Friday, August 11, 2006
Stupidity to the left, stupidity to the right...
It's hard to mention stupidity without saying something about eBay sellers, so here goes: In my post of 7-30-06, I mentioned that a Swarovski crystal item I'd gotten from an impressive-seeming seller turned out to be, unbelievably, an imitation; given his 100% feedback rating, I was certain that he'd follow through with his promise of a full refund, including return shipping... but of course it was more complicated than anticipated. The evening after I mailed the package, I sent him a message giving him the exact cost for the return shipping; he got that box the very next day, which is unheard of even though he lives in the closest city... and guess what he did, a mere 12 hours after being sent a message containing a reminder that he owed me for return shipping? You guessed right; he immediately issued a refund MINUS the return shipping... and filed for a refund of his eBay fees, which generated a message to ME asking me to verify that I'd gotten a refund from him. I don't know which would be worse: if he did this hoping that I'd somehow forget about the return shipping over a half day period, or wouldn't find it worth bothering about once I had the rest of the $, or if he was just incapable of keeping track of what he'd agreed to from one day to the next, even in as important a case as when he was at risk of being reported for FRAUD. I sent him a polite message reminding him of what he'd agreed to pay, and to give him credit he ponied up right away, so this unfortunate incident didn't cost me any $; even better, I got the identical item from a different seller, who verified that the swan logo WAS on it, and it ended up being $9 cheaper, plus she sent a free display thingie for it... all's well that ends well.
The next item has 2-fold stupidity. Ask yourself this; what kind of a moron dedicates YEARS of their life to elaborately deceiving a broad-based online community... and then, what kinds of morons are deceived for YEARS by the clumsy maneuverings of the 1st kind of moron? You can find the answers to these questions here:
http://www.journalfen.net/users/charlottelennox/784.html
The long, long, LONG story "includes or touches upon many scandals and conflicts of the past five or six years in a certain sector of the Harry Potter fandom," but you don't have to know or care about HP to understand what occurred; I recommend at least scanning this story (it'll still take a while), because it shows how EASY it is for even someone who clearly has no life to fool most of the people most of the time, and teaches several valuable lessons:
1) Just how mind-bogglingly FAR a sick person will go to achieve their warped goals; normal people don't grasp this, and this allows the baddies to get away with murder over and over again because folks can't accept that anyone could ever invest so much time and effort in trouble-making.
2) a) That anyone who goes to great lengths to "get" someone, or a group of someones, is guaranteed to be a cockroach; good people just don't have the fanaticism it takes to pursue a protracted campaign against others.
b) When someone attacks an individual or group with personal insults and foul language, it's 99% guaranteed that they're a cockroach and the target person or group is innocent of any crime greater than disagreeing with them or having greater social success than them; it's just barely possible that a good person could become so enraged at actual mistreatment that they'd act this way, but don't count on it, especially if it goes on for post after post, site after site and day after day... rage isn't that long-lasting or that methodical.
3) The specific methods this turd used to pull people's strings, such saying she was a minority and then posting fake racial attacks on herself to generate sympathy from her target audience; I'd never seen THAT one before, but her claiming to have medical problems (including hospitalization) is standard cockroach behavior... how does every rotten person automatically know to pretend to have serious health issues to deflect criticism, do they all read the same book or something? Even if you don't care about the psychology involved, it's important to know about these ploys so that they can't be used to deceive YOU; you probably think you're too smart to fall for any of this stuff, but I'll bet that the many people who WERE fooled would have said the same thing.
I've never seen anything else that remotely approaches the detailed reporting of online misbehavior that appears in the story of this nutcase and her many dupes, much less the tracking of such a person over such a huge stretch of time; I'll be going back to it as my schedule permits and re-reading it in greater depth, because I think I can learn more from this depiction of real-life events than from a whole pile of books on psychological and sociological theory.
This next one goes beyond stupid to surreal: There are people online who combine an inability to spell beyond the grade school level with the refusal to use a spellchecker; they're mostly a harmless nuisance, but now they're halfway to enshrining one of their most pitiful mistakes as a real word.... the increasingly ubiquitous "sike." THIS IS *NOT* A WORD, FOLKS!! Ok, technically it IS, although it's so obscure that most dictionaries don't even have it; it means
n. 1. A gutter; a stream, such as is usually dry in summer.
