Silver Jacket

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  • Pimp My Bod

    Hummer_eau_smA while ago I was wandering through a beauty supply store at the mall–killing time before a movie, mind you–and in the men’s section I came across something that made me rethink humanity: Hummer Eau de toilette. Yes, Hummer. As in the SUV. Regaining composure, I imagined a base of transmission fluid, with hints of rubber. But no, it smelled like real cologne. With a Hummer logo slapped on the bottle. Awesome.

    Ok I can maybe see dudes getting carried away with their mechanical penile extensions. Buying Hummer fragrance, Hummer hemorrhoidal cream, Hummer mac and cheese. But then on the next shelf I spotted… Hummer body wash? Shitballs. Please read the product description with me:

    The essence of adventure is captured in a body wash for those who aren’t content to simply watch the world go by. HUMMER body wash is a fresh, exhilarating scent that blends organic essences of the natural world such as sandalwood and leather with exotic spices like cardamom and amber for a truly masculine adrenaline rush that can only be called HUMMER.

    Nice. I really want to know who grossly miscalculated the Venn diagram on this target demographic. "Ok team, we want to reach that hordes of men who A.) buy Hummers, and B.) use body wash. Oh, and they have to know what the fuck cardamom is."

    (Was Klosterman involved in this scheme?)

    But to drivers who actually do sit in that Venn sliver, I only have this to say: Save the planet and get yourself a fucking beard instead.

  • Pinching Comes Before Kissing?

    Pinching_fingersSo I was at a party recently with a couple coworkers: Jay and a woman who prefers to remain unidentified (let’s call her Betty.) There was drinking, there was dancing, there were bloggers, and there was a weird dude I’ll call Munch. Munch was harmless but a little too friendly, and at a crucial moment a little too liberal and libidinous in his interpretation of the Yellow Pages slogan. Having met Betty only minutes before, dude pinches her ass. Um, what?

    Eagle-eye Jay spotted the maneuver and later got to the bottom of the situation. Here’s Jay’s recollection of the intervention:

    ME [Jay]: do women ever react badly when you pinch their asses!
    HIM: oh my GOD, yeah! like last month, i was talking to this woman at a party, and we were flirting for hours–like *hours*–and then I pinched her ass. and she like, recoiled, and was like, "I can’t believe you just did that!" and i was like, what the hell?
    ME: why do you think she reacted that way?
    HIM: i don’t know, i guess she just took it the wrong way.
    ME: and why did you do it?
    HIM: to communicate to her, i’d love to dominate your luscious body.
    ME: to dominate it?
    HIM: yeah.
    ME: so we’re talking, like, not just like normal, mutual sex, but more like, you’re dominant and she’s submitting. to communicate to her that that’s the type of sex you want.
    HIM: no, i mean… i’m exaggerating to be funny.
    ME: so just regular sex?
    HIM: sure.
    ME: so basically to communicate to her that you’re attracted to her.
    HIM: yeah.
    ME: so then, why pinch her, when there’s a chance that will be misinterpreted?
    HIM: what do you mean?
    ME: well, you just said she took it the wrong way. maybe some women think it’s degrading.
    HIM: degrading?
    ME: well… if she didn’t like it… so why not just do something that communicates to her that you’re attracted to her but that’s less likely to be misinterpreted?
    HIM: like what?   
    ME: well, like you could kiss her.
    HIM: well, pinching comes before kissing.
    ME: necessarily?
    HIM: yeah, to me, kissing is more intimate. pinching is less intimate.
    ME: so you would always pinch a woman before you kissed her.
    HIM: pretty much.
    ME: why? i mean, do you get pleasure out of pinching? i mean, ok, you’re trying to communicate something to the woman. but do you get anything out of it?
    HIM: what do you mean?
    ME: i mean, if you feel her ass, you might get something out of it. but does it feel good to you to pinch an ass?
    HIM: well, if she giggles, then i feel good.
    ME: and if she doesn’t?
    HIM: then she’ll be like, "i can’t believe you just did that."

    Our ‘munchy friend later went on to explain why handjobs come before handshakes.

