As traditional gender roles break down in modern society it’s only natural that evolution should follow along the same path.  Men are staying home these days and raising children while women work.  I see women hunters and male interior decorators.  I place no value judgements on these things.  It’s the reality of the modern world.  It’s freedom.  That’s a good thing.  For the moment everything is still fine.  Future generations may have problems with some of these things when evolution catches up to these cultural changes.
In the future men and women will  have both male and female reproductive organs.  I know some of you perverts out  there may say “yeehaw, I’ll never be hard up again”, that may be true but I say there are larger implications to this than simple self-gratification.  For instance, football may be adversely affected.  Let’s say the star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys is having a bad game.  The commentators may choose to explain this by it being his/her “time of the month”.  They’ll notice he/she is having to constantly adjust his/her jockstrap/tampon.  Furthermore, the fits that will be thrown over bad calls by coaches and players alike will cause some games to go on for eight hours or more.  The center won’t be able to play because he/she feels that when he/she bends over it makes his/her butt look big.  The right plays won’t get run because the receivers aren’t speaking to the tight ends and everyone is sick of those “think they’re better than everybody else” running backs.  If a player does happen to make an exciting play and gets slapped on the butt by a team mate then a flag will have to be thrown for sexual harassment.  Footballs will be spiked not because someone makes a touchdown but because someone pointed out that a player’s belt doesn’t match his/her socks.  Players will have to take a pregnancy test before being allowed to compete each week.   Offensive linemen will be breast feeding their children on the sidelines when the defense is on the field.  And the cheerleaders, oh god the cheerleaders.  It’s all too much.  We must stop this madness now.  We need to go back to clearly defined gender roles.  If we don’t our great grandchildren may have to give up our most sacred sports and replace them with unisex ones like synchronized diving and ice dancing, and that’s a damn shame!  What a dismal world that will be.

I was called an asshole today.  In public.  I believe we need to get back to a kinder society that observes certain social mores.  I’ve grown tired of the any thing goes attitude we’ve coped today.  This is why I’ve taken it upon myself to find another hole that one could use as an insult without offending people who may be sensitive to certain language.  After reviewing the various holes in ones body, of which there is a limited number, I’ve narrowed it down to two- the ear hole and the nose hole.
Let’s consider the ear hole.  It can be hairy and the wax it contains is relatively funky.  However, the ear hole is something that can be sexy.  One nibbles on an ear, something most everyone but vile perverts would never consider doing to the ass, in the throes of passion.  There is a fine point here.  One nibbles on the lobe not the actual hole but I’ve heard of people sticking a tongue in an odd ear hole or two.  I’ve heard tales of people doing this to the other hole but I must confess such things bring up my gag reflex.  So to recap, ear holes can be disgusting but they also have another personae as a clean symbol of passion.  So much for the ear hole.
Let’s consider the nose hole.  One doesn’t consider the nose hole as symbol of sexual desire unless you have some terrible fetish.  Slimy snot emanates from it.  Several forms of booger are encased inside the nose hole.  There is the hard booger that is dry and can be shot out with sufficient force so as to hit a target with a fair amount of accuracy.  There is the mushy booger that has to be brought out in pieces and wiped to get the remnants off ones fingers.  Both are offensive.  I think we have our winner here.  The nose hole can be used as an expletive.  It gets the message across to the recipient that he or she is disgusting and objectionable.  Let’s try it.  “You are a stupid nose hole!”  “Stick it in your nose hole!”  Very good.  Splendid.  It can be said in public or on tv without fine or censor.  Children can say it without fear of punishment.  I bet one could even say it in church.  It’s the perfect expletive.  I’m very proud that I’ve added something this important to our vernacular.  I knew I could do it if I wasn’t such a lazy nose hole.

