Last night EINY’s three substitute bloggers braved the Brooklyn night to meet up. The topics under discussion were varied and ranged from employment to enjoyment, from striking to striking out (or not) with women, from Granada to south New Jersey. For a while though, the conversation focussed on EINY himself and how he manages to write so many posts on his blog, all the time. He’s certainly got a lot of opinions but it is a mystery to us where he gets them from, and he meets a lot of interesting people, but it’s another mystery how he meets them.

Later in the night, after some hearty Mexican fare and several ginger ales, we discovered a possible answer to this puzzle. We were chatting away about our families when a woman at the bar, who had been eavesdropping, decided to chip in with her own, not entirely relevant, tuppence worth. In the next ten minutes we learned that she was of Greek extraction; was from Texas; had a mother who suffered from a mental disorder; had a father with a martyr complex; hated Houston, TX; thought our generation were too willing to give when the going got tough; had been in New York for six months, but was leaving because she hated it (NY, apparently, is like a Greek god: you didn’t have to like it but you had to respect it); thought the MTA strikers were evil, evil-doers; and that when she googled herself she came up with only one entry.

Perhaps, we idly wondered, she was coming on to us (we are handsome fellows after all). That illusion was shattered when her date arrived and the deluge ended (or, one presumes, diverted to a new channel). I’m from Yorkshire, so I find this sort of indiscriminate chatting that Americans seem to enjoy both unsavoury and unsettling, but Yorkshire folk are not especially adverse to sharing their opinions with people, and perhaps that explains EINY’s prolific blogging: he’s a Yorkshireman gone native.

from l to r: bald/glasses, bald/no glasses, hair/glasses

Jared Diamond is a clever man. This much is obvious. I recently came across an article written by him a while ago entitled ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race‘. When Diamond says things like that, he’s not being sarcastic, or cute, or about to launch into some trite childhood reminiscence. No, he’s being totally serious.

So what’s the mistake, you’re wondering. Farming, that’s what. The first farmers (and many subsistence farmers today) had a substantially worse standard of living than their hunting and gathering contemporaries (including poorer health, shorter life spans and less leisure time). The first European settlers crossing the great plains in America often remarked how lazy the native populations were, but the locals were well fed and enjoyed doing whatever it was they did between hunts.

The one big direct advantage of farming had over hunting and gathering was that it allowed higher population densities. Eventually that led to surpluses, division of labour, technology and civilization, but it also allowed for social hierarchies, which resulted in one group of people dominating another. Farming may have led to the invention of the washing machine, but only after enabling the subjugation of women.

There are plenty of people who want to go back to this kind of ‘natural’ living, or at least the kind of social structures it produced, but it’s too late of course, Pandora’s Box has been opened. Before farming there was no political power to be grabbed and there was no ‘progress’ to be made. Nowadays it’s a utopian dream to imagine that if one power structure is removed it won’t be replaced by another one, as if everyone would just unilaterally agree to mind their own business. So what we’re left with, since some bright spark decided to scatter a bunch of seeds ten thousand years ago, is arguing over the least worst way to organise our lives, or have them organised for us.

To learn all you need to know about science you just need to watch advertisements. The best science brains of today are all trying to find the most effective protein for hair strengthening, and, fortunately for us, the Pantene Foundation provide the public service of keeping us up to date with this research. For truly radical science, though, you need look no further than S.C. Johnson’s Glade Scented Oil Candles.

At first glance, the advert (or commercial, if you prefer) on TV gives us nothing new: you light the candle, the wax melts into an oil and your house stinks like a tart’s bra for three weeks (or, more specifically, ‘Dewberry Dream’). There’s a lot of guff about a specially designed cotton and metal wick, and a hot plate, but the truly revolutionary new technology is saved for the end (they know how to build tension, these advermetising fellows) when the voice-over giddily tells us that ‘when the oil is gone, the candle goes out’.

They’ve done it! Who would have thought that it would have been a commercial smell company, rather than NASA or someone, who came up with the world’s first NOT-EVERLASTING CANDLE. If only they’d had this technology in the Middle Ages, they could have avoided all that expense on snuffers, and avoided all that misery they’re so famous for (although those dreadful snuffing unions would have no doubt tried to get them banned).

Now that S.C. Johnson have released this technology into the public domain, there is no stopping it. I guarantee that by this time next year Subaru will be bringing out a car that when the gas is used up, the car STOPS RUNNING! I, for one, cannot wait.

(Incidentally, I noticed on the Glade website that they have trademarked the phrase ‘Scenterior Design’.)

In reference to my blog entry yesterday, this editorial in the New York Times explains succinctly why the people currently in charge of this country are doing their best to make life harder for the average American.

This blog by a friend of mine is strange, sinister and extremely special. Look at it now!