Universal Donor

UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
Universal Donor We can ill afford another Klendathu feed it up! \| UD email You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS SITE STATS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo and here's something weird: my place in Humor 3-space	Tuesday, May 29, 2007 RULES EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY I SAID GODDAMN! ON YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU ANSWER YOUR PHONE I don't care if you "don't like the phone," or you "don't feel like getting into a long conversation," or you're "trapped under a fallen pillar" -- you answer the fucking phone on your birthday. It's one day out of the fuckitysuck year. You people are selfish. Why? Because I want to complete this transaction. I went to all this trouble to REMEMBER your SPECIAL DAY. And now I have to sing "Happy Birthday" onto your voicemail? What do I get out of that? I want to hear you squeal with joy at how AWESOME I am. The value of your birthday really lies in how SPECIAL it makes ME look in comparison to the rest of your worthless friends. You're not gonna call me back today, I know that. It would be way lame and desperate to call me back for birthday wishes, like "oh, did you call me earlier, tee hee?" No, you're too busy eating cake or having dirty birthday fucksex in some juke-joint bathroom in the Tenderloin. So I gotta call AGAIN. When I could be having a fucking donut. DON'T FUCK WITH MY DONUT HOUR, PEOPLE. I don't have much left to hold on to, so I will fight like a cornered mongoose to defend it. DON'T BE ALL SEXY AROUND ME IN THE SPRINGTIME Oh, you say you can't help it, huh? "I'm just as god made me," you insist. I call bullshit, you hot sexy thing you. Get off my subway! It would be one thing if you were just wearing normal-person clothes like a normal person, but you are wearing some filmy and spare construction of breatheable, meshy hoo-hah. Or you're blinding me with periodic reflections off your glistening clavicle. Or you are absent-mindedly probing your navel while I'm trying to read, over here. Or you have a tattoo somewhere compellingly dewy that begs to be examined. Or you are female, between the ages of 20 and 40, and not completely deformed. NOW I REMEMBER WHY I HATE HAVING A SEX DRIVE OH MY GOD. I have a friend who I am pretty sure feels this way all the time, and I have to say: Dude, I had no idea. I am so, so sorry. This explains so much. Your life must be... well, I've only been feeling this way for like three WEEKS and chemical castration is looking like an attractive option. SELECT YOUR NEW RINGTONE IN THE PRIVACY OF NOT MY FACE Certain activities are entertaining to those enmeshed in them, but unfailingly irritating to those on the periphery. For example: finger-drumming fancy polyrhythms onto a tabletop along with your iPod is not fun for anyone but you, the drummer. Your little ping that says you've got a new instant message -- over and over again? -- well, HOORAY FOR YOU, YOU HAVE FRIENDS JUST AS LAZY AS YOU, but no one wants to hear it. (Ditto for the blockrocking two-foot penis-compensating bass speakers in your car. Boring AND a cliché.) Furthermore, certain sounds are designed to get your attention: sirens, alarms, bells, whistles, and so on through the rattle, buzzer, and klaxon families. Cellphone ringtones, the heirs of this noble ancestry, usually combine the restraint of the paparazzi the the subtlety of a crowbar pimpslap. You know what the most annoying thing in the world is? When you try out all your cellphone ringtones in public. I know the variety is a source of mind-hobbling bliss for you, the selector, and I know you are OH SO EAGER to give EVERY POSSIBLE TONE a fair shake before you pick the winner, but everyone and I mean EVERYONE around you -- including that nice old Chinese lady and those Mormon missionaries -- wants to a) scramble your eyeballs with a screwdriver, b) pack feces into your bloody eyesockets, and then c) stomp on your neck real hard. Now, would you like that? DO THAT AT HOME, DOUCHEBAGGUS SUPERMAXIMUS. posted by Universal Donor 9:28 PM Thursday, May 24, 2007 Dear Man talking on Cell Phone in Bathroom Stall, You are in a stall in the men's room, talking on your cell phone. While apparently pooping. What gives? — UD in the Men's Room Dear Men's Room UD, Don't be afraid -- I'm not dangerously clueless. I just got an important, career-defining call that filled me with pants-shitting fear, so I took my bizniz to the crapper for extraspecial precaution. Sometimes I call people who intimidate me from in here because I imagine I am defecating on their power over me. What's that Mr Big? SPLOOSH is what! Ya heard? BOO-YAA! — Mr. Busypoops Dear Cute Girl with Platter of Half-Sandwiches on the Street, Thank you for that half egg-salad wrap. — UD on the Street Dear Street UD, No problem! Thank YOU for taking it off my hands! I was wondering: "what am I going to do with these sandwiches?!" because I just came from this meeting? And there were like all these sandwiches which were totally gonna be thrown out, and I was like "THAT'S wasteful!" so I asked them if I could take them, and my coworkers were like rolling their eyes like "there she goes again miss recycle" ha ha because I'm always yelling at people like "you! gotta! recycle!" ha ha and so they were like "don't you want to wrap them up?" and I was like "no I'll just take that platter, it's disposable anyway," like what a waste, but anyway they were like "are you gonna eat them? ha ha" and I was like no but maybe some homeless person will, and they were like "homeless people don't want your garbage sandwiches they want money for booze and