Time To Put Aside Childish Things

Some of you may have noticed a decrease in posts lately about game. There’s a reason for that. I haven’t been motivated to write about picking up women because I’ve found The One. I’ve fallen hard for this girl and… I might as well announce it here: We’re engaged to be married.

She’s absolutely perfect in every way. I adore her. She’s a few years older than me, which I have come to appreciate because of the maturity and depth of wisdom she brings to our relationship. Our conversations are long and always fascinating. She has so much to say about the world owing to the wealth of experience she has accumulated over the years. You will never go back to younger women once you have enjoyed the subtle pleasures of deep, meaningful conversation with an older woman, holding hands as you both discuss the finer shades of Naomi Wolf’s oeuvre. And I hate to boast, but it takes a strong man secure in his masculinity to handle an older woman who knows who she is and what she wants out of life.

On our first date, she told me she was a women’s studies major in college. I’m ashamed now to admit I cringed when I heard that, but she has broken through my carefully constructed defenses and opened my eyes to what it’s like being a woman in modern society. Try putting yourself in another person’s shoes just for a minute; it’s good for your soul. She told me about her struggles after college to make ends meet, but that she had no regrets about the low paying work she chose to do. I’m proud of the work she has done making abortion, contraceptives, and sex toys more accessible and affordable for third world women. This can only mean more sex for everyone and thus, fewer bitter men and less warfare.

Speaking of sex, it is amazing with my woman. A grown-up woman knows how to please a man in bed and, more importantly, she knows what gets herself off, so we don’t fumble around spastically or behave like selfish lovers. Her blowjob technique is expert level. I have no idea how she got so good. Some women are just born with the talent, I guess. She is also a die-hard romantic because she always loves sex with the lights off. I love going down on her and licking her supple labia.

I don’t want to sully my love for her, but since you all are probably wondering, yes she’s a solid 8 for her age. Much older men are constantly checking her out. I can tell you that when you fall in love with a woman you stop noticing the hints of crows’ feet in harsh light and start noticing other things, like her character. She loves me even more for seeing the real her and making her feel special. And she is special. No other woman could replace her.

I met her in a Scrabble club, which was a nice change of pace from the parade of skanks I was meeting everywhere else. I did run game on her when we started dating, although I didn’t have to lay it on thick because she’s not a flaky  22 year old girl playing the field. She won’t admit it, but she loved it when I negged her and teased her and read her palm. Because I saw her as LTR potential, I took her to a four star Asian/Mexican/Anti-American fusion restaurant on our second date. The tab for that night wound up costing me $120 but it was worth it as this was the only way she could be assured I was serious about her as more than a fly by night fling. I did some light qualifying and listened attentively to her stories about dating a DJ when she was in college and her time abroad in Rome experiencing the local flavor.

I broke my three date rule with her. We didn’t have sex until the 6th date, which was fine by me because I would have valued her less had she spread her legs sooner. She played me, and I thank her for that.

We dated for a few months and the love was strong. Although I have repeatedly written about the engagement ring as the status symbol of the incorrigible whore, I realized that being in love with a woman will inspire a man to forego his self-interest, make sacrifices, and betray his principles for a higher cause — to witness the happiness and flush of victory on his beloved’s face.

Yeah, I know what a lot of you are thinking. “Hypocrite! All this time he’s been telling us to avoid marriage, and he goes and gets married.” You forget that I’ve also said rules were made to be broken.

Did I shit all over the mission statement of this blog by admitting to all of the above? Some would say yes. I prefer to frame it as the actions of a man who was willing to be vulnerable and magnanimous when real love was on the line. Once a woman loves you for who you are, there’s no reason to continue seeing her as the woman you had to game into bed. My woman loves me and this is all I need to know that she will never hurt me. That’s why there will be no pre-nup.

When she found out about the blog (I couldn’t hide it from her in good conscience) she was understandably upset, but also intrigued. I reassured her that the man she sees on the blog is not the man she knows in real life. Then I bought her a Burberry scarf.

My new life begins now with the woman I love, and the tone of this blog will reflect that. I expect my readership to go through the roof as they follow me on my new adventure.

Next post: The limitless joy of children.

Hormonal Surge

Conventional wisdom is that human females don’t go into heat — that is, their ovulation is hidden from male discernment — but I believe this is only partially true. The bars and clubs during the last couple weeks have been drenched in intoxicating estrogen. I notice this each year when spring begins, right around the end of March and beginning of April. The women are on the prowl, and the men are slabs of beef dangling from meathooks for inspection.

What does a roomful of sexually excited women look like? ADHD liplicking gigglebombs with perpetual pelvic grind syndrome.

The women jump from one man to the next, heaving their bosoms and smiling with glossed lips, expressing the full sensuality of their bodies in arched backs, thighs rubbing together, fingertips lightly grazing every available surface. They want the men to suffocate on their womanly bouquet, to lose control. Attention whoring is at DefCon “I’m on PornoHub” level. It’s been a hassle lately to keep one woman’s attention for long because their raging hormones are driving them to sample every man within sight, until the best cock they can afford presses its chub against her belly. That’s been the downside. The upside is that there’s a new woman eager to talk to you everywhere you turn.