  • Gotta Have Faith

    Us3_1I don’t much care for country music. With the exception of some bluegrass and that Gourds cover of "Gin and Juice." Yet somehow Saturday night I found myself front row at the Faith Hill/Tim McGraw concert at Madison Square Garden. (In case you didn’t know, Hill and McGraw are the First Couple of country, Bible Belt royalty. Combined, they’ve sold over 60 million records, not including McGraw’s craptacular collaboration with Nelly.)

    StageSo, front row. Well, actually, there’s front row, and then there’s this. I did not know seats like this existed at concerts. The circular stage had two runways extending from the middle with five seats at the end of each runway. We had five of those seats. Sitting level with the stage, we had just a short obstacle in front of us, upon which we set our beers. Yes, we spilled beer on the stage.

    Now, if these had been artists I was a huge fan of, I would have flipped out. As it is, it’s hard not to have a good time at such a perch. The musicians kept coming over and talking to us as they played their guitars, etc. Faith stroked my hand, and I drew a fist pound from Tim. (Boo-ya.)

    Oh, and we had preshow party passes, where we hung out in a small room as Faith and Tim warmed up, all for the amazingly low price of…FREE. All you country-luvin’ haters, keep hatin’, but happenstance happens. My friend Lauren is a yoga teacher, and one of her clients is the production manager for the tour. Hey, it’s not my fault.

    FaithSoap-luvin’ haters may recall my trip to the Days of Our Lives 40th Anniversary Party a few months ago, where I pretended, poorly, to belong. "So what do you do? Oh, you’re the star of the show? Um, that must be nice." Hard to miss the stars in this show, but I still felt a little ‘baggy when they were just feet away and I couldn’t sing along with the rest of the crowd. Gosh, I hope I didn’t hurt their feelings.

    Two quick notes on their outfits. Faith wore Pumas that night (as did I). I highly approved. And Tim wore tight jeans covered in crosses made of jewels. In fact, I’m pretty sure he Bedazzled them himself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of clothing so Christian and so gay at the same time. With the possible exception of that technicolor dreamcoat Joseph used to flit around in. But hey, I don’t mean to judge. Some of my best friends are Christian.

    [Pic 1: Jae, Lauren, me, a bit of Jess, taken by Leta.]
    [Pic 2: The stage from our seats.]
    [Pic 3: Faith crooning to me, with Tim in the background doing his cover of "I Have No Legs" from "Kids."]

  • On the Money

    Leary2A review of the new biography of Timothy Leary appearing in the Times today includes the following paragraph:

    In a twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo — he pulled himself along a telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car — and transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act." [emphasis mine]

    The last time I recall seeing someone use that terminology in reference to a piece of writing’s spunkiest moment was in my own hand, aimed at an article I wrote in 2003 for a national physics lab’s magazine. Sending the link to a fellow writer, I wrote, "Be sure to read the final graf for the money shot."

    What was it?

    [LA Times science journalist K.C.] Cole proudly told me what Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, said of her once. "’K.C. Cole is our ambassador to the realms of the exceedingly strange.’" Couldn’t one say the same of 60’s psychonaut Timothy Leary, the Harvard scientist who explored the far reaches of experience with psychotropic drugs in search of insight? Cole laughed. "But my exceedingly strange realm is the universe," she said. "It’s the real stuff. That’s what’s so amazing about it. The universe itself is much more amazing than anything Timothy Leary ever saw. I don’t care what he was on."

    And personally, I think the money shot in the Times piece was its title: "The Nutty Professor." Ahem.

  • On The Road Again

    WallyworldDear blog, I’m sorry to have neglected you for so long. You see, there have been some changes, and I’ve been busy. The last time we talked, I lived in San Diego. I now live in New York. Why? I’ve got a great new job as the News Editor of Psychology Today. (I appreciate your help in getting me that job, btw.)

