I recently saw a short documentary on killer whales (orcas.) Apparently, they found a pod of killer whales who had found a new way to hunt for stingrays by swimming upside down, biting down on them and then swim the right way up, flipping the stingray over and therefore putting them in a state of tonic immobility. The physiology of stingrays is such that they become docile and eventually asphyxiate when they are flipped up side down, so they don’t fight back. What was even more interesting was that they seemed to teach each other this new technique. Also, when the scientists who were observing them caught up with them several months later, they found that almost all of the orcas in the pod displayed vicious scars and signs of struggle, probably with sharks. They soon found out why because this pod had developed a shark hunting technique. They would flank a shark, ram it, stun it temporarily and then grab it, flip it upside down, putting it in a state of tonic immobility and suffocating it. The scary thing; they’re teaching it to other orcas. The great white shark is no longer the top of the food chain in this planet’s oceans. :)
[MMA] Best Entrance: Yoshihiro Akiyama
I was always a fan of Yoshihiro Akiyama – or Sexyama, as he’s called by his fans. When he moved from Dream to the UFC he stunned everyone with his amazing entrance. He walked out into the arena with his team, went down on his knees and bowed. Of course, those who knew him knew that that was his customary entrance. Coupled with the fact that the Japanese always have more window dressing than the UFC ever did, it looked nice, but it didn’t really shine like his entrances normally do. Here’s an image of his entrance at UFC 100:
Now compare that to his entrance at Dream 5, where he fought Misaki (ruled a no contest due to an illegal soccer kick to the head of Sexyama.) What’s also interesting is the stark contrast between Sexyama’s entrance and that of Misaki. :)
Unpopular Ideas About Paedophilia
Before I say anything, let me preface all of this with the answer to the very first question you are likely to ask; do you think pedophilia is okay? No. No, I don’t. Don’t for one moment take the following as an endorsement of pedophilia or pedosexuality. Morally, ethically and legally wrong.
However – there would be no point to this post if there was no however – it is understandable (up to a certain point.) 300 years ago it was normal for people to be married by the age of fourteen and have children a year later. Especially in the case of girls it was normal to have them married off to a far older man. An elderly man is more established and financially more secure and was able to provide for her and her children. A young woman was still strong enough to go through childbirth and hopefully have many children before she’d become either barren or too old. Nowadays, through the wonders of modern medicine a woman can have children up to her fifties if she’s inclined to accept the elevated risk of birth defects. Also, in most developed societies the church (and specifically the Catholic church) no longer pushes the idea of having as many children as possible, so a woman doesn’t have to start early and she can decide to provide in her own financial security as to not be dependent on a man. All in all very good developments, I would say. But it doesn’t deny where we came from and who we were not so long ago.
I often see younger girls and appreciate their budding beauty, thinking to myself “Wow, she’s going to a heartbreaker when she grows up.” Immediately following such a thought I realise I shouldn’t speak such appreciation out loud for fear of judgment, even though there was nothing lecherous about my appreciation. And still, I feel like I am biologically driven to take note of a young beauty and show appreciation for her appearance. If she had nothing to offer me on a biological level I’d have little appreciation for her.
I guess there’s a digressively sliding scale, ranging from appreciation to lecherous to predatory the younger a woman becomes. If I appreciate a thirty something it’s because of her beauty, strength and confidence. If I appreciate a twenty year old (having passed the thirty mark myself) it might be considered lecherous and if I appreciate a girl in her teens my feelings could be labeled as predatory. Anything younger than that as sick and deranged.