drugs" and I was like "well I'll take them anyway you poverty bigots" and now here YOU are, not homeless -- unless... you're not homeless, right? Ha ha so anyway I KNEW someone would — Dear God, Would you PLEASE make this girl shut up? — UD with his Mouth Full Dear Ungrateful Dumbshit, No YOU shut up. — God posted by Universal Donor 2:24 PM Thursday, May 10, 2007 Some of the discussion around my previous post about pornography recapitulated a commonly held belief about the effect of media on society, and one that I find -- as I stated in the post -- to be emotionally satisfying but intellectually adolescent (see for a perfect e.g. this paper by somebody I really hope was in high school). Now for some mythbusting. MYTH #1: People imitate behaviors observed in fictional media. Nope. Not important ones, they don't. Let's repeat this: We do not not learn how to behave by emulating FICTION. Q. Really, UD? That's odd. So how do we really learn to behave, if not from fictional media? A. We learn behavior by watching real people, IN PERSON, whose behavior we emulate -- consciously or not -- out of respect, admiration, envy, peer pressure, or whatever. This mechanism, Social Proof(1), is programmed into us by millions of years of evolution. We learn from family, schoolmates, community members, teammates, coworkers, etc. Barring illness or psychopathology, people learn to ______ by watching other people around them ______. Q. Why is this myth so convincing, or pervasive? A. Several reasons: Because we see serious, bad behaviors in life that mirror things we've seen in media -- and we get the causation exactly backwards. Media will reflect life back at us, not the other way around. Because sometimes we try out in real life the behaviors we observe in media. But it's still the reactions of our peers (social proof) that determine whether the behavior is accepted. In fact, we usually only test behaviors that we think have a pretty good chance will be accepted, because rejection is wicked painful. For example! We might see a cool character smoking in a movie, and we might think we started smoking as a direct result -- but smoking still falls within the accepted behavior of some subset of our community. Because sometimes, for shock value, we emulate behaviors we know will be rejected. But those behaviors are still instinctively calibrated to the values of the community in which we exhibit them. The SUPERFICIAL aspects of the behavior (getting face piercings, wearing stockings on your arms) are imitated, but the underlying rebellion is not transmitted through media. Nor will rebellion die without a media-approved mode of expression. Because parents worry about kids, and it's easier to place blame for undesirable behavior on what seems like a FIXABLE cause. But no matter what you do to the media, children will continue to smoke, drink, fuck, and use drugs, just as they always have. Some kids will die as a result of these behaviors. Acknowledging the real causes of these behaviors (biology; assertion of independence; boredom; social proof from family, peers, and community) is a painful admission of powerlessness. Because those EXTREMELY RARE occasions when people have obviously copied something awful depicted in media provide extra-vivid, though statistically insignificant, evidence. But violent anti-social behavior is usually caused by mental illness, extreme stress, or trauma. Not media. Because our tendency toward Excessive Self-Regard(2) makes us assume other people are stupider, weaker, or more suggestible than we are. The most fascinating thing about this whole concept is that nobody, and I mean NOBODY, seems to think that they personally are susceptible to the effects they are so worried about. It is always some "other," some fantastical hypersuggestible victim, who is the subject of concern. Think about this, because it is straight-up retarded, people. If you still don't get it, try this illustrative little test: Do you feel that you are you more likely to... � ...backstab your friends after watching Melrose Place? � ...discriminate against (or torture) Arabs after watching 24? � ...commit suicide after watching Heathers? � ...murder someone after seeing Man Bites Dog? � ...try heroin after watching Trainspotting? If not, why do you think other people will be? MYTH #2: People become "desensitized" to real-life violence after exposure to violence in media. Wrong. Our reaction to images of violence is almost entirely dependent on whether we believe the violence is or REAL or FICTIONAL. We can watch a hundred grisly murders in a movie without even flinching, because our brains are not easily fooled into thinking fictional images are real. But images of non-consensual or criminal acts of violence often produce strong visceral reactions of disgust, anger, and fear. Violence in REAL life is so upsetting that we instinctively act to stop it. What prevents people from intervening (other than basic fear of personal harm) is almost always behavior learned through more Social Proof (see Kitty Genovese, or the way kids learn not to intervene in schoolyard fights by watching the slightly older kids scream "fight! fight!"). Q. Why is this myth so convincing, or pervasive? A. Two reasons: Because people DO become desensitized, after exposure to violence in media, to violence in media. That is, depictions of extreme acts don't change what is acceptable in real life; they change what is acceptable in future depictions. Because people DO become desensitized to real-life violence after exposure to real-life violence. This happens to people in situations of imprisonment, wartime, extreme poverty, pervasive abuse, etc. Another example: real crime scene