1. A sick person.
v. i. 1. To sigh.
n. 1. A sigh.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Sike
but that's NOT how it's being used... it's popping up everywhere as a misspelling of "psych" (sometimes spelled "psyche," although that's also a different word), which is used as a shorthand for "I psyched you out" (aka "I fooled you"), such as "I actually hate blogs... psych!!" As is all too often the case, ignorant people who wanted to use a word they had no clue how to spell just spelled it like it sounds, withOUT the accepted disclaimer (sp?) to alert others that they were unsure of their spelling; other poor spellers, not knowing any better, didn't realize that the word was being so misspelled as to bear no resemblance to the original, and started using it thinking it was correct. There are plenty of examples of this unfortunate pattern (I'm seeing "hay-day" being used for "heyday" more and more, for example), but this one's reached a whole new level; if you look here
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sike&r=f
you'll see that although there ARE people who've indicated that "sike" is a misspelling, most of the entries claim it to be a valid word or valid version of the proper word... how long do you suppose it'll be before it becomes accepted as a true word?
What discussion of stupidity would be complete without the latest from my husband? He's always had an inexplicable inability to pronounce the name of that charming Warner Bros character, Pepe LePew, who, as you can hear here
http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/play/port_lofi.cfm/sound_iid.4424
pronounces his name "Peppy" (which isn't how the French would say it, but they didn't create him so they didn't get a vote); my husband's convinced that he'll get points in heaven if he pronounces Pepe the "proper" way rather than the correct way for the character, but that's not the stupid part... that'd be how he's incapable of PRODUCING the French pronunciation, so he refers to the poor skunk as "Pay-pay," no matter how often he's told it's wrong. He reached new heights of ridiculousness a couple of days ago, though, when, after being called on this for the billionth time, he "corrected" himself and called Pepe "Pee-pee"... I don't mean he said that to be a smart guy, I mean he honestly thought that that was a better pronunciation!! (Non-native English speakers who don't get the joke; "pee-pee" is what a child says to refer to urine).
When I was ribbing him about this later, we had the following exchange:
Me: What's next? You'll start calling him "Poo-poo"? (Non-native English speakers... don't ask.)
Him: You can call ME "Poopy LePew."
Me: Pepe's stinkier brother?
Both: {howls of laughter, after which he insisted on high-5-ing me with BOTH hands}
Him: Pepe's stinkier and more romantically inept brother?
Me: Ain't it the truth!!
Both: {more howls of laughter}
And that, dear friends, is what a happy marriage sounds like. :-)
The next item has 2-fold stupidity. Ask yourself this; what kind of a moron dedicates YEARS of their life to elaborately deceiving a broad-based online community... and then, what kinds of morons are deceived for YEARS by the clumsy maneuverings of the 1st kind of moron? You can find the answers to these questions here:
http://www.journalfen.net/users/charlottelennox/784.html
The long, long, LONG story "includes or touches upon many scandals and conflicts of the past five or six years in a certain sector of the Harry Potter fandom," but you don't have to know or care about HP to understand what occurred; I recommend at least scanning this story (it'll still take a while), because it shows how EASY it is for even someone who clearly has no life to fool most of the people most of the time, and teaches several valuable lessons:
1) Just how mind-bogglingly FAR a sick person will go to achieve their warped goals; normal people don't grasp this, and this allows the baddies to get away with murder over and over again because folks can't accept that anyone could ever invest so much time and effort in trouble-making.
2) a) That anyone who goes to great lengths to "get" someone, or a group of someones, is guaranteed to be a cockroach; good people just don't have the fanaticism it takes to pursue a protracted campaign against others.
b) When someone attacks an individual or group with personal insults and foul language, it's 99% guaranteed that they're a cockroach and the target person or group is innocent of any crime greater than disagreeing with them or having greater social success than them; it's just barely possible that a good person could become so enraged at actual mistreatment that they'd act this way, but don't count on it, especially if it goes on for post after post, site after site and day after day... rage isn't that long-lasting or that methodical.