Nowadays, girls reach physical maturity usually by the time they’re twelve years old, which might have been the age to start looking for a husband 300 years ago, but nowadays it is about the time the put their dolls down. Boys are much the same, physically ready to procreate but nowhere near the emotional and intellectual maturity to raise a child. Over the last few hundred years the moment of emotional graduation to adulthood has been pushed back further and further – myself, I am a 31 year old child – while physical adulthood has stayed virtually the same. We are fortunate enough to live in a time where we can keep our children from being bogged down by responsibilities, unencumbered and unobstructed from getting the best possible education their intellect can handle. A side effect is that we tend to keep our children as ignorant and innocent like children. They don’t mature until they really really have to and when they do they are not eased into it naturally, but it is thrust upon them by things like work. When work is generally a nine-to-five affair and also the first contact we have with responsibilities, we generally choose to remain kids for even longer in our private lives. Years after our first real job we’re often still not emotionally mature enough to deal with the momentous task of raising a child. All in all, our emotional maturity usually trails far behind out physical maturity. So we end up with all these urges but no concept of the possible consequences of those urges.
In the end it isn’t surprising that men, especially, can appreciate the beauty of a young woman due to hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of biology. The cognitive dissonance you experience, between the physical attraction and the ethical repulsion, can be very troublesome for some people. We’ve found an age of consent that is completely arbitrary and it is one of the great examples of law where one size fits no one. It is, however, the common agreement that we live by and those who seek to break that law should lawfully pay the price for that unfortunate decision, because no matter how you look at it, most under aged people are no longer capable of realising the full range and extent of the consequences of having sex.
My Back
Last week I decided to go back to training and thinking that perhaps BJJ wasn’t the greatest idea due to all the wrestling, I thought I’d start out with Sanda (kickboxing). While the training was very light, and mostly focussed on technique rather than conditioning, my back blew out three minutes into the warm-up. Being stupid, I continued training and by the end of the two hour class I was crippled. The following day I had a lot of trouble even getting out of bed, and my back was stiff and painful. That evening, however, I joined Eva for “a few drinks” and I didn’t feel my back at all during that time. (Probably on the count of the bottle-and-a-half of wine I had consumed.) The next day my back felt better and it continued to get better. I’m not sure what to think about this, but I’m not going to question it. I’ll take it easy for another week or two and see if I can start doing some stuff again.
In the meantime, my buddy Jim is going to have a kickboxing match this friday evening. (Low kicks and all!) Very excited. Hopefully he’ll do better than the last two people I rooted for; Marloes Coenen and Melvin Manhoef.
A Profession As a Lifestyle
I was recently told a story about a guy who wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer at a big law firm because he was more of a “heavy metal guy” than a lawyer. It struck me as odd that those things could be mutually exclusive until I realised that a large law firm probably don’t want non-conformists – at least not in a certain sense. I’m sure they’ll be delighted with someone creatively non-conformist who can get attain success by looking at things in a different light, but I can see how that person not being the suite-and-tie type might interfere with their view of how their business should be run. I think that what you’ll get is the belief that a choice of profession – in this case, being a lawyer – is a choice of lifestyle; dressing a certain way, acting a certain way, doing particular things, etc. If you’re surrounded by the same type of people at work for twelve hours a day, who all try to act according to what they’ve been taught someone in your profession looks and acts like, you’ll become convinced that the stereotype – or rather, the archetype – is true. It’s a self-affirming situation.
I understand the push to remove individuality in the military. I understand that large companies might want to do the same; conformity is easier to manage, after all. It does offend me, however, to think that I would have to move away from desire to be stereotype disconfirming in order to excercise a particular profession. Companies like Google embrace the differences that define us as individuals instead of part of the herd, and yet, they can probably also only allow that up until a certain point before your quirks and oddities start interfering with their ability to get you to do what they need you to do, so even there individual expression, while not stifled, is put to bounds. Perhaps people’s tendency to be underachievers, coupled with the unnatural instinct to be individuals, free to express themselves however they feel, leads to less success driven people who have jobs rather than careers. It’s often said that in order to be successful at your career, you have to liveyour chosen field, rather than just work in it.
And yet, the concept of letting your profession dictate your life to the extent that your profession has become your lifestyle, bothers me.