Walking through Dundas Square a few weeks ago I came across a protest. Or so I thought. I was walking up Yonge approaching the travesty of misappropriated public space to the approaching roar of bullhorns, youthful screaming, and multicoloured placards waving in the air.

“This is it,” I thought, “the revolution’s here.”

Except not. These activists cum Guerrilla Marketers were advertising a new shopping website, imploring passers-by to “revolt” against high prices.

Instead of doing the right thing and destroying them right there and then, I sunk a little further into the ground and considered that all revolutionary thought is dead. The closest thing we’ve had to a protest in this city in the past year was the Tamil’s crowding on the Gardiner. Of course, I didn’t support their cause, or support the other cause. Beyond apathy, however, most Torontonians responded with outward hostility to people so desperate to save their families that they stopped traffic on the other side of the world. (I didn’t say it was well thought out).

There is, however, one group out there actively challenging and remaking the cultural norms of our Western world. They are disparate, composed of cells of individuals, and lacking a unified objective, or even the knowledge of their collective existence as a political entity.

I call the movement Cats and Dicks (CAD).  At some point, it is entirely possible that a picture, an animation, or an entire site that you love or created or both, will be replaced by a picture of a cat or a dick. Or a Guy Fawkes mask, or Rick Astley, or any one of a million other web memes.

At this point, yes, it is obvious that this post-human counterculture is nothing more than the legions of sophomoric hackers, coders, and script kiddies, and I admit it is easy to dismiss them as such. The internet is a big place, and to focus an ounce of attention on any one group or collective is to give a relatively large amount of intellectual investment. It is easy to dismiss CAD as a bunch of idiots, but when studying countercultures of the past, we always looked at their goals, and not their effectiveness. (academic study of the effectiveness of counterculture would be the shortest class in the calendar).

While CAD obviously has no unified voice or manifesto, applying the ‘infinite monkeys/typewriters’ lens, at one point it becomes clear, all culture will be replaced by either cats and dicks. Granted, we will never get there, but the contrast gained from that perspective shows that what we once considered to be sophomoric is actually very clever.  Cats and dicks, not because they are immature in and of themselves, but because they are so immature compared to whatever I replaced that you care so much about.

It’s a technoscientific theatre of the absurd, and while it won’t change anything, it definitely makes a point in reminding us of the disposability of culture in a fully integrated world.

But enough about dicks.

I was rereading Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, and I started to have a hypothesis.

A little background though.

Miller and Kanazawa are Evolutionary Psychologists. Basically, they’ve planted their flag firmly on ‘Nature’ ground, on the other side of the river from those ‘Nurture’ scallywags. Everything we do, they say, is behaviour coded genetically from 10,000 years ago. 10,000 years ago being the last time that humans evolved. This idea, known as the Savannah Principle, theorizes that since the dawn of agriculture, human civilization has changed too quickly from generation to generation to allow evolutionary changes to take place. Geneticists know that when tracking changes in fruitflues (used due to their short mating, gestation, and life cycles) an environment needs to stay constant for roughly 20 generations before changes take place.

In any case, the Savannah Principle explains behaviour by relating it to our existence on the African Savannah, where we were the last time our changes were useful. It’s why we get scared in scary movies (our minds don’t fully understand the concept that what we’re seeing isn’t real), it’s why we crave sugary and fatty foods (scarcity), and its why that 6 by the door all of a sudden becomes an 8 when she’s sucking cancer into her lungs.

I was a 7, then I brought out my darts. Now I can destroy you WITH MY MIND

Some of the most cited examples of the savannah principle involve sex. Of course. Blonde hair connotes (and denoted, on the savannah) youth. Long, healthy hair meant a long history without illness. Large breasts we’re a good indicator of fertility because if they were high and firm, it meant newly fertile and not very old. Of course, small chests could connote youth as well, but there is the potential for age related trickery. There are far fewer 30+ women with high, firm (natural) breasts than small chested women in the same age group.

