One reason that real violence looks so ugly is because we have been exposed to so much mythical violence. (…) Contemporary film style may give many people the sense that entertainment violence is, if anything, too realistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. … [They] miss the most important dynamics of violence: that it starts from confrontational tension and fear, that most of the time it is bluster, and that the circumstances that allow this tension to be over­ come lead to violence that is more ugly than entertaining. (…)

A second myth is that fights are long. (…) Whereas most film and stage dramas compress real time to gloss over the dull and routine moments of ordinary life, they expand fighting time by many times over. (…) In reality, most serious fights on the individual or small-group level are extremely short.

{ Randall Collins | via OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

1) Throughout human history social activities have taken place at night. (In fact more than 60 percent of the people Piffer polled met their latest partner in the evening or night.) The evening is commonly reserved for courtship activity — dancing, drinking, having sex. Over time, the male night owl attends more social events, meets more women, and has more sex.

2) “Eveningness” is a sexually dimorphic trait. Across cultures, “more males than females stay up late at night (due to biological differences involving the timing of peak melatonin levels). Piffer speculates that men evolved to stay up late because the most reproductively successful men pass along their genes to subsequent generations. In terms of Darwinian sexual selection, evening orientation benefits males more because it gives them an increased opportunity to acquire multiple lovers — all at one go, or over time. Women, however, don’t achieve greater reproductive success by having sex with more men (it only takes one to get pregnant), which is why fewer women are evening-oriented. Men with an evening orientation have a competitive advantage over men with a morning orientation.

3) Evening-orientation, Piffer speculates, may also be a direct product of sexual selection. That is, women may actively choose night owls over morning birds. Piffer draws on the “cads-versus-dads” theory; that is, women often go for bad boys, especially at a certain stage of life, and men who stay up into the night are likelier to fall into this category.

4) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.

{ Jena Pincott | Continue reading | Continue reading | Circadian Preference and Sexual Selection: A Novel Evolutionary Approach, by Davide Piffer }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

I try to do what Jeff Koons did when he put 1, 2 or 3 New Shelton Wet/Dry vacuums in a Plexiglas box, and added a title. I put news in Plexiglas boxes, and add titles.

It’s rather an experiment than journalism.

It’s about editing news, about the concept “editing/commenting is creating” developed a century ago when philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault to name a few) made Philosophy by commenting past Philosophy.

Almost everything is quoted and nothing is signed: French writer Marguerite Yourcenar once said that it doesn’t matter who is writing. What matters is that it is written.

Also: Personality is like a collection of traits that we all share, and that we sometimes borrow from each other, but the totality (of qualities and traits) is peculiar to a specific person. That’s how one differs from another, by creating a different mix of existing traits, by tuning these traits to various degrees.

The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. We spend our life building this mask, and make it attractive, unique, different, coherent… It’s about editing traits and influences. It’s about creating something new from existing material.

artwork { Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker, 1981-87 | Vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas and fluorescent lights | Photo: Thanks Daniel! }

related { Whether your earwax is wet or dry is determined by a mutation in a single gene, scientists have discovered. }

Sorry for the blackout.

The server has crashed and everything it was hosting has disappeared. There was no backup — besides the google caches. We’ll have to start over from scratch. (The new shelton wet/dry now looks more like a sand mandala than a Jeff Koons artwork.)

I’ll keep publishing every friday. Thanks for your continued support and readership.

New URL is newshelton.com/wet/dry/