Affairs and Other Trivial Pursuits

Hello. Because it is Thanksgiving Week and no one wants to read “smart takes” or “deep dives,” today will be an abbreviated Gene Pool (AKA an abrvtd gn pl) featuring short extemporanea and extranea. The uniting factor is that it’s all about sexual, romantic and other human relations.

For example, there is this hilarious video. It is distantly related to the joke above, which is the best variation I’ve seen on a longstanding meme.

Then there is this:

A poll by yougov.com showed that when Americans were asked to estimate what percentage of Americans fit into these different categories, here were the answers:

Transgender: 21 percent!

Muslim: 27 percent!

Jewish: 30 percent!

Black: 41 percent!

Gay or lesbian: 30 percent!

Reside in NYC: 30 percent!

I asked a math bot to further deconstruct these numbers, and it turns out it means that more than a third of our citizens are likely Black, Jewish lesbians. (The actual percents of each group in the U.S. are, from the top, 1.6, 1.3, 2.4, 14, 7, 3.).

I’m not sure what the meaning of this is, but I’m thinking it’s not unrelated to the notion of “othering.” People feel beset, threatened and outnumbered by Others, which might help explain the election of Donald Trump.

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Speaking of sex maniacs, there is this story from Equatorial Guinea, where the headline tells you all you need:

Sex Scandal: Top Government Official Caught Having Sex With President’s Sister, Pastor’s Wife, Police Inspector’s Daughter, Uncle’s Pregnant Wife And Countless Married Women In Nearly 400 Sex Videos

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And lastly, I’d like to address two issues that got interesting poll results in recent Gene Pools.

The first is the subject of whether the odd, purely sext-ual relationship between RFK Jr. and reporter Olivia Nuzzi constituted an “affair,’ as it has generally been described in the media. I polled you about this and the responses were interestingly divided: Women said “yes,” by a small majority, and men said “no” by a large majority. I promised to weigh in today.

Weighing in:

I say no, for reasons involving the entire complicated nature of marriage and romance and commitment and freedom and individuality. Essentially we are talking about an overheated flirtation, which would be justifiably disturbing to a spouse, and probably indicate problems with the marriage that should be addressed — but it seems to me that policing this as an infidelity that is equivalent to an affair comes close to criminalizing thought. Does marriage imply ownership?

I have a close friend, a woman, who once told me that if she ever saw her husband holding hands with a woman across a table, she would immediately call a divorce lawyer. She also said that she’d do the same thing if she saw her husband ogling another woman. I feel her attitude to be possessive to the point of dysfunction. After marriage, we still remain human people, no?

To qualify as an affair, I think you need physical intimacy of at least a somewhat extended nature.

The second issue we’ll be discussing in the questions and answers below. It’s whether this museum piece, which sold for $6.2 million as art, is, in fact, “art.”

But I must first show you this, an AI image seized from the Web just yesterday:

Okay, here we go with questions and observations.

Q:  I've been trying to think of a good analogy for Trump's cabinet picks. I'm stuck between the villains in Dick Tracy, or Boris Badenov's Local 12 of the Villains Thieves and Scoundrels Union. They're comic book characters brought to life.

A:  I like the Dick Tracy villain analogy because of how colorful those people were.   Flattop, Pruneface, Breathless Mahoney, Pearshape, etc.  All cacklingly evil.  All hilarious looking. Here is Pruneface:

Here is Flattop:

They all have weird heads in some ways, just like Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr., who (quoting Jimmy Kimmel) looks like his face is always cooked to “medium well.”    If he were a Tracy villain, he’d be Gravelmouf.  Musk would be The Rectangle on account of his head being a perfect rectangle. Gaetz would be the wicked Dr. Pompadour.

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We now begin the Real-Time component of the Gene Pool, where you ask questions and make observations, and I try to answer them in real time. Use the Trump/cantaloupe colored button here.

Q: I don't know exactly where the line is between being friends and having an emotional affair, but sexting is surely on the "affair" side of it.

A:  See, that’s my problem.   I don’t know what an “emotional affair” is, exactly.   We are still allowed to have feelings and affection for people, no? Or do we park them at the door when we get married?

I feel I am probably in the minority on this.

Q: For those who think sexting isn't having an affair, can you explain how something consensual and sexual isn't an affair?

A: Well, how about a kiss?   How about if you share a kiss with someone not your spouse?  A single, impulsive romantic, even thrilling kiss.  Is that an “affair”?  Is it even an infidelity? This is a slippery slope, IMO.

Okay, now here’s today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: Just click on the headline in the email and it will deliver you to the full column online. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

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Also, perhaps you would consider fighting fascism for $4.15 a month? I’d sure appreciate it.

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Q: The banana art is a signal of a market top. We are in the crazy zone. Money and price have totally disconnected from value. We have been here before, indeed repeatedly. The tulip bulb mania of 1638. Canal and railroad stocks in the 19th Century.. Internet stocks in March of 2000. Mortgage bonds in 2008. It is the moment of frenzy. We experience it sexually when tension builds up to a climax. The Beatles depicted it music with the crescendo in A Day in the Life in the Sgt. Pepper album.  Crazy bitcoin money funded crazy conceptual art money.  We look back at the price of Cisco and Sun Microsystems and wonder what the heck we were thinking. Same with mortgage loans in 2008.  We wish there were a sign that there was a straw that would break the camel's back. If only there were a sign.  This is the sign. That is the value of this art. – Peter Sage, Medford, OR

A: Interesting take on it.   I knew a woman who made two million at the beginning of the Internet era because she built one of the first internet dating advice sites.  As I recall it was very primitive and not very good, but was acquired preemptively by a company that wanted to corner that market.  I believe it was Doonesbury that noted any company could double its value by changing nothing but adding an “e-” to the start of its name..

