sheer potentiality

I recently got a black MacBook with Parallels on it, so I can run virtual machines. So today I set up a VM with Ubuntu Linux. Um, any ideas what I can actually do with this?

Comments are back on.

I have expressed my views on the subject of pants privately several times, but I think it’s time to come public about it. Simply put, I’m against them.

No, I’m not some crazy person who doesn’t want to wear pants. Hear me out. I just think that social norms are pretty backwards when it comes to the subject of below-the-waist garments. There are two general options: bifurcated (pants) and unbifurcated (skirts and other things that aren’t pants). And, for some reason, women were the gender that got assigned skirts, while men got assigned pants.

When you think about the mechanical issues here, this makes no sense. Women have neatly packaged internal genitals which means the free-flowing openness of the skirt gives them no advantage. It also means that women can comfortably wear tight pants, which they, of course, end up doing a lot. Pants are actually no problem for women, which is why women have all but given up skirts.

Men, on the other hand, have external genitals that hang down from the crotch. This is highly problematic! There are two solutions to this problem, neither of which is appealing. One solution is to physically constrict the genitals so they’re close to the body. This is uncomfortable and is bad for fertility, because it constricts the vessels and warms the testicles.

Another solution is to wear looser pants, or to wear the pants lower on the hips, but this results in looking like a slob who doesn’t know how to wear pants properly.

Most men use a combination of both solutions, and we get by, but obviously the best solution would be to wear a kilt or some other form of unbifurcated garment. In several cultures this is socially acceptable for men but in ours it is not, even though they’re inherently more comfortable for men than pants are—whereas skirts are socially acceptable for women, despite the fact that they serve almost no purpose on a female body! This shit is bananas.

Mike Klein: Have you ever seen “Chicago”?
Philip Welch: Yes!
Mike Klein: I think Roxy’s killing of that guy was borderline justifiable. He had thrown her across the room in a rather violent way that could have caused serious injury, and then he immediately said “touch me again and I’ll put your lights out!” I would have bought a claim of self-defense, I think.
Philip Welch: I think that’s far from the central artistic point of the film But yes.
Philip Welch: In other news, apparently, Indianapolis is between Anchorage, Alaska and Eastern Washington!
Mike Klein: He had also raped her, if you include sex by fraud in that definition.
Mike Klein: Really? I had no idea…
Mike Klein: If you go east from Eastern Washington, it is.
Philip Welch: FedEx is teaching me all sorts of things about geography.
Mike Klein: Oh, now it’s all clear… my iPod started in North Carolina, went over the South Pole, stopped in Newark, and then came to my house.