Mt friend Stuart pointed me towards this article on how the British Government is now recognizing McDonald’s shift manager training as formal educational credits.

The article is full of quotes as to how this will provide greater eductionial oportunitys by allowing more people to get degrees and increase intentional competitiveness and result in a more skilled workforce, presumably because more people earn degrees.

It’s all nonsense, of course, giving more workers progressively more meaningless pieces of paper does not make the workforce more skilled any more than (as the US is finding out) printing more money makes the population any richer.

Last week China’s Administration for Religious Affairs announced that starting next month it will be illegal for Tibetian monks to reincarnate without the government approval.

Of course, once all the amusement wears off, you can see this for what it is. China’s latest attempt to exterminate Tibetan Buddhism once and for all. The whole leadership structure of the religion is based on monks reincarnating. The Chinese government how has the legal pretext to dictate the next generation of leaders and arrest those chosen by traditional means. With the Dali Lama getting on in years, the legislation is rather timely.

Yeah, yeah. I have not posted in months. But I have a good excuse. The dog ate my keyboard! The token fell out of my network cable and I could not log in.

The truth is I’ve just been too busy traveling and working to take the time to update this blog like the disciplined barbarian I strive to be.

I’m in Sofia right now and its Friday evening. I know there is something going on in this city I just have to find it. OK. I’m off in search of a cool club full of hot Bulgarian girls. I’ll let you know how it goes. If you don’t hear back from me in three days, send reinforcements!

It’s kind of a heavy topic today, but for the last few days a stray thought about the nature of free will has been stuck in my head like a 70s disco tune.

While we may be free to do whatever we want, we are obviously not free to want whatever we want. We can choose our actions, but we don’t choose the desires and values that form the basis for those actions.

In one area my respect for Japanese society has been in freefall recently. Until rather recently, Japanese have always had rather healthy diets. They tend to drink unsweetened drinks, have a national aversion to GM foods, and eat a lot of raw or lightly processed foods.

Things are changing. I made fun of the US consumers for actually putting McGriddles in their bodies, but they are here in Japan as well now. Worse still, McDonalds Japan recently introduced the MegaMac. A 900-calorie four-beef-like patty burger guaranteed to provide the USDA daily allowance of grease for a family of twelve. McDonalds, literally, can’t keep them in stock.

Pizza Hut, however, has now caused me to abandon all hope. The other night I ordered a pizza. (Hey, I take care of myself, but it’s not like I’m a granola-munching hippie!) They now offer a new crust that improves on their thick-and-greasy cheese-filled crust. The outside of the crust is actually made of dozens of little pig-in-a-blanket like rolls. Each gingerly containing a slice of bacon wrapping a piece of sausage suspended in grease. The pizza also comes with a honey-maple syrup which you are supposed to pour over the crust before eating it.

I’m not even sure you could get American’s to eat that slop, but it’s so popular here in Japan you have to reserve it in advance.

I learned an important life lesson today.

It is an extremely bad idea to open an electric coffee grinder when it’s running. Good thing I like the aroma of freshly-ground coffee. That’s what my whole kitchen smells like right now.

The other day, my friend was bemoaning the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet. (Yeah, my friend needs to get out more. He knows that.)

Over the past few months I read a bit of the nonsensical debate over whether “Pluto is a planet” with amusement. In fact, the debate has nothing whatsoever to do with Pluto. Neither the final decision nor any of the arguments put forth have the slightest effect on Pluto which will keep orbiting the sun as it has done for billions of years. Pluto doesn’t even know the debate exists. The debate was not about whether Pluto is a planet. It was about whether we should all call Pluto a planet. It’s an arbitrary label that people take far too seriously.

It reminds me of the duck-billed platypus. The platypus is a favorite of high-school biology teachers who explain that it is a freakish animal since it lays eggs, but nurses its young and does all kinds of things that make it difficult to classify. The platypus, of course, is blissfully unaware of this “problem” and continutes to eat, sleep, mate and make lots of baby platypuses just as it always has.

To say that the platypus is a mammal is not a statement about the platypus. It is a statement about our system of labels. Most people cannot separate the labels we apply to something from what that something actually is, and therefore think there is something odd about the platypus, because it does not fit cleanly into our labels.

Personally, I blame Aristotle for all of this, but I’ll save that for another post.

I just got back from another trip to the US.

When I travel, especially to places where I obviously stand out as a tourist, I generally get into the front seat of taxis. Although it tends to surprise the driver at first, they will generally assume that this is the custom where ever you come from and then drop into a much more talkative mood than if you had been sitting in the back.

I’m convinced that if you do this enough in Latin America, you will learn Spanish rather quickly. The drivers, being Latino, simply cannot sit next a person for more than five minutes without starting a conversation, and the fact that you don’t speak a word of their language is not going to stop them.

When I was in Peru a while back, I received hours of free Spanish instruction from taxi drivers while stuck in traffic. “OK. This is a bridge. A bridge. That’s a truck. A green truck. A brown truck.” Yeah, I know. Not exactly scintillating conversation, but it helped pass the time for both of us.

The only place I can’t really do this is in America where the passenger’s side door is always locked and the drivers and passengers are separated by an inch of bullet-proof glass. Of course, I understand why this is necessary, but it makes me a bit sad.

Greetings from a beach in somewhere in southern Vietnam. I’m here swimming, scuba diving and just generally hanging out. Although the waves on this particular beach are tiny, it seems that surfing is catching on among the younger Vietnamese.

Oh, those wacky Christians!

A man jumped into the lion cage in the Kiev zoo, walked over to the lions and shouted “God will save me, if he exists.”

He didn’t. A lioness immediately pounced on him and ripped open his carotid artery. The king of kings could not be reached for comment.

Now, what I want to know is why this chump thought he was a special snowflake. I mean, the Romans threw thousands of Christians to the lions  and the Big Guy didn’t feel compelled to intervene on their behalf despite the obvious PR value of such a move. So what made this guy think divine intervention would protect him from his own stupidity and arrogance.

It’s the Circle of Life.

Cowards never view themselves as cowards. In fact, cowards tend to view themselves as brave and virtuous. They have an astounding ability to delude themselves into thinking that their fear of confrontation is actually an demonstration of their virtue. After all, it is easy to fake compassion towards one’s adversary, and it caries little risk.

Likewise, every obnoxious insecure asshole, be it the domineering boss, the suffocating father or the violent husband, seems to have convinced themselves that their abuse is actually an expression of caring. The assholes justify their actions in terms of teaching lessons, efficiency or tough love.

These people are just plain creepy. Check out this video about a group that claims the “cure gayness”. Talk about the the cure being worse than the disease! This would be wicked satire if it weren’t real.

We barbarians are doing a bit or redecorating. Over the next few days I hope to complete the modifications to BigheaD’s ChinaRed theme.

I’ve lived a sheltered life. I always thought that “putting on my dancing shoes” was some kind of metaphor. I now not only know that there really is such a thing as dancing shoes, but I am the proud owner of my very own pair.

The spins in salsa were getting a bit too difficult to do in street shoes, so I decided more appropriate footwear was in order. The main problem here in Japan (other than finding a pair consisting of two lefts) was fitting my size-eleven feet.

I headed to a huge four-story dance emporium in Shibuya that claimed on the phone to stock my size. Two things struck me about the place. First, I was probably the only straight male to have set foot in the store this month. Second, the place was pure “Capitalism at Work.”

While I stood there with the female clerks staring at my feet and the male shoppers staring at my ass, I was amazed at how much money people were spending on dance accessories. Some of these people were dropping hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Teaching people to dance is one thing, but the real money is made in selling them a whole lifestyle.

I just finished reading Blink, an interesting little book about how we tend to make split second judgments and how those judgments tend to be surprisingly accurate. It seems that we assume tall people are the leaders.

The book cites Malcolm Gladwell’s research on the height of Fortune 500 CEOs. It seems the average male CEO is 6′ tall while the average American is a scant 5′9″. It gets even more interesting as people get taller. A full 58% of the CEOs ore over 6′ and 30% of them are over 6′ 2″. In the general population these numbers are 14.5% and 3.9%, respectively.

Interesting stuff. All together now…

I don’t want no short people ’round … don’t want no short people ’round me.

Long ago in my backpacking days, whenever I entered a new town the stray dogs would tell me how friendly the residents were. Not that they spoke to me directly, son-of-Sam style, but the meaning was just as clear.

If I entered a village and the dogs were well fed and ran up to me with their tails wagging, I knew I would be warmly received by the locals.

If, on the other hand, the strays were all skin and bone and snarled at me from a short distance away, the residents would undoubtedly be of similar disposition. I’d move my wallet to an inside pocket, zip my jacket up a little tighter and move on as soon as I could.

I’ve been reading a lot of evolutionary biology recently. It is intriguing to see how many of our rational behaviors are actually manifestations of deeply ingrained instinctual responses. The emotional responses we have to encroachment on what we perceive to be our territory being one of the primary ones.

I realized the other day that the dog that barks at me from behind a fence every time I walk by is barking at me for precisely the same reason that his master built the fence in the first place.

Both dog and master are telling all those who pass by “This is my territory.”

I’ve been learning salsa recently. I’m still pretty awkward, but I have a lot of fun. The other night I had a blinding flash of the obvious. The man must lead. No, I mean, the man really MUST lead. That’s the whole point of the dance.

A man can be a terrible dancer and cause the couple to trip over each others shoes, and the woman will laugh about it and keep dancing. A woman, however, has little tolerance for any partner who will not confidently lead her.

Any two items from this store prominantly displayed in a man’s living room will ensure that he will never, ever, fricking ever get laid.

Today’s example of fat people in denial is that researches at University of Wisconsin-Madison are saying that not only is obesity caused by a virus, but that it might be contagious. Apparently adenovirus Ad-3, rather than the documented increase in per-capita calorie intake, is responsible for the fattening of America.

Read more here.

My favorite passage…

Whigham says there is still a lot to learn about how these viruses work, as there are people and animals that get infected and don’t get fat and as yet it is not known why. … [T]he virus creates a tendency to obesity that must be triggered by overeating.

So if you are infected by this virus and you overeat you will get fat. Apparently this is completely unrelated to the fact that if you are uninfected and overeat you will get fat.

The Nobel Committee could not be reached for comment.