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Good Heavens, Miss Sakamoto; You’re Beautiful!
There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a young woman.
That’s from Proverbs, the sayings of Agur the son of Jakeh. Now, between you and me, I don’t know Agur the son of Jakeh from Adam son of a Hole in the Ground, but seeing as ten-year-olds aren’t noted for writing many proverbs, we can assume that he’s an old man. He must have been young once; he must have done this. Still, he’s ranking it as too amazing for him. Maybe it’s something he forgot with age? Well, I’m a young (relatively speaking) man, and if anyone ought to understand the way of a man with a young woman, it ought to be me, right? I don’t understand it. I can, however, pass on my observations, for science.
Take one male specimen; me. Non-standard, but it’ll have to do. Take him as he’s walking (uncommon) without a thought in his head (very common), and pass him by a female specimen. Unfortunately for the cause of science the amount of data in the control group (no female specimen available) dwarfs the experimental group.
The control case is plenty monotonous. The male of the species starts at point A, lumbers over to point B, and is almost never rewarded by finding cheese there. Repeat ad nauseam. The experimental case, however…
Normally the male specimen is oblivious to changes in his environment more subtle than being hit by a city bus. Through mechanisms unknown to science however, he instantly recognizes the female specimen and, at a speed that shames most supercomputers, measures her temperature against a hotness scale. Most people calibrate between 1 and 10, but I’m a fan of the Soto Normalized Scale.
Should the female of the species register high enough on the man’s scale, (“high enough” is variable, but know to depend on who’s watching), the next operation is a chemical assay, again of amazing speed. In the presence of precious metals on the female’s left hand, the experiment reverts disappointedly to the control case. Science has tested this method for substance detection in the diamond fields of South Africa to statistically negligible effect.
Should no metals be detected the heretofore astounding processing in the cerebrum takes its toll. The Medulla Oblongata steps up its work, increasing the heart rate and, for some damn fool reason, sending a large production order to the sweat glands. The cerebrum, on the other hand, has shot off most of its ready neurotransmitters, and no longer produces coherent thought. Indeed, we’d think that it no longer produces any thought at all except some of those thoughts get short-circuited through the flapping jaw.
This stage can last for some moments to months at a time. I believe it’s an exponential distribution, but more curve-fitting needs to be done.
How this fugue terminates is a matter of great interest to science. When observing samples who, having lost their higher functions in the moment, walked into stop signs and been put out cold, they appear to awake to no ill effect. Aside from the dent in their head.
For experiments where the subject is not lucky enough to hit a stop sign, the fugue state begins to dissipate when the female specimen signals that she already has a boyfriend or, and we’ve correlated this with how much jaw-flapping has happened, other means if she’s feeling less charitable. Sometimes means more painful than the stop sign.
If the female sample is removed and the effect is allowed to dissipate without being prematurely terminated, we see a follow on effect. The brain rebuilds its supply of neurotransmitters and lurches into a Sherlock Holmesian state. The smallest details are noted (except, oddly enough, what shoes she was wearing. Completely unknown to Science.) Wild chains of logic emerge, deductions are made, building on one another to a monumental conclusion: A probability calculation as to how likely the male specimen is to encounter that female specimen again. The number calculated is wildly optimistic.
That, I’m afraid, is the entirety of my survey of the subject so far. If you have observations of your own to share please do.
Published in General
You might appreciate this then. I no longer remember the particular Ricochet member, and whether he is still here on the site, but this fellow is an engineer by trade. He was professionally annoyed at the poor structural designs of women’s shoes, particularly heels, and personally frustrated with the pain he wife endured whenever she wore heels. So, taking his engineering trade seriously, he went and started a women’s shoe company:
http://www.ladyjaneshoes.com/intelligent-glamour/
We’re aware, Hank, that you don’t even look at the shoes on your own feet.
Hank’s boots at the Montana Meetup
How about these shoes? Best pair I have seen in awhile.
Only one shoe is depicted clearly. The other is hidden behind the first one.
You saw shoes? I should try to enlarge the picture.
Is that better. Now you can also see that pair of sunglasses.
You might only be able to see one shoe, but I definitely see a toe.
I always preferred this one:
Dunno why it’s so small. (That’s what SHE said!)
I can’t figure out what this means. But that’s probably a good thing.
The posted picture size defaults to thumbnail. If you edit your comment you can click on the picture and adjust that.
How? All I get is the location/position “tool,” not the “arrows” that allow for “stretching.”
Hit the “Edit” button; looks like a pencil. In there you’ll get a whole bunch of options; below the positioning buttons there there’s a dropdown for size.
Oops, cross posted! Never mind…
I don’t see a size option. Just stuff like:
Is this going to be one of those things where people say “oh, sorry, we only support Chrome?”
I think (and this is just a thought) that if you copy and paste the image from the web (as opposed to uploading from your hard drive), you sometimes don’t get a “size” option in that drop down. In that case, when you’re editing the comment, you should be able to grab the corner of the image and stretch it out? Click on the image first, and then the “stretching” arrows should appear.
I tried stretching it out, but it looks like only the thumbnail size was uploaded to your content library in the first place.
No, there’s a good sized one there. Here’s how I know. On Firefox (on Windows) I right-clicked the image and then on “copy image location.” It doesn’t work to paste the whole thing here so you can see it, but the last part is “/2000-05-07-large-150×68.gif”. Then I delete the “-150×68” part, and that displays the big image.
That’s the same technique I used to look at the shoes in the image that @phcheese posted.
Here, I’ll post the edited URL:
BTW, the way to make this work in the first place is to select “Link to media file” in the Attachment Display Settings, usually found toward the lower right of the “Add Media” page.
Only that my buddy Chuck was handsy in a way that Joe Biden, even in his dreams, couldn’t imagine.
I uploaded it from my own computer, the only way to link to it as a web site etc would include the whole Dilbert page, not just the actual comic.
Thanks for making it more readable.
Nope, all I ever got was the “cross”-like positioning tool.
Linking to the media file means linking to the file you uploaded, not to an external site. That way when somebody clicks on the teensy image, they get to see the file in its full size.
An additional option, independent of the above, is to select a larger size to display than the little thumbnail. There’s a menu item for it in the Attachment Display Settings or nearby.
Or as a guy in my eight grade class once said of a very pretty ninth grader he dated, upon his being asked if he would go out with her a second time, “Sure,she was pretty, but her back molar was a bit crooked.”