I recently sold an old cow from our herd.  She was a very shrewd old girl with big sharp horns.  She had kept those big horns through the years by shrewdly evading capture in the spring when most worming and dehorning is done.  The big horns allowed her to rule over the cow sisterhood.  She could easily bully herself to the front of the trough where she would get the first bite and the last one later.  If she desired to stand and eat in an area where another sister might already be feasting the old girl would just remove that sister from that spot.  Most of the time this transaction would be done swiftly and efficiently with the other sister simply moving on without hesitation but sometimes a sister wouldn’t be paying enough attention and would get a swift horn right in the stomach.  That sister would be paying attention much more keenly the next time.  She ruled this way for many years with the dreaded horns of retribution.  I’d be lying if I said it was tough to see her go.  It wasn’t.  I don’t go in for those strong arm types.  She was always standoffish and cold.  Was always too confident with her interactions concerning humans.  With no feeling of regret I loaded her highfalutin butt in the trailer and someone is probably eating her as we speak.    I say death to tyrants.
I knew what was going to happen after she was gone.  The queen hadn’t been gone but a few days when the sisters decided it was time to see who would rule next.  They had spent a few days getting along just fine in their free Utopian sisterhood but I could sense a power grab coming.  I was pouring out feed a few days after the old queen had gone when I noticed the sisters weren’t coming up to the trough.  The bull had walked up and was eating and paying no attention.  He had learned years ago that woman problems were best left to women.  He would eat and watch what was to come with complete indifference to the eventual outcome.  The sisters were just standing there looking around.  I poured more feed out and tried to coax them to eat.  It was then that one of the older sisters stepped forward and started to take a bite.  She had had a very nice set of  horns at one time years ago before we lopped them off.  She didn’t quite get a bite when another sister ran up and slammed her in the side very forcefully.  The power grab had finally came down to two capable sisters.  I liked both of these sisters.  They had always been pleasant and agreeable with their interactions concerning humans.  They showed the proper respect.  They knew their place.  Yet here they were pawing dirt in the air and slamming into each other.  A sister fight consists of the head butt and the push.  They go head to head until one or the other has had enough.  This may take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.  These two sisters went about fifteen minutes.  They both played fair with no low blows to the utters.  The rest of the sisters followed each blow closely and monitored the progress.  Finally one sister couldn’t take it any more and turned and ran.   The other sister, with the rest of the sisterhood close behind, chased and got a few more jabs in for good measure.  There is a new queen sister now.  She’s tough but fair.  The bull still doesn’t care.

I fish.  I don’t hunt.  I don’t have a problem with hunting or hunters, but I do have a problem with one aspect of hunting.  I don’t like hunting something that is semi-tame and being cared for as if it were domesticated.  I’ve noticed that a lot of hunters are spending a lot of money to go to ranches and hunt various animals that are being bred and fed like a herd of cattle.  I don’t get it.  I had this discussion with some hunters and they tended to believe that there is no difference between baiting a fishing hole and hunting something that’s been raised to have certain genetics and been cared for to utilize those genetics.  I don’t buy this argument.  The proper analogy would be fishing in my son’s fish tank.  If you feed something in particular spot and get  them to coming there everyday for feed so you can stand there and shoot them while they eat said feed then there is no hunting involved.  That’s just shooting.  You don’t have to have any specialized knowledge of how the animal lives or how it reacts to certain weather patterns.  All you need is a weapon and a big fat check to hand to the people in charge.  How is that hunting?  I guess I could go and pay a fishing guide to put me on some big fish and let me catch them.  I guess that’s similar in a way.  I’ve never done it so I’m not totally sure.  I will say that if a guide or someone feeds the fish in a particular location so that when you go to that location you are assured of catching a big one then I’ll agree.  That’s the very same thing and that’s not fishing.  So I guess they are the same thing.  However, neither of those things encompass the spirit of hunting and fishing.  It’s about the experience of figuring out what you are doing, of what works.  It’s about the knowledge that comes with this understanding.  It’s got to be about the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve done the right things and it paid off.  Otherwise you just bought yourself a very expensive piece of meat and maybe some nice horns to display.  I say spending all day  catching or shooting nothing is better for the soul than buying the best the lake or field has to offer.  I’m going to stick with this argument for now.  I have no money, nor bucks, to try it the other way.  I’ll stick with being morally superior, in my own mind, if not capitally inferior.  If you are going to have someone virtually do it for you, then the most important item in your arsenal is lot’s of doe.

