Memo to Steve: Just Shut Up.

A brief pause from dating paradigm updates to inform all and sundry that it's time for another eco-rant. Us coyotes are feeling out of sorts and heavily slimed, this morning.

I have just heard the PM's flat voice invoke words from Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow in a say-nothing statement to an environmental conference in Bonn, claiming his government is all hot on protecting this country's wilderness. Huh.

Stegner, before he became a writer's writer, was an American homesteader's kid whose family retreated back to the US after the Dirty Thirties' dust storms blew the farm to hell.

So I gag because Wolf Willow's setting has made it a staple classic of Canadian prairie literature. I love that book. It is a history/memoir written in prose as pure and honest as the south Saskatchewan air, in which Stegner lived the life that became the book. Purity that is, in my view, the exact opposite of the policies of a government that pretends to care about environmental stewardship only so far as this is likely to get it re-elected. Preferably with a majority. I hate that Harper has taken a beautiful thing and publicly mauled it with crude, oily mitts. Protecting Canada's wilderness? Tell the ducks that just drowned in tar sand tailings. Tell the next generation about the way Kyoto was dumped because it interfered with short term 'smart-money' (an oxymoron if ever I've heard one, and I've heard a lotta morons in Ottawa....) economic goals.

Pretending to care about the planet to dodge inconvenient questions about his recently fired foreign affairs minister has to appeal to Harper. He also may have enjoyed the semiotic irony of quoting Stegner, an American, writing about saving the Canadian wilderness. But for all his strategic posturing on the world stage, his government is doing pretty much squat.

Steve. You lying bastard. Stop embarrassing us all. Just shut the fuck up. Seriously.

Photo: Wolf willow, near Calgary, by ocean.flynn on flickr

RNDP 8: Google Love

Our next stop on the quest for an RNDP is Google Love. Reece Dano advocates that Google create a new online matchmaking service leveraging their knowledge of us. While other online dating services suffer from limited pools of available people and self-misrepresentation by the people that are there, everybody uses Google and Google knows "your interests, your true friends, your pet peeves, your neurotic preoccupations" and "probably knows about your ‘private’ sexual proclivities".

4D Analysis: Google would indeed have better data and as much computing power as anyone to throw at this issue. You wouldn't even have to sign up for it as Google already knows if you need help finding a date.

But is Google able to tell what constellation of interests will match with another constellation? For example, a man who loves golf can also love a woman who abhors the game, but a woman who likes camping and mountain climbing should never try to be with a man who doesn't even like sitting in a suburban backyard.

More fundamentally, is a high degree of common interests, opinions and preoccupations a good indication that two people should be together? Or that they will want to stay together?

In my next instalment of the RNDP series, we'll see that there is a growing body of scientific research, and we're talking real science with control groups and test tubes, suggesting we should be looking in a different direction entirely.

Taxi Driver Story II - The Soothsayer

Last Monday, after an amusing evening romp with a mere mortal, I was once again heading home in a taxi.

Unlike my other taxi driver, this fellow allowed me time to settle my dainty derrière into his crackly plastic covered back seat before driving off erratically.

He did not speak, but I was aware that he was staring at me fixedly in his rear-view mirror. “Oh, here we go again,” I thought, sighing lightly in an attempt to conjure up serenity.

Suddenly, he began speaking to me in a loud and passionate voice.

He explained that within a few seconds of seeing someone's face, he knows things about them. It is a gift. He does not see the future; he just sees things as they are.

And since, as you well know, it is a long drive to my home in the woods, I was his captive listener.

If I tried to thank him for what I perceived to be compliments, or to comment that he was correct about certain points, or to insist that certain things that he was relating to me were impossible, he would erupt and spurt, "You cannot argue these things with me. That is reality what I tell you!”

That is Reality

You are a kind person. That is Reality

You are a good person. That is Reality

You see life in black and white and know what you want. That is Reality

You have worked very hard all your life, and now you deserve to have fun. That is Reality

You have been a very good mother, and now it is your time to relax. That is Reality

You have taught your children to be the same kind of person that you are - kind, intelligent, and caring. That is Reality

You are involved with a man who loves to give you kisses everywhere. That is Reality

You are involved with a good and kind man. You will have a very happy, kind relationship. It will last forever. That is Reality

You will be married in 1-5 years. That is Reality

You will have 2 children - a boy and a girl. That is Reality

When you live with this man, every night he will want to be with you. He will cover you with kisses, and he will melt into you. That is Reality

To his suggestive comment about a man melting into me, I reacted, "Hey!"

"What?! That is natural what I tell you! It is on TV, it is on the Internet, it is in the movies - it is everywhere," he responded excitedly while waving both hands up I the air."

Has anyone else caught a ride with this soothsayer?

RNDP 7: Beyond the salmon skin bikini

Time out! Enough about revolutionary new paradigms that require actual thinking - or, worse yet, actual change - by would-be daters. Too much work and not enough profit potential for ESI Inc.

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...

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