is too good, we’ll both get engrossed in it, I’ll actually want to see it through to the end and I won’t focus on the primary mission at hand, which was sex (let’s keep it real here).  No, the more I think about it, a shitty movie is the best thing that could happen.  We’ll get distrated, stop paying attention, end up talking throughout it, making out, etc, etc.  This’ll be a great night.

We get to my apartment and enter my room.  I pop the tape into the VCR.  We sit on the bed to watch the movie.  We get about 5 minutes into the movie.

“HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAA!!!  Oh my God, did you see that?!”  She hasn’t stopped laughing since the credits started rolling.

“Uh, yeah.  I did.”

“Why aren’t you laughing?”

“It was funny, but come on, it wasn’t that funny.”

“Are you for real?”

“Are you? Come on, let’s just get back to the movie.  Stop worrying about me laughing.”

Now I won’t lie, “Money Talks” is not a terrible movie.  It isn’t particularly great either.  It’s adequate, a little bit above sitcom level comedy. Nothing groundbreaking or memorable, not the kind of movie I’d watch a second time, but the kind of movie I could slightly enjoy if I was watching it with someone else.  Anyone else.

She won’t stop cracking up for the whole movie.  I mean cracking up to the point where she’s convulsing with laughter.  She’s not only riveted to every utterance in the movie, she laughs uproariously at the dumbest parts.  Some of the lines she cracks up at the hardest I’m pretty sure aren’t even jokes.  I’m too annoyed with her antics to enjoy the movie, especially as she keeps asking me nonstop “Isn’t this the funniest?”

I realize there is no sex to be had during the watching of this movie.  It’s just not going to happen.  She’s not coming up for air between uproarious belly laughs and interrogations about why I’m not laughing harder, and on top of that I’m losing my motivation to even make any moves on her.  “Haven’t you seen this already?” I ask, hoping she’ll take a hint.

“Oh…heh…HAHAHA…I’ve seen it so many times….HA!…I lost count!”

“And it still cracks you up this much?”  [I'm normally not this snippy on dates, but this whole ordeal wore down my patience pretty quickly]

“Oh ‘Money Talks’ never gets old!”

Apparently not. I resign myself to the fact that I am not going to make any sex happen while this movie is on.  No way, no how.  But the minute it ends, though, it’s on.

So the ordeal is over.  It’s late, I’m going to have to wait until the movie’s over to make this happen.  As the movie wraps up and she wipes the tears of laughter from her eyes, we make small talk.

Then it happens.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“What’s what?”

“That.“  She points.

“You mean….my computer?”

“Yeah!  Can I see it?”

“Um….okay.  You want to look at my computer….now?  As in right now?”

“Yeah, yeah, let me see it.  What do you use it for?”

“You’ve never used one?”

“No.  Not really, my uncle had one and I used one when I was a kid…”

“Oh okay, let me show you.”  I turn on the computer and log onto the Internet.

She gets serious.  “Uh…what are you doing?”

“I’m getting on the Internet.”

“What’s that!?!”

“It’s…it’s like this big network where you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world in real-time, and your only limitation is how fast you can type.”

Her eyes widen.  “Really?” She in sincere awe at the concept.  Even in 1997 the Internet was still a pretty well-known concept so it boggles my mind someone could be totally ignorant of it, but I figure if it’s that impressive to her maybe it could help my cause.  I decide to really impress her by showing her a chatroom.

“Look at this: you can even go into something called a chatroom where a bunch of people talk to each other at once, similar to the old party lines they used to have back in the day.”  I sit her in my desk chair and stand over her shoulder behind her as I log into one.

As the words and messages in the chatroom fill the screen she starts to get visibly nervous.  “What are you doing!!!!!!??!?!” she shrieks.

“What?  What?!”

“Can they see me?!“  She launches herself from the desk chair into my bed and hides behind a comforter while looking at the computer from a distance, anxiously.

I totally lose it at this point. “Are you fucking kidding me?!  You’re joking right?”

“Are you sure they can’t see me?”

To make things worse, my roommate Grip, who hears the commotion, comes upstairs and into my room, just in time to see her cowering in bed behind a comforter, staring nervously at the computer screen.

“What happened?” he asks.

She answers “He turned on that thing and opened up a room.”

He turns to me with a look on his face of part disgust, part disbelief, part amusement and part “I am never going to let you hear the end of this one, motherfucker.”  Out of embarrassment, I make a last ditch effort to show that my date really isn’t as dumb as  she seems (even though she totally is) and I say “She’s just playing.  Isn’t that right? Always joking.”  I take her and and gently attempt to lead her back to to the computer.

She lets out a scream like “AIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!  No!” and starts pulling back, like a tug of war, with me trying to pull her to the computer and her trying to pull away, with Grip just surveying it all, not knowing whether to laugh at me now or mercifully wait until later.

And it was at this moment I make an astounding personal breakthrough, one that every man must learn at some point but many never do: sometimes, no matter how hot she is, sometimes the chance of getting sex just isn’t worth it.  Grip leaves my room, thinking of the thousand and one ways he’ll give me grief over this for the coming year.  Meanwhile, I turn off the computer and the two of us settle in on the bed.  She’s got that come hither look, like it’s finally time to make that move.  And I say those magic words.

“Time to go.”  She had a look of disbelief.

She leaves me about 50 messages after that date, each one increasingly angrier and erratic as time keeps passing and I don’t call back.  Sometimes I still wonder where she is.  She was truly one of a kind.