WOTE's Quote du Jour*

"If I were a dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently."

-- John McCain, on the Wall Street bailout bill


Quote du Jour courtesy of:

"Lipstick on a Pig: A 2008 Campaign Quiz," in this week's New Yorker (the Politics Issue)


My only comment that is not a much-too-obvious joke is, How did this not get more coverage?? Seriously, if you Google the quote, only three links pop up, and two of them are from The New Yorker piece. (Then again, if you Google "John McCain" & "dictator," you get 1,080,000 results, so who knows.)

(Then again, again, if you Google "Barack Obama" & "dictator," you get 1,070,000 results. Don't you just love the Internet?)


* Despite its title, not a regular feature of WOTE. To be used only when I have no original thoughts of my own, nor any "WOTE (as-Fun-as-a-Fact-Can-Be) Fact of the Day" to use as equally indolent filler.

W(hy) N(ot women's) B(asketball as long as it involves chicks shoving each other onto their) A(sses?)

Can it be a coincidence that less than a week after I mention the WNBA for the first time in my life, the biggest event in the history of the league takes place?

No, it cannot.

Or can it?

Yes, it can. And who should be in the middle of it all but my new favorite player, Cheryl Ford, whose police mug shot (below, again) I featured last Friday. Ford tore her ACL in the game, and is now out for the season. Unfortunately she got injured on an earlier play, not in the fracas itself, which would have made her "I'm afraid of contact" quip that much more ironic. Or less ironic. I'm not sure which.




"There's no doubt that there has been a tremendous amount of attention," WNBA president Donna Orender said, "but it's not the type of attention that we seek."

Perhaps another marketing axiom is now in play: There's no such thing as bad press. Don't get me wrong. Homunculus isn't about to hunker down with a Cosmo and his bitches and turn on a WNBA game. But if a brawl breaks out, he will watch the highlights. Online. The next day.

[Cue chauvinistic catfight meow sound & scratching-claw gesticulation.]

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Oh yeah? Well I'm descended from King David. Biatch.

Last week I saw Mongol, the 2007 biopic about Genghis Khan. It was the first movie from Kazakhstan ever to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, and has been a surprise crossover hit here (by foreign-film standards, anyway). However,

[WARNING: Spoiler Alert!!]

it sucked. Trust me. The biggest surprise for me came after the film was over, when I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and found out that 88% of critics liked it.

How can 9 out of 10 experts be wrong? Some, like me, would say that a) the experts are actually morons and b) Homunculus is never wrong. But I think this is also a case of a foreign-film bias at work. With Hollywood coming up empty so often, critics are desperate for films to praise; foreign films fit the bill. First, and most significantly, only the best movies from other countries make it over here in the first place, so foreign films are inevitably better, on average, than our own. Also, though, foreign films are foreign, and when we think of the words "foreign film," we think of smart guys with elbow patches writing peer-reviewed essays about decontextualized sapphic undertones. We think of Bergman and the French New Wave, Fellini and Kurosawa. Black-and-white. "Non-narrative" structure.

Yet most foreign films, even the ones that make it over here, are just slightly better versions of our own indie films. Mongol isn't even that; it is just a slightly better version of our own shitty big-budget epics. The director, for all his skill with action scenes, basically comes off as a film-geeked-out adolescent with a hard-on for blood and medieval weaponry. My suspicion is that he's seen Braveheart a few too many times.

Here is a plot synopsis:

1. Little Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
2. Teenage Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
3. Young-adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, loses war, gets caught by his enemies, escapes.
4. Adult Genghis gets into trouble, gets caught by his enemies, escapes, starts war, wins war, becomes emperor of the Mongols.

And that's where things get interesting -- and where the film ends.