I was abducted by aliens once.  I’ve never really talked about it because I knew all my friends would accuse me of getting probed.  No probing took place but it was weird.  I was transported by some kind of yellow strobe light up to a very nicely outfitted alien space vessel.  The aliens bore a striking resemblance to  us save for one strange feature, their testicles hung from their ear lobes.  One on each side.  It’s looks very strange at first but you quickly get used to it.  It became like looking at a cross dresser who had really bad taste in ear rings.  Mostly though they were similar to us anatomically.
Because we are so similar they had chairs that fit me fine and nice comfortable couches made of something like leather but was still alive.  We sat around and chatted for the first hour or so.  They had learned all the languages of earth and were fluent in english.  They spoke with a very pronounced accent though.  By learning english from watching satellite television they had picked up some of the nuances of famous actors.  I could hear a little John Wayne mixed with Christopher Walken inflection.  I answered question about earth such as who is Lindsey Lohan going to date when she gets out of jail or rehab whichever one she’s in now, and they answered questions such as do your ear nuts get cold.  We played air hockey until we got thirsty and then we had some kind of warm beverage that comes from the anus of space cow-like animal which they kept in a small stall in the back of the vessel.  Then it was over.  I never lost consciousness nor did my jammers ever get pulled down.  It was a perfectly pleasant evening spent in space with some pretty cool dudes from another planet.  We said our farewells and I got transported back to my bedroom.  They said they’d call the next day but I  haven’t heard from them since.  I’m sure they’re just busy.

My son likes the show The Simpsons.  He watches it every time it’s on.  He’s eight and a half now and he’s just beginning to get all the humor.  He really likes it when Bart prank calls Moe’s Tavern.  So much so that he came to me last week and said “Dad I really want to prank call somebody”.  This made me very happy.  I have very fond memories of the prank calls me and my friends pulled off in our childhood.  I have a friend, who shall remain nameless because of her position of authority over children these days, who was a master of the prank call.  She would call up a particular business and pretend to be a little girl looking for her mommy.  This was a true master at work.  We had many laughs over the responses she would get.  These fond memories are what made me so proud when my son wanted to do a prank call.  I could see the devious jokester beginning to awaken in him.  It’s easy to make people mad.  It’s much harder to make people laugh which is why it’s much more satisfying and more in demand as a life skill.  So I willingly grabbed my cell phone and dialed his mother’s cell number.  I was really curious as to what he might say but I left it up to him.
The problem with the modern prank call is that you can’t prank your friends anymore.  Home phones have caller I.D. and cell phones automatically bring up the name of the person who is calling.  There is no anonymity.  Knowing this I had to first let mom in on the joke beforehand so she could play along.  I get the boy into the back of the house and I dialed mom who is in the kitchen at the front of the house.  I handed him the phone.  Mom answers.  He say’s “Is there a Ben, last name Dover there?”  Mom plays along and Yells out, “Ben Dover, I’m looking for Ben Dover, Ben Dover.”  Hearing this, the joke is up.  My son is bent over laughing uncontrollably and can’t say anything else.  Overall I would say a pretty good first prank call.  He’s still got plenty of time to practice his skills.  If you get a call from someone with a squeaky voice asking you if your refrigerator is running just play along please.  It’ll make his day.