    Some notes on my third time driving across the country:

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  • Guts

    LogobodyLast week in New York I went to BODIES…The Exhibition, one of those human cadaver plastination exhibits derived from Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds. Among my favorite stops on the anatomical tour was the last–the body of work comprising glimpses of visitors’ psychological anatomies. At a table with chairs sat big binders filled with white pages inviting comment. Rather than add to the compendium, I sat and read. In just that one day, hundreds of people had shared their inner thoughts on the thoughtless innards they’d witnessed.

    A few notes on the exhibition: most bodies displayed were male. One room featured fetuses and infants in various stages of development, including one still housed in its mother, revealed by way of cutaway. The bodies all come from China, some donated but most unclaimed.

    Some comments raised political or ethical concerns. Should people be displayed after death without consent? Should female bodies have been used to illustrate more than just sexual reproduction (or, in one case, obesity)?

    Some comments were emotional. One woman wrote that she had had an abortion and became choked up when she reached the fetus room. She requested that all women considering abortion visit the exhibit.

    And, unsurprisingly, many comments were inane. "Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door." "Maiden Rulez." "Chinks are dumb and have small dicks."

    But below are four of my favorites.

    To many wangs. [Double entendre?]
    To many dead baby’s.

    I should not have seen this.
    Sorry.
    Dave

    Some of it looked like chicken.
    mmmmm  lol

    It was cool and interesting but it made me sick and dizzy and I almost cried.
    Call me.
    [phone number redacted]

  • Balloons in the Sky with Diamonds

    BalloonLeo Cullum’s cartoon on page 56 of the April 17 New Yorker is basically an illustration of an experimental fiction piece I wrote a decade ago in which acid and dealer are played by balloon and clown. Full trip after the jump.

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  • Funny Boneless

    Prison_breakEarlier today I mentioned Nick Sylvester’s Village Voice article about pickup artists. The Voice fired him for taking liberties with the truth–for mixing reporting and riffing a little too ambiguously.

    The lesson: if you make stuff up and put it in a newspaper, make it obvious that you’re making stuff up. Case in point: Sylvester’s 2005 Voice article on college cheating methods.

    But wait! Apparently even that’s not enough. In reporting last month on Sylvester’s pickup piece, AP writer David Caruso mentioned Sylvester’s cheating piece:

    In an August story about cheating on college campuses, Sylvester described interviewing a student who spent $500,000 to have a multiplication table tattooed over his entire body; a Harvard Medical School graduate who cheated with Morse code; a Boston College junior named Simeon Criz who cheated using a specially designed deck of playing cards; and a Manhattan doctor named Noam Feldstein who delivers "a hundred newborn babies each day."

    Boston College said it had no record of a student named Simeon Criz. The board that licenses doctors in New York said it had no record of a physician named Noam Feldstein.

    In all fairness, I believe it was the AP that broke the story that the guy in Prison Break is an actor.

    (Oh, how relieved I would be to learn that Caruso and his editors were merely reenacting this gag.)

  • Funny Boning

    ChesspieceLast week my friend Liz wrote in her advice column: "Questions, questions, questions. Men and women alike love to be drawn out from their selves with QUESTIONS. I keep a file of questions ready for occasions like this." They range from the timely ("Do you identify more with Generation X or Generation Explains-Your-Wearing-Stupid-Clothes?") to the timeless ("Who’s your hottest underage relative?") I have not yet tried any of them as pickup lines, but if you do, please let her or me know how they work out.

    Recently a bunch of pickup approaches actually were put to the test. In February, researchers at Edinburgh published their results on which "opening gambits" work best. Surprise surprise–situations where men organically display generosity or a cultured background work better than preformed pickup lines. (Summary here, full list of gambits here.) But then, the lines included schlock like this:

    M: What has 148 teeth and can hold back the incredible hulk?
    W: I give up.
    M: My fly.

    In Hulk’s place, I would have liked to see one from Nick Sylvester’s infamous Village Voice story about Neil Strauss’s The Game, in which Sylvester refers to someone’s "new signature move, a pickup line that takes over 15 minutes to tell and wraps up like this:

    "Anyway, my friend has had this mustache for as long as I’ve known him but he just shaved it and now he’s freaking out because he has a really bad tan line on his upper lip. He has a date in two days so we were discussing what he can do. My question for you is: Should he wear a fake mustache on the date?"