3) The specific methods this turd used to pull people's strings, such saying she was a minority and then posting fake racial attacks on herself to generate sympathy from her target audience; I'd never seen THAT one before, but her claiming to have medical problems (including hospitalization) is standard cockroach behavior... how does every rotten person automatically know to pretend to have serious health issues to deflect criticism, do they all read the same book or something? Even if you don't care about the psychology involved, it's important to know about these ploys so that they can't be used to deceive YOU; you probably think you're too smart to fall for any of this stuff, but I'll bet that the many people who WERE fooled would have said the same thing.
I've never seen anything else that remotely approaches the detailed reporting of online misbehavior that appears in the story of this nutcase and her many dupes, much less the tracking of such a person over such a huge stretch of time; I'll be going back to it as my schedule permits and re-reading it in greater depth, because I think I can learn more from this depiction of real-life events than from a whole pile of books on psychological and sociological theory.
This next one goes beyond stupid to surreal: There are people online who combine an inability to spell beyond the grade school level with the refusal to use a spellchecker; they're mostly a harmless nuisance, but now they're halfway to enshrining one of their most pitiful mistakes as a real word.... the increasingly ubiquitous "sike." THIS IS *NOT* A WORD, FOLKS!! Ok, technically it IS, although it's so obscure that most dictionaries don't even have it; it means
n. 1. A gutter; a stream, such as is usually dry in summer.
1. A sick person.
v. i. 1. To sigh.
n. 1. A sigh.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Sike
but that's NOT how it's being used... it's popping up everywhere as a misspelling of "psych" (sometimes spelled "psyche," although that's also a different word), which is used as a shorthand for "I psyched you out" (aka "I fooled you"), such as "I actually hate blogs... psych!!" As is all too often the case, ignorant people who wanted to use a word they had no clue how to spell just spelled it like it sounds, withOUT the accepted disclaimer (sp?) to alert others that they were unsure of their spelling; other poor spellers, not knowing any better, didn't realize that the word was being so misspelled as to bear no resemblance to the original, and started using it thinking it was correct. There are plenty of examples of this unfortunate pattern (I'm seeing "hay-day" being used for "heyday" more and more, for example), but this one's reached a whole new level; if you look here
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sike&r=f
you'll see that although there ARE people who've indicated that "sike" is a misspelling, most of the entries claim it to be a valid word or valid version of the proper word... how long do you suppose it'll be before it becomes accepted as a true word?
What discussion of stupidity would be complete without the latest from my husband? He's always had an inexplicable inability to pronounce the name of that charming Warner Bros character, Pepe LePew, who, as you can hear here
http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/play/port_lofi.cfm/sound_iid.4424
pronounces his name "Peppy" (which isn't how the French would say it, but they didn't create him so they didn't get a vote); my husband's convinced that he'll get points in heaven if he pronounces Pepe the "proper" way rather than the correct way for the character, but that's not the stupid part... that'd be how he's incapable of PRODUCING the French pronunciation, so he refers to the poor skunk as "Pay-pay," no matter how often he's told it's wrong. He reached new heights of ridiculousness a couple of days ago, though, when, after being called on this for the billionth time, he "corrected" himself and called Pepe "Pee-pee"... I don't mean he said that to be a smart guy, I mean he honestly thought that that was a better pronunciation!! (Non-native English speakers who don't get the joke; "pee-pee" is what a child says to refer to urine).
When I was ribbing him about this later, we had the following exchange:
Me: What's next? You'll start calling him "Poo-poo"? (Non-native English speakers... don't ask.)
Him: You can call ME "Poopy LePew."
Me: Pepe's stinkier brother?
Both: {howls of laughter, after which he insisted on high-5-ing me with BOTH hands}
Him: Pepe's stinkier and more romantically inept brother?
Me: Ain't it the truth!!
Both: {more howls of laughter}
And that, dear friends, is what a happy marriage sounds like. :-)
Monday, August 07, 2006
Why does disaster = DESIRE?!!
We've all seen countless movies and TV shows where a woman does something awful to a man, from spilling food all over his suit to involving him in a fender-bender, and in response he doesn't get mad, he gets romantically interested (or MORE interested)... even if she did whatever it was ON PURPOSE.
WHY?!!
What is it about having his suit or his car ruined that makes a man amorous? I understand that both good and bad events can produce adrenaline and thus a feeling of excitement, but we normally have no trouble distinguishing between "bad" excitement (anger, dismay, etc) and the sexual kind, and the former does NOT usually morph into the latter... why is this scenario consistently an exception?