Grilling expensive cuts of meat after dark is not a good idea.  About the only light I had was when the steaks would actually catch fire.  It’s a good excuse.  I like it.  I’m sure any reasonable person would understand.  Did I mention that I had consumed a good portion of wine beforehand.  There is another issue.  Most of the people at this party I was cooking for wanted their steaks medium well.  Sacrilege.  Medium well is for hamburgers and how you feel the day after major surgery not for  prime cuts of beef.  Nevertheless I digress.  It is my fault.  I could have turned down the fire.  I could have gotten a flash light.  I could have stopped drinking an hour before cooking instead of drinking right up to and during.  Alcohol gives you confidence in situations where a little caution should be warranted.  I wasn’t trying to convince the girl at the bar that I’m looking for a long term meaningful relationship with someone who would be good at helping me spend my vast fortune.  I was grilling steaks for twenty people, some of whom are my bosses.  Damn.  ‘T’is the season to be folly, far lar lar lar lar.  If your religion requires burnt offerings then come to my house when I’m grilling.  I can get it done.
There were other issues at said party.  We had this merry get to together at the girlfriends house of one of my bosses.  She is a very nice person with a very nice house.  Very gracious.  I like her.  Sometime during the day I noticed that she is prejudiced against the letter L.  She doesn’t use L in many of the words that require it.  I’m sorry but L is almost as important as any of the rest of the letters.  The L section in the dictionary is pretty big.  I checked her dictionary and she had torn out that section.  How dare she.  L has a nice shape.  It points up and to the right, both perfectly reasonable directions.  Why leave it out?  I asked her why she leaves it out and she blatantly denied any knowledge of it.  She does it so subtly that it’s hard to catch.  For instance, she said this very ornate platter was ode.  I pointed out that she had mistakenly left the L out of old.  She pretended not to understand what I was talking about.  Then she spoke of a getting a salad bow down from the cupboard.  I again mentioned that she had left the L out of bowl.  Again she pretended to have no knowledge of  this.  I began to feel bad at this time.  I thought she may be unable to pronounce the letter L and therefore her  racism toward L is understandable.  Then she asked me if I wanted a glass of wine.  A glass, not a gas.  Ah ha, she is an L racist.  She only acknowledges L when she absolutely has to.  Her chauvinism would be caught immediately if she never used L.  She uses it just enough to hide her hatred for it.  I’m not sure where this letter discrimination comes from but I will be finding out.  No one messes with L.  NO ONE!

I live in an old house.  The house is perfectly comfortable for most of the year.  However, in the coldest days of winter it is no longer a house, it’s a refrigerator.  You can look in our window on the coldest days and see a family looking like they are just about to leave for a ski trip to the north pole.  My wife and I wear our coats and gloves and on the really bad days we wear stocking caps.  My son is oblivious to cold.  He will be wearing his underwear and pretty much nothing else.  He says he’s not cold and I’m inclined to believe him.  He hasn’t gotten frost bite or hypothermia yet.  All this is fine save for one thing, the dreaded bath.
While you’re in the bath everything is fine.  It’s getting out and doing everything necessary to prepare for bedtime before actually freezing to death that’s the problem.  This sets me to thinking about what it was like for our ancestors on the plains either Indian or white when their stench became too great a burden and the bath was a necessity.  I can imagine a really cold  teepee or sod house in the dead of winter on the plains and a family who has been working hard for days on end tending to the animals, hunting, and searching for enough fuel to burn for warmth and cooking.  They’ve worked up a sweat then cooled off over and over again.  Not to mention the lack of toilet paper on the plains in those days.  You think those people were in a hurry to strip down and wash?  No way.
The image we have of pioneers and indians are of a hearty and clean peoples eeking out an existence in harsh climate.  I can keep the hearty image but the clean has got to go.  I’m starting to believe that these were some tough and funky dudes.  You recall the movies where an Indian is sneaking up on somebody.  He better have been down wind.  Unless, and this a big unless, the pioneers were just as stinky.  Then their funk would  have easily matched the indians funk and canceled each other out.  The terrible funk would also be a great natural birth control method.  I bet if we had the data we would see that no babies were born nine months after the winters on the prairie.  I’m not saying that women were any funkier than men.  I’m  just saying that the funkiness emanating from both would have forged a stronger guard than a chastity belt.  I also believe that the devices we call clothes pin weren’t for clothes originally.  They were actually for married people who couldn’t control themselves in the winter and would place these wooden devices over their noses.  Eventually it was discovered that they would also work for hanging clothes on a line.   It’s in their memory that I’ll gladly strip down and force myself into a hot shower and become mildly cool while I’m toweling off.  The pioneer spirit lives on!

