Recently in Old Drafts Finally Published Category

April 20, 2009 9:20 AM

So much for the one-drop rule...

It seems that few of us, if any, are as racially pure as we like to believe. Melanin and skin colour research suggests that those of us that identify as white, or "pure white", quite possibly had ancestors that were as black as night pre-Jesus. The opposite is true for black people. Check it out:

"Our original estimates were that [skin color changes] occurred perhaps at a more stately pace," Jablonski says. But now they're finding that a population can be one color (light or dark) and 100 generations later -- with no intermarriage -- be a very different color. Figuring 25 years per generation (which is generous, since early humans walked naked through the world -- clothes slow down the rate), that's an astonishingly short interval.

The linked article goes on to offer an explanation for why you sometimes have dark-skinned populations living high altitude by considering the agriculture available in various parts of the world at that time (around 10000 years ago). Sounds a bit like Guns, Germs and Steel.

With literacy and the advancement of technology, eventually the collective human memory will be much longer, and humans in the year 5000 might be able to connect with their differently-coloured relatives of 2009. And then they will really question how differences in race, something as petty as skin colour, could have had such devastating consequences. But I don't think it should take 100 generations for this to happen. Surely we have got to be better than that.

November 17, 2007 11:27 AM

Salad

Originally from May 12, 2005:

There's something I've been meaning to say, but always forgot about for some reason (maybe because it's not that important). I was lying on the bed with Rose last night talking about something or other when I felt the need to admit something to another human being.

I don't like salad. In fact, I really can't stand salad, and I don't care who knows it.

We live in a bullshit salad culture where everyone just assumes that you want a green salad, Caesar salad, fancy salad with your meal. But I don't want any of that. I wish I could go to a restaurant and only pay for what I want. The main dish with no fucking salad. Because it's just a waste of the chef's time, a waste of food and a waste of my plate's real estate.

August 29, 2006 10:11 AM

Rotten Soul

I am rotting from the inside, but maybe I can reverse the process.

I don't want to die. I want to live. You have to die in order to bring forth life. Those who don't are regarded scornfully, as subhumans.

Conformity is the death of the soul, they say, and there are so many ways to conform that do not suit me. I conform enough already.

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