Year: 2005

It’s a pity that it’s been patented. I can think of a number of people who should be wearing this and forced to use it.

Sometimes I find it difficult to love my fellow human beings when they are like these particular examples. This is a US-centric list – doubtless we should be thinking about one for citizens of the world at large… Any suggestions?

This is a phone. According to the sales blurb: "Customers can also choose from optional costume covers in unique forms such as Bull, Tire, Cheese, Lawn and Sucker to change handset appearances with ease and a sense of fun".

Alright, I know I’m obviously out of touch with today’s modern world, but all I would like is a simple phone, OK?

What is it about people in marketing? Why is it I look at many of them and think: "The wheel’s spinning, but the hamster’s dead"? And then combine the world of Fashion with Marketing, and you’ve got a foolproof case of why they should be first up against the wall, come the revolution. Here’s a case in point: a news story on the birth of Hybrid Man.

All the usual suspects are there:

• A study carried out by French marketing and style consultants (always a bad sign).
• The study was "unveiled" to Fashion Group International (the fashion industry – usually barking mad)
• The occasion was during a seminar to find "the future strategy for Fashion in Europe" (er, shouldn’t the strategy be to sell more frocks to people who know no better? What else is there to your strategy? No need for a seminar, then).

The managing director, Pierre Francois Le Louet, said: "We are watching the birth of a hybrid man. … Why not put on a pink-flowered shirt and try out a partner-swapping club?".  

Beg pardon? What was that you said?

"He is looking for a more radical affirmation of who he is, and wants to test out all the barbarity of modern life" including in the sexual domain, said Le Louet, adding that Reebok with its "I am what I am" campaign had perfectly tapped into this current trend.

How times change; in my day, "I am what I am" was a torch song belted out by a drag queen – now it’s a slogan for overpriced footwear. Sorry, Monsieur Le Louet, I think I’ll pass on your invitation to become a hybrid man – I don’t think my comfy slippers quite fit the image your campaign is pushing.

Sepia Mutiny has two interesting data points around the beliefs and practices of Homeland Security in the US.

Data point one: two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers.

Data point two: a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned white murderer with an assault record who shows up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor is let in after being served coffee at the border post.

Hello?

The BBC news site is carrying a story at the moment about an online gamer who has been sentenced to life for killing a fellow gamer. The motive for the killing? The dead gamer "sold" a virtual sword belonging to the killer. So alongside the Virtual Economy now arrives Real-life Crime. This may be the first, but it won’t be the last.

Today I came across Gabriel Rosenberg’s blog that, in his own words, is "A mathematician’s thoughts on same-sex marriage, and little else of late". While obviously a lot of the discussion revolves around the culture and mores of Americans, I noticed that one of the entries referred to an article by Stanley Kurtz that was called "Lessons of the same-sex marriage debate in the Netherlands". Intrigued, I went and read the piece, which turned out to be arguing that same-sex marriage signifies the demotion or abolition of marriage as the socially preferred setting for parenthood.

The article leads off with a graph that strikes me as being a very questionable piece of statistical cooking. It is a graph from the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics showing "Out-of-Wedlock births" for the years 1970 – 2003. That in itself is fine – the questionable bit comes in having certain years marked with the milestones in the moves to introduce same-sex marriage in the Netherlands, and the suggestion that the conjunction between the introduction of same-sex marriage and the rise in out-of-wedlock births "is no coincidence". There are of course plenty of other factors that play out in Dutch society that might influence the figures, but those are ignored by Kurtz.

I thought that I would visit the Central Bureau of Statistics web site to see what they might have to say about the matter. I found a paper by Jan Latten on Trends in samenwonen en trouwen (Trends in cohabitation and marriage) published in Q4 2004. It’s in Dutch (unfortunate – if you don’t read the language) and it illustrates some of the complex interactions. Latten himself warns against simplistic interpretations using the traditional categories of marriages, divorces, etc., but I can’t resist pointing to the very first graph in the paper, showing the numbers of marriages registered during the years from 1960 to 2003. What that shows is that the rate of marriages rose during the swinging sixties to a peak in 1970, and then fell very rapidly thereafter to a low point in 1983, whereupon it picked up again and oscillated at around 85,000 per year up to today. These facts clearly didn’t suit Kurtz’s argument. Also, at first sight, graph 8 is startling, showing that in 2003, nearly 40% of the firstborn were born out-of-wedlock. However, as Latten points out, many parents now marry after their first child is born – and graph 8 also shows the effect of this.

What all this boils down to is that ideas of marriage are indeed changing, but that simplistic, Chicken Little-like cries of "The Sky is falling" are not the answer, particularly if the "blame" is placed at the door of same-sex marriage.

As an aside, reading some of the comments on Gabriel’s blog gives me a strong impression that their writers are particularly unpleasant people. Phrases such as "same-sex impersonation of marriage" and how homosexuality "crushes responsible procreation". I think I need to go and have a wash.