Why is it that if a woman demonstrates by her destructive proclivities that she's a virtual PSYCHO, that makes her EXTRA-desirable to the victim? Is it because he assumes that she must be ferocious (aka passionate) in bed as well as while she's busting his headlights with a baseball bat? That'd be pretty twisted, but I guess you can make a case for it; however, that still wouldn't explain why ACCIDENTAL assault is so entrancing.
In a recent issue of Cosmo, they had an article dedicated to describing unusual ways that couples met, and one of them was astonishing even given an awareness of this absurd tendency; there was a mixed group playing some sport or other, and a woman hit a man in the head with a ball, knocked him out, and was so embarrassed that she ran off and didn't come back... and I'll bet you can guess what his response was. Can you imagine being laid out by someone's clumsy or unfortunate ball handling and responding by wanting to DATE that person? (If you're male, you might have said "yes," but bear with me while I try to sort it out.)
There was a 2nd mind-boggling incident described in the article that, while not involving harm to a man or his belongings, was tangentially similar because it dealt with another sort of situation that would normally make someone want to distance themselves from the other person, NOT pursue them; having seen them make a fool of themselves. A woman used the men's room in a restaurant out of desperation, found herself without toilet paper, and came staggering out of the stall with her pants half up to find, what else, a MAN at the sink, looking at her and trying not to laugh. She bolted, mortified, to rejoin her friends at their table... where she received a dessert from the man who'd seen her and inexplicably found her humiliating display to be emotionally or sexually stimulating. Would YOU see someone stumbling around with their pants half-down in a bathroom as reason to want to go out with them?
This reminded me of an incident involving a notoriously standoffish singer (male) and a then-teenaged fan; the 1st time she met him, she'd somehow managed to get drunk during the show, and vomited all over him. Did he recoil in revulsion? Have her thrown out? Race from the room in a fury to change clothes, hating her forever after? No; he laughed his @ss off, and... it's left vague as to what sort of physical contact they might have had, if any, but she ended up being his "friend" and working for him as her career, so at the very least she was rewarded for her poorly-aimed reverse peristalsis by being given 2 decades (so far) of closeness to a famous person. My head swam when I read about this, because it seemed utterly surreal that a person would respond to being vomited on by a stranger with anything more pleasant than disgust; despite a singer being involved, we can't be SURE that sex, or sexual desire, resulted in this case, but in a broader sense this is still the same concept in action, I think, because at the very least it caused him to want to form a relationship of some sort with her.
In case you're wondering, it's not just straight men that fall prey to this irrationality; a gay man who's been with his lover for half his life revealed to me that the 1st time he went to bed with him, he fell asleep on him in the middle of the act... which you'd THINK would have made his now-husband so hurt and upset that that would've been the end of any possibility of anything further happening between them, but, surprise surprise, had the opposite effect instead.
My husband, who's usually utterly lacking in psychological insight, has provided me with a good explanation of what's going on in all these cases; when we initially discussed this topic a few years ago, he said that making a memorable impression was the key to getting a man to want to know a woman better (or another man, presumably), and that a bad impression was still an impression and so created the same focusing of attention (for the most part) as a good impression would. When I read him the examples of this concept in action from Cosmo, he came out with an even better thought; once disaster has struck, many of the emotional barriers that normally exist between strangers or acquaintances are shattered, AND it fast-forwards them past lots of "getting to know you" steps because you simply can't make tentative, painfully-polite conversational forays with someone once they've barfed on you or wrecked your car... a sort of intimacy is formed by shared participation in a disaster, and the achievement of this intimacy creates a feeling in the man of having "made progress" with the woman, which encourages him to strike while the iron is hot (and makes him happy to have been spared the awkward introductory phase, even if it means he was unconscious and possibly concussed).
It seems insane to me, but then again so do lots of common psychological patterns; all I can conclude is that, should I ever unexpectedly be single again (and either the body's never found or I'm acquitted, lol), I'm going to walk around with a Big Gulp with a loosened top that I'll dump all over the man of my choice.
WHY?!!