Rumor has it the film's producers intend to turn it into a trilogy. If they do, they might want to check out Wikipedia. I had remembered reading something once about how some ridiculous percentage of Asians are descended from Genghis Khan. So when I got home, I looked up ol' Temujin on the web to see if I could find anything about that. Sure enough, the Wiki came through, as always. According to Zerjal et al [2003] (my favorite Central-Asian microbiological genealogists, incidentally), "about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world)" carry a Y-chromosome link to "male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives." According to Homunculus, that's about 15 million mini-Khans running around the Steppe (plus about 15 million more Genghis-ettes). Not bad. The dude must have been like Warren Beatty, Wilt Chamberlain, and Warren Jeffs rolled into one. (Homunculus, for his part, would love nothing more than to have 8% of the Western world in 2853 A.D. composed of little Homunculi. Ladies?)

The film, needless to say, turns Genghis into an uxorious romantic. (In its defense, Mel Gibson's teeth in Braveheart were anachronistically well-polished, as was Russell Crowe's chest in Gladiator.)

Mongol also spurred a memory I had of a quote I read a long time ago from the Khan about what really turned him on. I googled "genghis khan quotes" and -- voila! -- found what I was looking for:

WOTE's (as-Fun-as-a-Quote-Can-Be) Quote du Jour

"The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters."

I think we can all agree on that.

Seriously, this dude was one of history's all-time badasses, right up there with Napoleon, Vlad the Impaler, and that guy who tackled a shark from behind and gutted it. For the filmmakers to characterize the Khan as a philosophizing family man, as opposed to the warmongering firestarter he actually was, is a bit of a stretch. It would be like casting, say, Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

Oh.

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

It’s been said a million times: we all have our imperfections; we all have things we don’t like about our bodies. In our world of glossy dual-page spreads and celebrity idolatry, those imperfections -- the things, as it’s been said a million times, that make us human -- inevitably merge with what we dislike about ourselves and become the very things we cover up, disguise, minimize, lament.

Me, I’ve never worried all that much. And trust me: it’s not because I don’t have my fair share of asymmetries, blemishes, and strange-looking nipplage. I’m as bent-nosed as the next guy (or at least the next guy who got clocked on the schnoz by a Pogo Ball as an eight-year-old). I guess I’ve always just had bigger problems to worry about. Lately, however, when my obsessive-compulsiveness (one such bigger problem, incidentally) has flared up and rendered me particularly obsessive and/or compulsive, I’ve noted for the first time all the imperfections I previously merely noticed. My response has been neither lamentation nor the happy acceptance the same beauty magazines that airbrush their models exhort their readers to feel (“Embrace your curves!”). Rather, I’d classify my reaction as one of... oh, let’s call it amused curiosity. I look at my nipples and think, "Damn, that’s some fucked up shit right there. Nice going, Darwin." I suppose I view my nipples as proof that nature has a sense of humor.

Here is more proof:

• When I urinate, it comes out in a spiral. I shit you not. (Er, I piss you not.) It’s true that once it hits the toilet bowl (or misses), it has already normalized into what I presume is the more traditional "taut spaghetti" form. But right out of the eye, it’s shaped like a helix, and it’s been like that as long as I can remember. [Incidentally, we have a urologist cousin who has made quite a name for himself (or as big a name as you can make as a urologist, anyway) by using his patients’ urination, uh, trajectories to determine the health of their, uh, urologies. Again, I piss you not -- his vanity license plate is "WEWEDOC." No joke. Anyway, Cousin Norm, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line and let me know if I should get that helix thing checked out. (And also that burning sensation -- is that normal?)]
• I have freakishly large pupils. An ophthalmologist once told me I had the biggest pupils he’d ever seen, which is basically akin to having the largest feet a podiatrist has ever handled, or being the best lay Paris Hilton’s ever experienced. In other words, it’s sayin’ something. Anyway, we all know what they say about guys with big pupils… That’s right: they end up with terrible red-eye in photos. I’m not the most photogenic person to begin with; eyes that glow like tale lights don’t help the cause. It’s ridiculous, really. If you were to look through my old photo albums, as I do whenever my unnecessarily dilated pupils don’t get in the way, you would find dozens of group shots of me with the people in my life. There -- those are my family and friends, smiling and presenting as normal, happy people. And that there -- that’s me, with my arms around them, looking like the spawn of Satan Himself.
• My fourth toes curl under my third. That may seem impossible -- or at the least, impossibly uncomfortable -- given the mechanics of upright locomotion, and you’d think the same thing were you to see my toes (and you should be thankful you haven’t -- they’re not a pretty sight). But there’s really no better way to describe it: each of my fourth toes doglegs inward and slips neatly (if I may say so myself) under the middle of each third toe. And the only effect it’s had on my locomotion is on the shape of my footprints. Apparently the condition is genetic: my paternal grandmother’s toes do the same thing.
• I can turn my tongue upside down. This is another one I’ve heard is entirely genetic. (My dad can do it; my mom cannot.) I can only flip it clockwise, though, and it’s far less exciting than the cherry stem thing (which my sister can do).
• When I cross my legs, man-style (ankle on knee, rather than thigh-over-thigh, which, I still maintain, must have deleterious consequences on one’s sperm count), I can only go left over right. I assume this is a flexibility issue as opposed to a genetic one, but the disparity between the two positions is extreme: it’s not so much a preference as a physical limitation. I literally cannot put my right ankle on my left thigh without lifting it with both hands and then simultaneously pushing down on my right knee with my elbows. My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to start doing yoga. Maybe that will help.
• My left nut hangs lower than my right. I am pretty sure yoga will not fix this, but I’m not overly concerned, since apparently most men suffer from some, uh, asymmetry on one side or the other. (Yes, I looked it up.) (What, like you wouldn’t have?) My own discrepancy seems to be rather extreme, however, and widening every year. By 2019, when I have that right-over-left thing mastered, my left nut will be bouncing off the curb. On the bright side, it’s a well-known fact that left-nutted people are highly logical and facile with numbers; I credit the 800 I got on my Math SAT to my testicular imbalance.
• There’s a strange hair that grows out of my stomach, at the bottom left can in my six-pack. It’s all alone and perfectly white and longer and finer than any other strand on my body (or head, for that matter). At least an inch, I’d say. And whenever I pluck it out, boing! -- it sprouts back at some random time, seemingly to full length overnight. I’m looking at it now, as I type this, and wondering if perhaps I should leave it alone this time, if it might not be a source of some power I just haven’t harnessed yet.
• I cannot straighten my pinky fingers. When I hold out my hands in front of me, as flat as they will go, the pinkies remain slightly bent at the first joints, forming perfectly imperfect 170-degree angles.
• My left ear sticks out further than my right. I noticed this particular irregularity a while ago, but it didn’t occur to me until a year ago what caused it: sleeping on my right side my whole life. As resilient as the human body is -- I assume it does what it can to maintain its symmetry -- twenty years of eight-hour load-bearing sessions will do that to a flab of cartilage. When I realized my sleeping habits were to blame, I immediately attempted to reverse two decades of habit by trying to fall asleep on my left side. The thing is, I actually prefer the aesthetics of my somnambulantly altered ear -- the "natural" one sticks out too much -- so sleeping on my left side into the mid-2020s would actually create an artificial symmetry more handsome than the original, plastic surgery be damned. The problem was -- and is -- that I can’t fall asleep on my left side. I thus settled for a happy medium: I now sleep on my back. My ears will be forever imbalanced, but only moderately so. Worse things, I suppose, have been borne of childhood.

So there you have it. That’s me: warts and imbalances and freakish disfigurations and all. My self-portrait is below. Since this will forever remain an anonymous blog and I will never post my photo, the MS Word drawing tool-generated version below is the closest you will come to glimpsing ol’ Homunculus. However, the devoted readers of this blog who know me -- i.e., my parents -- can attest that it is a fairly accurate representation of what I actually look like.

Now it’s your turn. If you’ve read this and become inspired to catalog and then reveal your own endearing deformities, please do so by posting them in a Comment below. The readers of this blog -- i.e., my parents -- might respond by growing brave themselves, and it could soon snowball into some revolutionary sociological experiment and eventually put every beauty magazine on the shelves out of business. That’s what my magic stomach hair is telling me, anyway.