investigators get desensitized to violence through exposure to it. But no amount of watching C.S.I. will prepare you for the shock of seeing a real dead body. MYTH #3: Pornography teaches men to disrespect, abuse, or objectify women. False. The social proof that causes such behavior is not cued by sight and sound alone. It's a feedback loop that occurs in real space and time. The brain is not so easily fooled into mistaking fictional actions -- no matter how realistic -- for real social proof. People learn to disrespect, abuse, or objectify women from their families, communities, teammates, co-workers, or frat brothers. MYTH #4: Images in media create unrealistic standards that are harmful. True! Standards of beauty, wealth, happiness, and success in media show us unattainable ideals and create powerful feelings of inadequacy and failure. That for sure is true. Seeing skinny women in media doesn't change women's behavior, or else every woman in America would be skinny and wear the same clothes as celebrities (in general, women dress like, and have body fat indices similar to, the women around them). Media standards just make us feel terrible about ourselves most of the time. Which, I'll grant, is still a pretty bad effect. MYTH #5: Images of sex and violence in the media are responsible for the decline of morality in this country. Wrong. The much lamented "decline of morality" is caused by the fact the loudest contemporary proponents of "morality" are filled with obvious misery, judgment, anger, and fear. Who wants to emulate behavior that leads to that? "Morality" has become synonymous with prudery through association with these people. This has not always been the case. I wish those people would shut up so that people could learn that ACTUAL morality leads to love, acceptance, and happiness. ---------------------- (1) Read that Charlie Munger article I keep talking about. (2) I said READ IT, I said! posted by Universal Donor 2:09 PM Tuesday, May 01, 2007 Okay, I know I don't usually delve into serious social topics without injecting laffs, but I wrote the following as a response to a blog post that I read which, like so many discussions of pornography, I felt missed the point. Read that blog post here, and check the comments, then read my response below after you clean the barf off your shirtfront. (NB: all the theories below are the result of extensive anthropological research; I, personally, do not have any sexual urges whatever. I live suspended in a giant harness made of neoprene, fed an intravenous mixture of nutrients and morphine.) ------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Girls are just as horny as guys. The biological imperative is the same for both genders: MAKE MORE COPIES OF YOURSELF. That imperative is expressed differently due to the nature of sexual reproduction: MALE: impregnate as many females as possible. FEMALE: get pregnant NOW. (Homosexuality inconveniently complicates this reductive formula, so I will just ignore it for the time being, though I invite comments that address the gay side of this issue.) As I think both sexes can attest, these urges are almost always there to some degree. BUT -- YAY! We have learned to transcend our basest urges in daily life. Men can control their desire to fuck (or even ogle) every pretty girl who passes, just as women can control their desire to get impregnated. 2. "Porn teaches men to feel ____ about women" arguments sound to me like "violent video games cause violence" (i.e. emotionally satisfying but intellectually lazy) HERE'S WHAT SOME WOMEN DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT PORN AND YET MEN NEVER SEEM TO BE ABLE TO ARTICULATE: What a man likes in porn does not necessarily have any relation to what he likes in real life. Pornography is not ENJOYED by most men, but merely USED to achieve orgasm.* Ask guys if they keep watching or reading porn after they come -- only the rare connoisseur will say he does anything besides turn away in vague disgust. Therefore, porn is often chosen for gaudy visual stimulation, taboo violation, extremity, or whatever. Guys over thirty who look at, for example, "teen" porn rarely want to fuck actual teenagers, and almost never want to be in a relationship with one. (That is gross. Have you seen teenagers? They're so young.) Since, one hopes, a man considers his sexual partners to be more than just ejaculation facilitators, one can see that what is valued in a partner is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what is valued in porn. In my experience, women feel threatened by pornography when they incorrectly think that: a) men desire in a real-life partner the physical characteristics they prefer in porn, b) men desire in a real-life partner the behaviors exhibited in porn, c) men want to treat a real-life partner with the disrespect that is a hallmark of a lot of porn. What can I say? THESE THINGS ARE USUALLY NOT TRUE. If you really think your boyfriend/lover/spouse would rather date a porn star, or fuck a teenager, or abuse you, or poop on your chest, or WHATEVER, maybe it's time to MOVE ON. But if your relationship seems solid in every respect, maybe try to remember what you've read here and don't fret so much about the porn. --------------------------------------------- * This is important because guys who are horny become almost completely useless, and tend to make TERRIBLE decisions. This is true for women too, but men build up to uselessness in approximately three days after the last ejaculation, whereas woman vary greatly in their level of uselessness and the time it takes to get there. posted by Universal Donor 10:49 AM HOME	OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded"