Saturday 11 December 1999

Pic of the day: The new pajamas in its right element. Too bad about my head not getting on the picture, but it's not like I used it or anything. Or I would not have been lugging around furniture and a heavy old computer in the night.

Still no offer to sponsor an all-night webcam? I have the computer and the extra phone line, but staying online costs ca $1 per hour. :)

So I slept till over noon. Then again, I did not fall asleep until about 5 in the morning. After the compulsory IRC, I got involved in a discussion on a mailing list. I had kindly explained why men generally prefer women who are somewhat rounded, how this made sense historically. Skinny women (as in skin and bone skinny, not just slim) have a reduced fertility. They may not be able to conceive at all, or if they do, they may lack the necessary fat for the proper building of the fetal and infant brain. Cells of the brain and spinal chord are insulated with a layer of fat from the supporting glia cells, and this insulation is essential to their functioning. In humans, there is also a growth spurt in the brain shortly after birth, and some of the female fat depots are for the lactation.

Anyway, someone went so far as to doubt me. I am not used to that. And this is not exactly rocket science either. You did not need to be around for most of our race's history to know that starvation was a serious problem, and that it would be a great idea for starving women to be a turn-off for the male populace. It still is. And there are people still starving on our planet. (If you think that is a bad thing, you may visit the hunger site and do something about it, for free.)

There are also people - mostly women, but more and more men - who are starving because of neurotic anorexia. I am not going to go into any detail about that, but it does mean that you are likely to have starving people in your hometown even if you live in a rich country. Giving them food will likely not help, but you can still check whether or not they look fertile. I'd say no.
(Slim girls may be another thing. See Rachel's Daily Diary and make your own decision. :)

Luckily I did not send my angry e-mails before going to sleep. I completely rewrote them in the morning. This is hardly the first time I act like that. In fact, it is a habit of mine to delay emotional letters overnight. I have been thankful for that more than once.

An overcast, slightly windy day met me when I finally crawled out of bed. A thin layer of powdery snow was sprinkled on the vegetation outside. After eating a little yoghurt, I set off to shop groceries. Actually my fridge was almost full, but I bought a little anyway. I was all out of chocolate and soda, too. I walked home in the cold wind, playing old songs on my minidisc player and thinking about my novel, in which our miracle-working hero and his female friend face an uncommon ethical question: If you are temporarily wearing the bodies of a married couple, is it OK to do the, uh, marital arts? Is marriage a thing of the body, soul or spirit?

Legend had it that emperor Nero's last words was a complaint about what an artist the world was losing. I wonder if my ambitions are of the same nature as his. The idea of having a layer of editors, publishers etc may not be so bad after all.

After a nourishing pasta meal, I've been lazing like mad all day. I haven't even bothered to play Daggerfall. That's pretty extreme. There is a really scary article in Psychology Today, which I intended to write about. But since I've already filled this entry with fluff and am to lazy to rewrite it, I'll just wait for another time, if any. Also I am not sure what it might do with people's sanity, and with my readership I guess I should give that some consideration ... ;)

I'm only slightly disturbed myself. I have seen this coming for a long time.

In other news, I've downloaded the (legal!) .MP3 song "always alone for Christmas" by Jonas Groth. It is fairly catchy, well performed. The boy can sing well enough. But the text is so depressive that it wraps around into fun for me. The depressive listener however may feel pretty bad after listening to it, I would suspect. Take care.