The icons of economic recession… tattoos?

I know there are still, and probably always will be, fuddy-duddies out there.  But I couldn’t help wondering whether the Washington Post was joking when they recently posted the op-ed Ink-Stained Wretchedness by Colonel Sanders-impersonator¹ Richard Cohen.  This is just a quick ‘WTF?’ entry… thanks to Aaron for pointing it out.

…the tattoos of today are not minor affairs or miniatures placed on the body where only an intimate or an internist would see them. Today’s are gargantuan, inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly. They bear little relationship to the skin that they’re on. They don’t represent an indelible experience or membership in some sort of group but an assertion that today’s whim will be tomorrow’s joy. After all, a tattoo cannot be easily removed. It takes a laser — and some cash.

Are we supposed to believe that Colonel—ahem—Mister Cohen gets to know the people wearing the art well enough to determine what their relationship to it truly is?  Is he an adept translator of Hebrew, Chinese, or Sanskrit (what Cohen calls “Hindi”) characters?  I suspect not.  And I sorely doubt that he gets to see the “minor affair” tattoos on the bodies of many “intimates” in person these days—so how does he know whether they are still popular? And let’s get this out of the way: watching porn does not provide our intrepid cultural anthropologist with a representative cross-section of today’s youth.

Is the Washington Post required to keep publishing this guy’s column?  Do newspapers have some kind of secret tenure system I’m not privy to?  For disclosure’s sake, I do have three tattoos, all of which are visual (at least in warm climate) to the general public.  And this fuddy-duddy did just call me a loser:

The tattoo is the battle flag of today in its war with tomorrow. It is carried by sure losers.

But, in his very next sentence, he continues:

About 40 percent of younger Americans (26 to 40) have tattoos.

What a grim vision of the future Mr. Cohen has.  I hope he can take some comfort in the likelihood that he probably won’t be around to witness much more of it.

¹ I think Brooks Wackerman does a better job.

Hiatus? No, just tenacity. I mean, Tennessee.

I haven’t given you much lately, Survival Machine readers.  I’m up to my monkey-like ears in work at my job, preparing for my biannual desert sojourn, and keeping my finger on the pulse of this mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world.  Currently, I’m in Jackson, Tennessee, setting up a new physicians office.  I only now managed to pry it off the pulse long enough to type this post.  I just got done watching Episode 1 of The History Channel’s new series Evolve, which prompted a fun live blogging-and-commenting session on PZ Myers’ blog, Pharyngula.  I thought the show was pretty decent for something on The History Channel; my gripes were shared by PZ and several of the commenters on his post.  For an episode purportedly focusing on the evolution of eyes, far too much time was devoted to vertebrate eyes (dinosaurs, cats, humans).  There was a rather cool (I’m told) portion on jellyfish eyes toward the beginning that I missed.  Still, the crux of the whole IDiot argument about ‘irreducible complexity’ is that eyes didn’t just pop into place one day—this episode should have spent far more time on intermediary forms of the eye, using examples like hagfish or teleostei.  They did what you’d expect them to do for ratings, which is to show and discuss eyes in things people find cool (dinosaurs, big cats) or cute (tarsiers, ourselves).  Oh well.  I did learn that tarsiers have eyeballs bigger than their brains… though I’ve encountered more than a few humans who might fall into that category as well.  Anyway the cookie crumbles, this show airing is a positive thing.  And I bet if Curt Deckert were dead, he’d be turning over in his grave right now.

As for my blogging… okay, okay, I’ll try to keep up.  Maybe I’ll even post again later this week.  For now, no good post is complete without a picture of something.  What’ll it be this time?  I’m going with my gut (aside: next week’s episode of Evolve is about guts!), and posting a tarsier.  They’re just too stinkin’ cute for their own good!

P. S. — Thanks to C for watching Singe while I’m in Tennessee.  Be careful not to laser-cut his highly evolved eyes while playing “stalk the uncatchable spot.”  Did you know they glow in the dark due to his Tapetum lucidum?

Request for site logo.

Hey, I know some of my readers are not too shabby when it comes to graphic design.  Is anyone out there is willing to design me a banner logo to display at the top of Survival Machine?  I’d like it to suit the violet colors of my WordPress theme, and possibly incorporate some science elements (like a DNA double-helix, a galaxy, an organic molecule, an atom, an erlenmeyer flask, et cetera).  Let me know if you’d like to take a crack at it.

I’m just getting tired of the plain text title.

The Great Catholic Cracker Crack-Up

Please read PZ Myers’ entry on what I like to call The Great Catholic Cracker Crack-Up at Pharyngula.  It’s comedy gold.

Atheist Soldier Sues The DoD, and The Evolution of Compassion

This April, The New York Times reported the case of U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, a soldier who started a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and subsequently had to be removed from Iraq due to numerous threats from his fellow soldiers.  Now, I’m not exactly surprised by this.  I’d expect the military to be drooling with evangelicals, of course.  And I could probably cynically overlook verbal harassment of an atheist in the armed forces, just because I expect that sort of bullshit from indoctrinated meat-heads.  But physical threats?  That really is beyond the pale.  Now, Spc. Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his freedom from religious persecution as protected by the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution.  You go boy.

Seriously, this is not the sort of reputation the military should want, given that non-religious Americans are the largest (non) religious group after Christians.  They have enough trouble recruiting as it is!  This is just another example, sadly, of Christians thinking the world revolves around them.  It’s bad enough that brave men and women who are devoted to the service of their country were blithely thrown into harm’s way in Iraq by a callous and evangelically-motivated administration… but non-religious soldiers’ lives are threatened by their loving, Christian comrades-in-arms as well?  What a disgusting blemish on our armed forces.  I hope Spc. Hall wins his lawsuit and the DoD cracks down on prosyletizing by officers.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, have I?  Still, life marches on.  I got some paperwork done that’s been taking forever (to put it mildly).  I also was inspired by the news I wrote about in my previous post, and decided to read Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Compassion.  This book tells the story of his experiment: a computer tournament in the early 1980s that pitted programs submitted by game theorists from various academic disciplines (as well as an 11 year old computer prodigy) in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game (a classic thought experiment).  It’s quite interesting, and you can expect me to write a more in-depth review when I’ve finished it.

P.S. - I would love to get some comments on my posts.  If you’re reading this, any feedback will be appreciated.  It’s hard to talk myself into posting when it feels like no one is reading! I’d really like to get this blog fired up.