Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Blame it on Shutterclog Niek: I just spent an hour I didn’t have absorbed in the photographs of Ari Versluis. Versluis works with stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek exploring the “dress codes” of wildly differing groups.

At first glance, the images look like proofsheets–12 shots of a recognizably “goth” young girl, for example. A closer look reveals 12 quite different young girls, each in her own unique version of a very goth dress.

Men in jackets and ties. Teenage boys in jackets and ties. Women with headscarves carrying babies. Cute guys in tiny Euro bathing suits. (See the site contact page for an animated display of those cute guys.)

The images don’t leave you snickering at their subjects–they leave you with a deepened awareness about the ways those people are just like you, and not just like one another.

We long to be seen, we long to be understood–and no clothing on earth could do the many jobs we want our clothing to do for us. We want to say “I’m unique”, and we also want to say “I’m this kind of person.”

Okay, I’m off to express my individuality by putting on one of my all-black “I’m a writer who lives in a big city” outfits.

“Get a snapshot of your life as it might have been had you been living in Britain 100 years ago. Just enter your gender and your father’s profession,” says the wonderful but rarely-work-safe Niek. If you don’t like what you see, you can nudge your avatar up or down the sociological staircase and try again.

To the Romans, “Rosa” meant a generic five-petaled flower. In fact, almost any five-petaled flower you see is from the “Rosaceae” family.

And May is the month when their flowers are everywhere.

The family includes such wildflowers as “cream bush, toyon, cinquefoil, horkelia, blackberry, thimbleberry and strawberries.“

Nerds like me will enjoy even more taxonomy:

“The fruits formed from the Rosaceae flowers …include apples (Malus), almonds, cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums, sloe, and prunes (Prunus), pears (Pyrus), blackberry, loganberry, boysenberry, raspberry (Rubus), strawberries (Fragaria), quince (Cydonia), loquat (Eriobotrya), rose hips (Rosa), medlar (Mespilus)…. Rosaceae also account at least one nut, the almonds (Prunus)….

“The Rosaceae family includes four subfamilies.

1. Rosoideae: many shrubs, perennial herbs, few annual, deep hypanthium, fruit hip, flat-like appearance, including genus Rosa, Rubus, Geum.
2. Prunoideae: woody plants, trees or shrubs, one carpel, pit, includes peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines, apricots, almonds.
3. Spiraeoideae: mostly woody trees and shrubs with a few herbaceous perennials, flat like appearance, including genus Aruncus, Spiraea.
4. Maloideae: trees and shrubs, fruit pome, including genus Aronia, Crataegus, Malus, Sorbus.”

Baby pigs goofing around with a peaceful tiger? This image came from Sukree Sukplang/Reuters–here’s their explanation:

“Sai Mai, a 26-month-old female tiger, plays with baby pigs at a zoo in Chonburi province, 50 miles east of Bangkok, May 7, 2003. The Royal Bengali tigress was born in captivity and breast-fed by a female pig for four months after her birth.”

No kidding–at the Sriracha Tiger Farm (Thailand), you can visit those tiger-and-pig mixed families.
amazing moments as the comely, but scarred lass feeds a croc.”)

How many times have you heard the pious hope that bringing diverse groups together would make people friendly? BZZZT! Wrong! People are much too smart (or too stupid) for this.

Ethnic groups in close contact rarely share space like good-natured tigers and happy little pigs. Pakistan glowers at India–Argentina smolders at neighboring Chile.

Who hates Northern Irish Protestants? Northern Irish Catholics, that’s who! Neighbours who ride the same bus routes and love the same tin-can brands of instant coffee and rice pudding.

I’m tired of pious hopes for cheap solutions. I can imagine human groups finding peace–IFF (scientific jargon for “if and only if”) they aren’t in conflict for the same scarce resources. If I see your needs as a threat to the needs of my kids–I’m not going to like you. No matter how well I know you, I’m not going to like you.

One of the life’s pleasures is watching your kids amaze you. Translation: my daughter Amity just produced her very first brand-new weblog, “Nature is profligate“.

Amity writes about photogenic stuff, with links and photos reflecting her wide-ranging love of biology. A small sample:

This delightful creature is Bombadil, my polydactylous cat. He looks as though he has two paws (one large and one small) on each of his front feet. These paws are semi-opposable, and he does use them to grasp objects.

