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Sunday
RNDP 7: Beyond the salmon skin bikini
Instead, let's go the Cosmopolitan Magazine route. Heck, they have at least a half-dozen revolutionary new dating paradigms per issue, if the covers at the checkout line are any guide. Most seem to involve trying new (allegedly) kinky moves, bathing suits or lingerie - so no real thought on the part of the user. Easy!
One possibility for at least half of the population hit all the local throw-way news tabloids just this past week. (Oops. The Petfinder ain't a throwaway? Who knew?) I speak, of course, of the salmon skin bikini. Why this is suddenly "new" is anybody's guess. Or more likely the work of a really frenetic and dumb-ass-lucky publicist - because as Time Magazine notes here, they first showed up in 2003. So five years ago, all you loser lifestyle editors who bought into the latest hype campaign! But hey, with any luck, the reference in the heading on this post'll get us mega hits from unsuspecting Googlers looking for the (heh...) skinny.
Anyway,, I'm thinking women who want to wear scales to find true love - you know who you are - are neglecting the traditional values. I mean, of course, not fish but reptiles. Ummm, not the ones you've dated.
Imagine yourself in one of our comfy Mumumelons®, complemented by an alluring, accompanying line of fitted snakeskin lingerie/swimming separates! To whit: CoBra® tops and Aspanty® bottoms, currently under development in Aggie's fertile fabric lab. I understand the snag so far is tanning the snake skins properly - the scaly buggers keep rubbing each other's backs with SPF 90, every time we try to hit 'em with the sunlamps...
Thursday
RNDP 6: MySpace
Two years ago, a blogger named Nurble in a posting titled myspace told us about what he'd initially thought was a new dating paradigm, but turned out to be shameless self-promotion:
...some girl started chatting me up at a bar last night. She didn't actually seem interested, she seemed to just be killing time, so we talked for two or three minutes, then she asked if I was on myspace.
"Interesting," I thought, "is this the new paradigm for the 21st century? No more phone numbers and Swingers-esque waiting x number of days to call and sweating it out?" Maybe we can start giving out our names and email addresses and account names instead of just shooting in the dark.
We can admit what everybody already knows, that the first thing most of us with computers do when we get enough information is run straight to google and try and dig up some juicy info. How fascinating it would be if the new thing was "give me your name, assume I'm going to go home and read everything you've got scattered around the internet, and after that, we'll see."
Interesting indeed. Unfortunately this girl was not on the avant-garde of a new dating paradigm, she was just some actress who had 1100 friends and a poorly designed page full of headshots and pictures of her with celebrities. Booooo.
Unfortunately, this posting in which Nurble revealed himself to be that rare combination of fieldworker and theoretician did not live up to its promise. Nurble rarely commented on dating following this post. We know he was concerned about finding a date for the 2006 Emmy Awards and he found one. In July, 2006 he posted a bit of dialogue that may have been a transcription of an actual exchange from a date:
INTERIOR, NIGHT Guy: Are you going to take your contacts out? Girl: I was thinking about it, why? Guy: Well, if you're going to, then I probably shouldn't. Otherwise we might find ourselves in the worlds sexiest game of Marco Polo. ...and, scene.
In September of 2006 he revealed that he sent a copy of What's Your Number by Ian Pooley to a woman and it "didn't really work out..." but this could have been at anytime before this. We know that he later had a beautiful girlfriend lying in his bed while he was blogging about songs. And now he is moving to New York with his beautiful girlfriend. The same beautiful girlfriend? Perhaps.
4d Analysis: This fieldwork gives us more questions:
- Was Nurble too hasty to dismiss this as a new dating paradigm?
- What if her Myspace pages had revealed them to be more compatible? Say if he also had 1100 friends (instead of 12) and some of them were famous? Or if her page revealed her to be a shy but thoughtful artist?
- Or was his sense that she was just killing time all that he needed in order to know that she had no future in his life?
Bonus: Here is a Nurble Posting that Aggie will like.
On Questions:
"...questions are more important than answers in shaping the future of science."
- Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, Science Magazine
To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered
- John Ruskin
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers
- Voltaire
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein
Tuesday
Are we Cool Over 40?
Our friend XUP is all over the blogosphere these days and is even back to blogging. Last week, she posted two excellent pieces, one on how to be cool over the age of 40 and another on how to live to be much older than 40.
