Just a quick one, dear readers. I keep seeing shit cars with Playboy stickers on, and girls wearing Playboy branded clothing. What exactly are they trying to say? They are invariably overweight, and have an orange glow and badly bleached hair. Playboy sell the concept of hot girls with no clothes on. Do these girls want to be porn models? Do they aspire to be a centrefold? Who would want to see these hideous girls naked? 
I’m loving the Mac, but have had a bit of a learning curve! These are the things that scuppered me this week:
None of these things are the Mac’s fault, but it’s made me realise how entrenched I am in the PC world. PC stuff comes second nature, so I am having to think about things I do now 
Bearing in mind Western governments have recently invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, shouldn’t petrol be super cheap now?
Everyone is jumping on the “green” bandwagon. However, cutting polluting effects of their products by 1% does not give companies the right to splash “GREEN!” all over it. That is such cynical marketing, and misses the point completely.
This leads on to another point about advertising in general. They are professional liars who slant things to make their stuff look better than it is. This sounds obvious, but even being aware of it is not enough to protect me from the barrage of lies that are fired at me every day. I can only pray that people are sharp enough to resist. It is short sighted for advertisers to promise the earth to make people buy things, only for them to realise afterwards that they have been skanked.
Which leads to another point. Why do I care? Commerce requires a constant obsolesence, otherwise companies would sell one perfect item to everyone that wants one, and then go bust due to lack of sales. We don’t need all this “stuff”. What would happen if we all realised that? Serious economic changes, and not for the benefit of shareholder driven companies that need constant expansion. Constant expansion needs a constantly increasing number of people to sell things to. We only have limited space and consumable resources. Where is this leading? Am I taking a too abstract and long term view? Maybe, but that’s the way I think, and I don’t want to play the circular purchase game. And I certainly don’t believe in “Green” air travel, or “Green” cars. They just aren’t green, so stop trying to make us think they are, lying companies.
I was bought this book as a present by someone and he told me it is “the scariest book I have ever read”. I agree, but for a different reason. The basic premise of the book is that due to evolution, we have inherited mating strategies that result in us promoting our family line. Sperm Wars describes a hypothesis to “explain” this. Essentially, women aim to confuse their partners as to their fertile time, fuck as many men as possible and then let the sperm battle amongst themselves to fertilise her egg. May the best sperm win.
While Baker makes a strong argument for this hypothesis, the book and methodology sets off red flashing lights to me.