    (Reconstructing the first 15 minutes of that line would make a great exercise for a creative writing class, but "reporting" on its existence was a riff that lost Sylvester his job.)

    Or the Edinburgh team could have relied on the old fave The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines, which already has a smattering of data on the utility of many lines. Skim through and you will find that "I wanna put my thingy into your thingy" is surprisingly effective, working 100 out of 120 times. Unsurprisingly, "Chick do now" has worked 0 out of "804,147 (or so one guy claims)" times.

    You’d think "Chick do now" would have amused one of those thousands of women and led to a hookup. Two scientists (Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine) published a study last year in which people rated potential partners on desirability. Subjects viewed head shots with funny and not-so-funny quips attached. Women liked funny men, but apparently men didn’t give a shit whether women were funny. These data didn’t mesh with claims from both men and women that they like partners with a good sense of humor. So B&B did a follow-up study and found that men and women mean different things when they say "good sense of humor." Women like men who say funny things; men like women who think the things they (men) say are funny. (Good summaries of the research here and here. Full PDFs available here.)

    French maximizer La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "We often pardon those people who bore us, but we cannot pardon those who find us boring." Modern-day research has now demonstrated the utter male-centricity of this particular maxim. (Whereas the male-centricity of this Maxim was never in question.)

    The flirting research came to bear in an IM chat with Liz last month:

    liz: what do you think about the notion:
    men: use conversation to establish dominance
    women: use conversation as gift to establish togetherness/equality
    me: ya
    me: like that humor study
    me: girls like funny guys, guys like girls who think they’re funny
    liz: humor is the ultimate trick – it tricks guys into thinking they’ve become dominant by making girls laugh. it tricks girls into thinking they’ve been offered a gift by the man to induce togetherness
    liz: what happens though when i tell a humor-joke?
    me: no effect
    me: guys don’t care
    liz: is gilda radner funny?
    me: ya
    liz: is that good?
    me: ya
    me: i need funny. i am not most guys
    liz: oh so you’re saying certain guys, it’s a plus
    liz: but guys guys don’t care
    liz: how can i know the difference
    me: you cant
    me: ok you can
    me: do they attempt to elicit humor from you
    liz: seems so simple, and yet i’d never have come up with it
    me: i have lots of experience attempting to elicit humor from chicks
    me: its my litmus test
    me: if they fall flat, too basic, i lose interest
    liz: how do you do it
    me: leading, snarky questions can work
    liz: example?
    me: last night i replied to [redacted]’s friendster message. her profile says she wants to meet someone who can procure a butterfly knife. i said:
    me: "Why do you wish so badly to procure a butterfly knife? What do you have against butterflies? (Or is it merely a person who can easily obtain one that you wish to find? You’re into bad boys/girls.)"
    me: not brilliant, but it should work
    liz: but isn’t that just showing off your creativity/humor, more than eliciting hers?
    me: its both. thats the key.
    liz: yeh

  • Ali G to AARP

    Oldpeople_1Yesterday Language Log wrote about Ali G’s interview with Noam Chomsky, which is now on YouTube, so I sent the video link to my friend Sara.

    Before leaving work the following IM chat took place:

    Sara: that made me laugh real hard.
    me: i love ali g
    Sara: how can you not love ali g?
    me: if part of your head is missing
    Sara: oh right that makes sense..it made me laugh especially because for the longest time i thought that oral sex was just phone sex…and then that whole cunnilingual thing.
    Sara: hey did you have a good birthday?
    me: was ok [I turned 28 on April 14]
    Sara: are you sad because you are an old man now?
    me: yes
    me: but ive always wanted to be a member of the aarp
    Sara: dont worry i think youll age well
    me: i hope to grow out of my awkward stage
    me: into the hotness
    Sara: oh i think you are coming along just fine matt. but yeh.
    me: thanks
    Sara: no problem

    OK, pretty regular IM chat, ya? But half an hour later I get home and what do I find in the mail? An erroneously delivered issue of AARP magazine.

    Ha ha, very funny Dr. Jung.