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Q:  Re: Your critique of Millennials not picking up phone calls. iPhone users can dodge spam and help heart-attack uncle. You just hit "voicemail" on your incoming call screen and a transcript of the message starts to appear on the screen--AND you can still pick up the call as long as they are still on it. Transcripts are sometimes laughable, but you can figure out pretty quickly if you want to pick it up. I presume this feature is available outside of the Appleverse.  Terri Smith

A: Thanks, Terri.  Good advice.  

Q: Wow. Achenbach’s article on The Beatles is really incredible.  Thank you for sharing it. I always thought that line from Live and Let Die was egregiously ungrammatical too, but then I realized I'd misunderstood it because of Paul's softened but ever-present Liverpudlian drawl. Here is what I'm now convinced he's actually saying: "But in this ever changing world in which we're livin'..."

Sarah Walsh

A: I’d like to tell you’re right, Sarah, but nah. Paul was once definitively interviewed on this very subject, and said he wasn’t sure which it was … livin’ or live in … which is suspicious, because he realized the double-in was terrible but was not denying it.  Then someone tracked down the original music score for Live and Let Die, from 1973, and the lyrics were written;  “But if this ever changing world in which we live in….makes you give in and cry… ”  I have researched it ad nauseam, including listening to it for 15 minutes on a loop.  There is no “r” or even an elided r in the way Paul pronounces ‘we.’ 

Some new written lyrics have made the transition to the better-sounding line, but it’s a sham.   When Guns n’ Roses covered it in 1991, they cited the original words.

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Q: Should Jack Smith have forced T-rump to browbeat his own Attorney General into dismissing all the cases in order to set the facts on record as to who did what for what purposes for future historians to write? I think this dismissal not only lets him off the hook now, but also when the future history is written. Tom Logan - Sterling, VA

A: You lost me. Why would it set those facts on record? It would LOOK worse, but why would there be any greater discovery?

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Q: Something I think is art but others don’t.  It’s mine, a small size brown paper bag tied up in a bow that previously held a thoughtful gift from a dear friend; the crinkles in paper retained the love and authenticity of the gift bearer like a hug while the generous opening where the gift presented itself held the joy it gave to me -- I remember being unable to toss the brown paper bag and stow the bow in my desk drawer -- alone it was a work of art; so I hunted throughout my little home for a spot and affixed it to the wall just off the bedroom stairwell

A:   Nice touch.   

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Q: Something considered art that I don't consider art: the hideous massive blue "abstract human walking" sculpture outside The Kennedy Center. Jackie weeps.

You mean this?

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This is Gene: Now here’s something I think is art and others, presumably, don’t:

I can’t really explain why I find it so beautiful, but I always have. I think it is clean, elegant design. Also, maybe, the Google home page logo.

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Q: In the summer of 1975, I visited (among *many* other places) the "Museum of the 20th Century" in Vienna.  They had a big exhibition of Saul Steinberg, and on upper floors, what I described in notes I took at the time as "mostly local, mostly avant-garde" art works.  My reaction to much of the latter was, "Yes, but is it art?"  But then I recalled that people used to say things like that about Steinberg.

– Jay Banks

A: When I first heard Dylan – Freewheelin’ album that my older brother brought home, I laughed.  I thought it was ridiculous non-music.  I was 12. 

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Q: I recall in 4th grade, my class took a trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where I was exposed to a number of works which I considered ridiculous -- a joke at the expense of the collector, inviting the viewer to join in the thought that some idiot had been scammed. Naturally, I started to think about making such preposterous things myself, with the thought that I definitely deserved the resources more than any nitwit who had such funds and was willing to spend it for such a stupid object. But I found that I could not imagine making such a thing without sinking into depths of pondering the metaphor behind the absurd work... which makes it art and not just a scam. I have been paralyzed for decades since by the question of whether I would be crafting a clever scam, or making merely bad art. I consider myself an ethical person, so I would only want to sell such an object to someone I consider a genuine fool with more money than he knows what to do with, who would be buying a lesson in fiscal responsibility. But I would be deeply embarrassed if it turned out that I actually was an artist, but only making art that I could not respect myself. — Tim Livengood

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A: My friend Philip Brooker, who was a fine artist and an art director, once told me that even untalented people might have a chance at being “discovered” and exhibited if they show gallery owners that they have wild intense, nearly insane dedication to their oeuvre. ….   I had the idea of spending a year trying as best I could to paint four masterpieces – the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s self portrait, The Boating Party, Girl with a Pearl Earring.  Trying my best, earnestly but ineptly.  I have no technical art skills and no talent whatsoever.  I would paint and repaint for a year, and do nothing else. Philip kinda liked the idea. It showed absolute determination and dedication and there was a point to be made in there, somewhere.  Art critics would find and/or create a bullshit narrative.

This is Gene. We’re out of here. Please continue to send in Observations and anecdotes here:

See you on Thanksgiving Thursday, with a truncated Invitational: Just the new contest. We’re back to normal next week.