The example of breasts, I think, is analogous to the point I’m trying to make about cigarettes. When a girl is smoking, she is saying “I’m Young.” If you see a girl smoking, and she still looks young, she almost definitely is. The window for a girl to smoke consistently and remain youthful in appearance is frightfully small. Most people who smoke like they did in college for more than a few years after graduation undergo a massive change in complexion, voice, and general health and appearance. While most girls don’t smoke, of course, their age is harder to figure out as a result. Smoking (and not looking like a handbag) is a good indicator of what age a girl is.

This hypothesis has some problems though. The first, and most obvious is that I didn’t blame the media, the cigarette companies, and the patriarchal pedagogy. My answer to that is “shut up.”

This is as much a theory as anything the post-structuralist canon has produced, so we’re just shooting the shit right now and talking about ideas that haven’t been proven.

The second is that cigarettes haven’t been around for 10,000 years. While breasts, hair, sugar and fat have all been around since we started walking upright, we’ve only been smoking tobacco for about 7,000 years. I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but by then we were so spread out that the evolutionary developments of one tribe would be unlikely to turn up in another. It’s possible though...

I guess my conclusion is that we can still learn behaviour from our surroundings. Its why you’ll find the youthful fashions of your culture more appealing than the others, and this can be taught by the media.

It’s a spotty theory at best, and, of course, there’s no way to prove it, but at least now I have a reason why I find a girl slowly killing herself attractive, that doesn’t boil down to some deep seated love of Ophelia Syndrome.

Oh, and if she smokes, she pokes, apparently.

It`s called anepaweek.com and it`s exactly what it sounds like.

Every day I`ll post a new song. they won`t be thought out or mastered or anything, but since I never really got out of lofi, it seems disingenuous to cal them demos.

This means my output will really increase, so if you like my music for some reason, there will be something new there every morning.

Cities like Paris, London, and Amsterdam have some of the most interesting layouts as a result of, in some cases, six thousand years of continuous habitation, but while this contributes to beautiful historicism in the way of archetecture and legend, very little could be expected of the Normans, the Franks, or the Romans in the way of logical, efficient urban planning. Well, maybe the Romans.

Manhattan was by no means the first area to make use of the grid plan, which had been used by Indus Valley civilizations as early as 4600 years ago. It is, however, the world's most famous example.

The plan, drawn up in 1811 by Gouverneur Morris,  John Rutherfurd, and Simeon De Witt, called for the grid to encompass the entirety of the island, regardless of topography. Instead of naming the streets, they would simply be refered to by number. 16 avenues running vertically, and 155 streets running horizontally, with one way traffic alternating eastward and westward every block.

What resulted is a city that was perfect to navigate for pedestrian, carriage, and eventually automobile. Standing at any intersection in the city, one can immediately place themselves geographically after only a two minute explanation of the urban layout. What's more, you could place any other location, and figure out your direction and distance at any time of the day.

With over 70,000 residents per square mile, Manhattan is one of the most densely populated areas in the developed world, yet it manages to maintain a (relatively) efficient flow of people at all times of the day. 1811 was roughly 90 years before the first skyscraper, but it was the year New York became the first modern city.

In the original version, McHeath was far more than a murderer, but also an arsonist and a rapist. There was a time when this constituted pop music in Germany. Fifty years later, Falco.

Lotta Lenya went on to play Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love.

A Prehistoric Noise Rock Opera

recorded december 08

AND NOW, WHAT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

Most of the recording took place over the past three weeks, but Chemical Fire 1979 was recorded all the way back in October of 2007. Written by myself and Chris Arnett, the song features...

Chris Arnett - Guitar, Backup vocals

Jeff Green - Glokenspiel

Andrew Kouri - Harmonica

Jon Bray - Wolf Trumpet

Medina Abdelkader - Tambourine

I realize that I am clearly blacked out drunk at the time of recording, but no alternate takes could even come close to how much I love this demo version