(If you’ve seen older versions of my blog, you’ve seen Bombadil’s brother-cat eying a plastic frog–it served as a header for all my Astroturf stories.)

If you know someone who likes biology, friendly writing, and gorgeous pictures, send that person to Amity’s weblog. But beware–I wasted a long time yesterday playing with quicktime movies of colorful octopi. The background blup-blup-blup noises are more hypnotic than little blue cocktails with paper umbrellas on top.

Anyway, thanks to Dave Winer and his Blogs at Harvard program for helping this happen!

Something strange has happened at Ivy League colleges since I was in college. A surprisingly large fraction of the entering students now come from strongly religious families. Why is this?

One simple explanation is that colleges are more diverse than when I was young. Many black families, and many “ethnic” families, are strongly Christian. But I don’t think that’s all.

So many of my fellow-leftist parents ran into trouble with their kids in high school. The lure of teen culture–if not drugs and alcohol then at least “hanging out”–was in powerful opposition to our ideals. The parents whose kids were afraid of going to hell–well, a lot of their kids did better in high school than our kids. Not that I think kids should spend adolescence worrying about hell….

I tried to google some numbers to back up my anecdotal evidence–couldn’t find any. But if I had another pre-high-school-age kid, I would spend more time encouraging self-control and less on glorifying self-expression.

Science heartlessly revealed information we all (sort of) knew but guys were hoping would never be public–“ Men Tend to Overestimate the Number of Sexual Partners They’ve Had.”

Before I listen to anyone else’s bluster about the important objectives served by the war in Iraq, I would like to watch the blusterer try this little map game. Test your knowledge, at the most basic level, dragging and dropping the names of countries onto a map showing the Middle East. (Disclosure: I was embarrassed by mine.)

(Thanks to Joho for the link.)

Have you noticed that media frenzy over women POWs as exemplified by petite teenage Jessica Lynch hasn’t spilled over even one drop of extra compassion onto Shoshana Johnson, a 30-year-old black single mother from El Paso, Texas?

Shoshana is safe! And so are the rest of the POWs captured two-plus weeks ago when their truck took a wrong turn. My response at the time was that we should fire Rumsfeld and Hastert but bring Shoshana Johnson home to her two-year-old daughter.

I have to say that if Rumsfeld, Hastert, and Bush were all about to lose their jobs, I would not be as happy as I am now to learn that six US POWs are free, and one of them is Shoshana. The human heart is mysterious, don’t you think? But one of the very best things about us funny two-legged human animals is this: good news about people we care for brings us so much more happiness than news that bad things have happened to those we deplore.

Did Donald Rumsfeld rush into war, brushing off experts who warned it would be no “walkover”? Yes, according to the New Yorker and others. No, according to Rumsfeld and General Myers, in a vehement press conference.

Not surprisingly, Myers also claims that people who thought the war should have been planned differently, and news media who report their dissent, are endangering our troops and harming morale.* I have a different perspective.

After any decision, some people who “lost” feel their ideas got no fair hearing. By protesting, they hope to move future decisions more toward their side. Left-wingers have quite a lot to protest lately, but (for example) the anti-Roe-versus-Wade crowd is still out in force. So I don’t think the fact that everyone doesn’t clam up about the war should come as a huge surprise to Rumsfeld** and Myers–nor should the fact that a free press in a free country wants to report this dispute.

Just as predictable as outcry from folks who “lost” the debate are the highly moral reasons the folks who “won” give that all debate should end immediately. For example, at Harvard, there was a very loud outcry when anti-abortion students put up posters of much-magnified fetuses–pro-choice students claimed the posters were unfair, “intimidating,” immoral, etc., etc.

If Republicans want to build our troops’ morale, let them do so by pointing out that in real life few decisions are unanimous–and that one of the things we’re supposedly fighting for is the right of dissenters to speak. It is not the fault of General Myers that sleazy politicians have been pushing the idea that any dissent is treason that hurts our troops–but I can’t help asking, what business did he have sending troops out in such a precarious way that their safety depends on an end to domestic free speech?

* “The criticisms, he said, are ‘absolutely wrong, they bear no resemblance to the truth, and it’s just harmful to our troops that are out there fighting very bravely, very courageously.’
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** Joe Conason in Salon amusingly details Rumsfeld’s loud dissent on military strategy when Clinton had troops in the field in Kosovo.