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

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Scientists decoding the human genome announced that just 78 genes separate men from women. The BBC then published a list of guesses at what those genes do.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Women drive on the stretch of road they can see. Men move through the landscape by car.

Men do not even bother to look for something, then ask where it is and hope that it was the woman who put it away.

Men use I or me when they should use we or us. Women use we or us when they should use I or me.

Men speak in sentences. Women speak in paragraphs.

These are my favorites because they make me laugh by reminding me of some, not all, of the real men and women I know.

Speaking of real men and women, Dave Winer today links to a lovely piece he wrote a few years ago about boys, adventure, and a dangerous tumble down the side of a mountain. On the way down, exhilarated, safe, he points out his cuts and blood to a little boy:

Look, I fell down the mountain! I smile happily. I’m OK! Everyone laughs.

Boys dig this (I’m a boy too). In our best moments, this is what being a man is about — taking risks, falling down, getting up and laughing at our good fortune.

I know Dave means by this what he says he means–that men (like women) find inspiration and comfort in living up to their ideals.

There are a lot of things that aren’t “fair” when you compare the lot of men and women. Women live longer. Men earn more. Women make jokes about men and don’t like it when men make jokes about them. (Of course the opposite is also true–it just depends on which social group you hang out with.)
I did
a Google search on “it’s not fair” and came up with almost 90,000 results. Here, in the order I found them, are the top six:

1. Health Care is under attack in Ontario and transsexuals have been unfairly targetted.
2. During the Iraq war, ClearChannel radio news had a blatantly pro-war slant.

3. The playing field for DB2 backup and recovery is not level.
4. Global inequalities condemn many people to live in hopeless poverty.
5. Pollution and nationalism create problems for many species.
6. Some national park roads are impassible when it rains.

Some of my favorite bloggers–one is Halley–say honest blogs in a personal voice are the wave of the (business) future. I disagree, for two reasons.

1. Honest blogging can hurt your career.
2. I don’t think your boss should expect to buy your “personal voice”.

1. How can your blog hurt your career? A recent conference summary at JOHO lists just a few ways. Federal law protects you by forbidding prospective employers to ask certain questions–“How old are you?” “How many children do you have?” But if you post such info in your blog–that protection is gone.

Once you are hired, you can be fired for stuff you post in your blog. It doesn’t have to be stuff like “Our product sucks.”

Suppose you have even one co-worker who doesn’t like you. Suppose this co-worker finds something “naughty” in your blog–you smoked dope, or you played football pools on company time, or whatever. Suppose this co-worker brings this to your boss–your boss could be in big trouble if he doesn’t act, even if he doesn’t want to–just the same way an airport security person could lose her job if she doesn’t confiscate tiny pocket knives.

2. How can you business-blog in a personal voice? If you write stuff your boss wouldn’t like, see problem #1, above. If you are careful not to write stuff your boss wouldn’t like, how is this honest and personal?

If your boss requires you to business-blog, can you do it during normal business hours? Or are you expected to blog “as a professional”–that is, after work, cutting into your family time?

Fun, thoughtful, quirky, provocative, purely Halley-esque. Just go read it. I don’t have time to add my own two cents this morning, but that’s okay. You’ll be thinking up your own responses and that will be even more fun than reading mine.

Bzzzz–is that a scooter approaching, or a flock of buzzwords? A2O! AOS! Anyone for audio caffeine?

Buzzwhack’s Buzzword Compliant Dictionary has short definitions, full of attitude, for stuff like this. I even get their “BUZZWORD OF THE DAY”–and today’s definition took a (buzz)whack at Segway:

EPAMD: Electric Personal Assistive Mobility
Device. A term coined by Segway in an attempt to
convince state legislators its motorized
two-wheeler is not a “vehicle.” Vehicles aren’t
allowed on sidewalks, have to be registered like
cars and require drivers to be licensed. How many
vehicles, er, things meet the EPAMD definition?
Only the Segway and nothing else.

PR giant Burson-Marsteller’s super-aggressive hype campaign for Segway is a major case of a big ugly tail wagging a cute little dog. (Speaking of super-aggressive hype campaigns, Burson-Marsteller also fronts for Botox.)

Kinda makes you wonder–how much of the cost of a Segway goes to BM?

“I find it’s often hard to take a good picture of someone wearing a HELLO stick-on label.”

Jim Roberts of Noded raised this excellent point in his comment on my blogpost yesterday. Have you ever wondered:

• why photos of people at conferences look so bad?
• why your passport photo looks like Uncle Bill on a bender?
• why some photographers take gorgeous pictures, but most take photos so bad our subjects wish their heads had been cut off?

Answer: there are force-fields in our universe that make (some) people look terrible in (some) photos. These “Photogenicity Inhibiting Force Fields” or PIFFs are my own contribution to physics and metaphysics:

• Why do PIFFs attach to objects like HELLO badges?
• Why do PIFFs pervade the world of “Official” photos?
• How do photographers like Niek get rid of PIFFs?
• Why is everyone in my family but me immune to them?

As soon as my lawyers pin down the trademark, copyright, and patent rights to “PIFF”, I’ll be unveiling this for the New York Times.

“The years teach much that the days never know.” Ralph Waldo Emerson “The true measure of success isn’t money or power. It’s laugh lines.” send a postcard

Usually we get to paint our own portraits in these pages of ours, and to post photos that are at least somewhat flattering. For example, if I think about what I look like, I might think of these recent but still very flattering photos.

Anyway, I love the email interview Frank Paynter did of me–he is a brilliant question-devizer–and he was kind enough to take down a photo I didn’t like and replace it with one I sent him. So now this is what I look like, not just according to me but also in Frank Paynter’s interview.

But as for what I am like–that nerdy, ditzy persona in the interview? Frank got that perfectly right.

Wow! I woke up Friday morning to discover that Frank Paynter has published our email interview! I quickly dashed off this mini-response, then raced out the door to catch my flight to Colorado without noticing I never posted it to the home page.

Now I’m sitting in a Kinko’s in Boulder…expect mile-high blogging when I return, and jet-lagged garble at this very moment.

Thanks to Frank for being so interested–and so interesting himself.

There’s a great big biosphere outside our blogosphere, and you can see some its strangest features in Amity Wilczek‘s Harvard blog “Nature Is Profligate.”

Aside from the fact that Amity is my daughter–I love the surprising stuff she blogs about and the even-more-surprising things she says about that stuff. To quote Amity on the subject of
two-headed snakes:

“Watching a movie of a two-headed snake is like watching a tug of war with a very short rope — one head says “Up!” while the other says “Down!”…Snakes have a keen sense of smell, which is very important in their prey location response. If one head smells like a recent meal, the other head may try to eat it!

(BTW, following Amity’s two-headed-snake-links, I discovered a
cute little duck with a 17-inch corkscrew for a penis. Did he evolve for two-thirds of “wine, women, and song”?)