What is it about having his suit or his car ruined that makes a man amorous? I understand that both good and bad events can produce adrenaline and thus a feeling of excitement, but we normally have no trouble distinguishing between "bad" excitement (anger, dismay, etc) and the sexual kind, and the former does NOT usually morph into the latter... why is this scenario consistently an exception?
Why is it that if a woman demonstrates by her destructive proclivities that she's a virtual PSYCHO, that makes her EXTRA-desirable to the victim? Is it because he assumes that she must be ferocious (aka passionate) in bed as well as while she's busting his headlights with a baseball bat? That'd be pretty twisted, but I guess you can make a case for it; however, that still wouldn't explain why ACCIDENTAL assault is so entrancing.
In a recent issue of Cosmo, they had an article dedicated to describing unusual ways that couples met, and one of them was astonishing even given an awareness of this absurd tendency; there was a mixed group playing some sport or other, and a woman hit a man in the head with a ball, knocked him out, and was so embarrassed that she ran off and didn't come back... and I'll bet you can guess what his response was. Can you imagine being laid out by someone's clumsy or unfortunate ball handling and responding by wanting to DATE that person? (If you're male, you might have said "yes," but bear with me while I try to sort it out.)
There was a 2nd mind-boggling incident described in the article that, while not involving harm to a man or his belongings, was tangentially similar because it dealt with another sort of situation that would normally make someone want to distance themselves from the other person, NOT pursue them; having seen them make a fool of themselves. A woman used the men's room in a restaurant out of desperation, found herself without toilet paper, and came staggering out of the stall with her pants half up to find, what else, a MAN at the sink, looking at her and trying not to laugh. She bolted, mortified, to rejoin her friends at their table... where she received a dessert from the man who'd seen her and inexplicably found her humiliating display to be emotionally or sexually stimulating. Would YOU see someone stumbling around with their pants half-down in a bathroom as reason to want to go out with them?
This reminded me of an incident involving a notoriously standoffish singer (male) and a then-teenaged fan; the 1st time she met him, she'd somehow managed to get drunk during the show, and vomited all over him. Did he recoil in revulsion? Have her thrown out? Race from the room in a fury to change clothes, hating her forever after? No; he laughed his @ss off, and... it's left vague as to what sort of physical contact they might have had, if any, but she ended up being his "friend" and working for him as her career, so at the very least she was rewarded for her poorly-aimed reverse peristalsis by being given 2 decades (so far) of closeness to a famous person. My head swam when I read about this, because it seemed utterly surreal that a person would respond to being vomited on by a stranger with anything more pleasant than disgust; despite a singer being involved, we can't be SURE that sex, or sexual desire, resulted in this case, but in a broader sense this is still the same concept in action, I think, because at the very least it caused him to want to form a relationship of some sort with her.
In case you're wondering, it's not just straight men that fall prey to this irrationality; a gay man who's been with his lover for half his life revealed to me that the 1st time he went to bed with him, he fell asleep on him in the middle of the act... which you'd THINK would have made his now-husband so hurt and upset that that would've been the end of any possibility of anything further happening between them, but, surprise surprise, had the opposite effect instead.
My husband, who's usually utterly lacking in psychological insight, has provided me with a good explanation of what's going on in all these cases; when we initially discussed this topic a few years ago, he said that making a memorable impression was the key to getting a man to want to know a woman better (or another man, presumably), and that a bad impression was still an impression and so created the same focusing of attention (for the most part) as a good impression would. When I read him the examples of this concept in action from Cosmo, he came out with an even better thought; once disaster has struck, many of the emotional barriers that normally exist between strangers or acquaintances are shattered, AND it fast-forwards them past lots of "getting to know you" steps because you simply can't make tentative, painfully-polite conversational forays with someone once they've barfed on you or wrecked your car... a sort of intimacy is formed by shared participation in a disaster, and the achievement of this intimacy creates a feeling in the man of having "made progress" with the woman, which encourages him to strike while the iron is hot (and makes him happy to have been spared the awkward introductory phase, even if it means he was unconscious and possibly concussed).
It seems insane to me, but then again so do lots of common psychological patterns; all I can conclude is that, should I ever unexpectedly be single again (and either the body's never found or I'm acquitted, lol), I'm going to walk around with a Big Gulp with a loosened top that I'll dump all over the man of my choice.