Today I am taking a break from the smoking and drinking XUP recommended, from my quest for an RNDP and from wooing Ms Twain, to bring you:
A handy table that shows how the ESIs stack up on XUP's coolness indicators
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- Aggie has a laptop and a cell phone, but doesn't know how to use either very well.
- The IO has a Blackberry.
- CS says she's in a band. Her bandmates are not so sure.
- 4D actually says "in my day" on a regular basis.
- Coyote: "***BLAMMO*** I'm on my butt with my tail smokin' and my ears ringing. You figure out which side I take".
- Unless you think 4D's limp-hop-stride is cool.
Sunday
AndrewZRX: the Placenta, the Motorcycle and the Baby
I need to do something about the placenta in the freezer. My wife refuses to put anything into the same compartment. She says she won’t eat anything that’s been near it. My plan was to dry it and crush it up, then bring the powder to my father’s cottage in Wakefield, Quebec. I was going to plant a maple tree with it. But apparently it takes about 12 hours to dry a placenta properly, and it smells up the house. She’s having none of it. So. Seems I have to get rid of it.
Speaking of motorcycles: I like the roundabouts here, but I sure miss driving on the right. It’s the biker wave. You can’t really do it properly over here. The controls are on the same side, but because the roads are backwards, the wave looks like you’re waving to someone on the sidewalk (pavement) to your left, rather than someone across the road on your right. (Most of us have learned that the wave must be executed with the left hand, to keep the right on the throttle and covering the brake). So if you want to wave, instead of just coolly letting your left hand off and giving a wee flick, you have to raise your hand high enough so the other guy will see it. It’s too awkward. I won’t do it.
Bruce is 11 and ½ weeks old now. (Why can’t he just be three months old? When do we stop counting in weeks?) He turned out to be more than I thought. He’s just so beautiful. I get to see him change every day, developing, figuring stuff out. He looks at me this certain way sometimes, this look that says: I am alive, and I find it quite good indeed. But the thing is, he doesn’t look like a baby. He looks like his own witty wee soul. He’s already here. He’s sentient, self-aware, and already has a sense of humour. And I’m his Dad.
At first I tried the head nod. But what if you were just bouncing over a bump? It wasn’t clear. Then an Irish biker friend told me that Europeans wave with their feet. Good idea – that right foot isn’t usually doing anything special anyways. So I tried it. I felt stupid. Like, really stupid. So I tried something else – using my right knee, foot on the peg, but opening my leg a little. It didn’t feel stupid. It felt wrong, like I was sending a signal. And I never got a response. I wonder what would have happened if I tried that in Germany. In black leather.
Back on the Bike That Blew, I settled for the head tilt, a popular option in Scotland. A nod with a rightward spazz of the neck. But it was so unsatisfying.
The new Kawasaki Versys I’m riding has a high slam trigger switch, like pulling the turn signal stalk on a car. This is how I now acknowledge my motorcycling brethren. No contortions of the head, no left arm raised in the air like some fucked up salute, and no encouraging the Germans. Just a flick of the high beams.
The wave is an important part of the biking experience. It means more than just hey, look at us, we’re bikers! It means we recognize the awesomeness of it. It means we respect each other for keeping the rubber side down. It means we’ll help each other when we’re in trouble.
I can’t wait to get Bruce on the back of the bike. My wife says, “No. No way in hell”. But I know just what she means. She means: “I know there’s no way of stopping you. Just promise me you’ll be safe”. And I will.
All the firsts are all the time. Just like that, he’s now telling us stories. I don’t understand every nuance, but I think I’m getting his drift. It’s a hell of a thing! He’s going to blow my mind when he first speaks.
The placenta? I can’t just throw it out, not after all this. So I’ve been meaning to bury that placenta in the backyard. I just haven’t got around to it. And it’s sure to come up again, in the middle of an argument about something else entirely. I need to head that off. But I just can’t seem to find the shovel.
AndrewZRX lives in Scotland. Everybody has to be somewhere.
Friday
FLASHFLASHFLASH!!!!!
What effect this earth shattering news will have on his revolutionary new dating paradigm research is anybody's guess. Will Dwarf's hope rise, phoenix--like? I dunno. But I bet this'll probably be interestin'...