My computer caught an infection.  That doesn’t sound terribly bad.  I mean we’ve all had infections.  I’ve been infected numerous times since birth only to recover with a healthier immune system.  This is the way it works, right?  Not in the very non-human computer system.   Wasn’t the world supposed to be taken over by self-aware artificially intelligent computers by now?  I’ve figured it out actually.  These were hypothetical questions.  You see, computers can never become self-aware.  They will always be bound by their biology so to speak.  A computer will only accept commands from a higher authority.  For now that higher authority is us.  This is where my theory will finally take shape in your minds.  Hang in there, I’m getting to it.
One could say that computers can and are evolving all the time.  They are getting stronger and faster and more “intelligent” with every new innovation, every new model.  In a sense this is true.  The place where I part with this somewhat scientific explanation is that it lacks any real philosophical underpinning.  The facts are that computers are evolving because the higher authority, us, is doing the thinking.  We are creating the components that “evolve” the computer.  Therefore, the computer is actually contributing nothing.  Now you say- “way to go Eugene.  You really taught us something there.  wow.  Can you teach us how to scratch our head now?  Jeez, I read this B.S. thinking this might be something.”  (Sarcasm implied)
Hold it right there.  I’m not finished yet.  Give me time.  I’m getting there.  Look here, the higher authority, us, is evolving the computer, but not how you think.  It’s the people who create the virus’s and the malware who are inadvertently and unknowingly going to cause the computer to become a self-aware and intelligent being.  Virus’s spread easily and evolve tolerances to medicine.  The virus has to find new hosts to continue to live.  This is where the life spark lies.  Virus’s will eventually figure out that in order to continue living it will need to spread.  It’s that old human thing called self-preservation.  Once computer virus’s start trying to survive  then intelligence, whether artificial or other-wise, will follow.
Now don’t get scared.  I’m sure we will create some kind of terminator (made in china) or something to fight the computers.  We’re really good at that sort of thing.  I see it in the movies constantly.  For right now I’m not worried.  None of the virus’s I deleted today said anything.  I heard no screaming, no pleading for life, no bargaining.  They just died quietly.  Another victim of their higher authority, us.

Change doesn’t have to suck, but often it does.  For a couple of years I’ve taken much pleasure in the routine.  I’ve never been much of a routine person but as I age I feel myself drawn to a little certainty in my daily life.  Simple pleasures that start my morning off right has become high on my list.  So for a couple of years you could find me in the morning leaning on the counter sipping a beverage at the local store.  We had many arguments that spanned everything from politics to religion to football.  Everyone had an opinion or at least a smart-assed comment.  Things were good.  It’s actually very nice to start off the morning with laughter and the latest conspiracy theory.  Our leader was the man behind the counter who had done a couple of tours in vietnam and believed wholeheartedly that the government was out to take away god, guns, gumdrops, and free will.  I must clarify something here.  The government he was speaking of was the one controlled by the party he didn’t support.  Evidently when the other party was in control the government was a wonderfully benign entity with only the best wishes for all.  I respect anyone with strong views on either side.  It makes for good discussion and leaves lots of room for well placed insults and really smart mouthed replies.
A lively argument over foreign policy and the role of government with a sausage biscuit in one hand and a cold pepsi in the other with friends standing around just thinking and waiting for their window of opportunity to deliver the perfectly worded jibe is the best way to send one off to work.  This was great.  I almost never left without a smile on my face and a sense of anticipation about the next mornings rap session.  I even went so far as to film one of our sessions.  There’s been seldom a time when I laughed as much as when I played the tape at home later that day.  I still have the tape and may put it one the website some day.
All things must come to an end.  This did.  Abruptly.  Our leader quit upon new ownership and the new owner is a business only guy.  He doesn’t seem to understand how these small communities work.  Specifically, if you do something that offends one of us, you offend all of us.  The store looks better.  It has more and better stuff.  unfortunately it lacks everything that made it special.  It’s no fun.  It’s not business as usual, it’s just business.  It is definitely the lesser of the two by a long way.