Unfortunately, this nirvana won’t last long. By mid-April, the estrogen surge will have depleted itself, and most of these horny chicks will have either gotten themselves boyfriends or regressed back to their usual bitchy, arms crossed selves. Your window to act is short. Smart men know that this is the time of year to go out every night of the week to fatten up on the bounty. Be like the crocodiles gorging on the stampede of wildebeest crossing the treacherous river during their annual migration.

Men don’t understand the compulsion of the springtime female hormonal surge because our hormones surge year round. We might have a downtick in our libido now and then, like after brain surgery or a death in the family (immediate relations only), but mostly we’re good to go regardless of the season. I’m especially immune to hormone surges because my libido is at a constantly elevated state. If it goes any higher the tip could explode.

Results From The Female Beauty Rankings

The rankings of the ten girls from last Friday’s post are in, and the results, as expected, are pretty much in line with the general concept that men by and large share a surprisingly similar perception of what constitutes female beauty along the 1 to 10 scale. If a woman had two scores that were within 20 votes of each other, I gave her a two number ranking.

Woman                                             Readers’ Score            My Score
(a) TBG’s asian 10                                         6                                  5
(b) wino                                                        9,8                                8
(c) Rain And’s Mom                                        7                                  7
(d) fur smile                                                  9,8                                9
(e) red beret                                                 2                                   2
(f) heavy wool skirt                                       3                                   3
(g) IOI                                                          10                                 10
(h) chocolate fry                                            5                                   6
(i) schnoz                                                      1                                    1
(j) chipmunk                                                  4                                    4

A few thoughts:

There was more agreement on the 4s, 5s, and 6s than I predicted. Obviously, I chose this category well.

There was more variability/less agreement at the upper end of the scale, and firmer agreement at the bottom end. This was intentional. In the first installment of “Female Beauty 1 To 10” I stacked the deck in favor of strong contenders for the 8, 9, and 10 spots by using such world beating hotties like Alizee, Sophie Marceau, and Monica Bellucci. This time I made an effort to fill the upper slots with plausible girls. That is, girls you might have a chance of seeing in your daily life from one week to the next. Naturally, “daily life” 10s in most locales excluding fashion districts and playgrounds of the rich and famous are not going to be as hot on average as supermodel/celebrity/actress 10s. Truly superb specimens of female pulchritude don’t stay in general circulation for long. Hence, the greater difficulty in finding a round-the-way girl who could qualify as a bonafide 10.

As one commenter astutely noted, TBG’s asian 10 looks like what the future sexbots will look like. Doable, but also a little bit “off”. Perhaps this is because it is easier to model an Asian’s face as they have flat, nondescript features compared to other races. And their skin is smoother, facilitating a realistic transference to high tech plasticine. The voting also confirms that TBG has no taste and is probably a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman.

Throwing in a couple girls from different races didn’t seem to affect the voting much. This is a point in favor of the hypothesis that macro beauty standards tend toward universality.

Chipmunk looks nothing like Schnoz. Not even if they were the same woman separated by 30 years. Some of you need Lasik. But since the conspiracy theories will continue to fly, I chose those two randomly off the internet. If they are the same woman taken at different times then that would be a ridiculous coincidence.

For those of you (women and Peter) who were saying “Oh, red beret woman just needs to lose the glasses and she’ll look better” or “If heavy wool skirt girl just lost 15 pounds…” or “If schnoz fixed her hair and used some skin lotion she’d be an attractive woman”, all I have to say is:

BETA PLEASE!

You are so full of shit you must actually believe the nonsense you write.

In the future, I plan to do a “1 to 10” post with another race — all Asian or all black. And maybe a NSFW post with just naked bodies minus the attached faces, to see if your ratings of women’s bodies corresponds with facial beauty. I’ve always suspected that, despite the uncommon butterface phenomenon, hot bodies are normally paired with hot faces. Most of the time you can safely approach a girl from behind if her ass is round and she has a slender hourglass shape and lustrous hair — her face will not disappoint.

I will also change the ranking system in future installments to allow you to vote any way you like. I’ll continue choosing candidates according to my personal 1 – 10 rank ordering just to see if, given the looser rules, your voting still matches up with mine.

Evil Easter Egg

Rain And’s Mom was not the Evil Easter Egg, though I can see why some of you thought that. It *is* pretty evil to put someone’s younger-version Mom up for the ultimate judgement and then to demonstrate by the voting that thousands of men would like to bang said Mom in every available hole and splooge on her face for the cum de grace. The Subprime Splooge of a Thousand Betas. Who said romance was dead?

It took a while, but after an impressive cooperative effort the discovery was made. (I think commenter benjack was the first to stumble on it.) The Evil Easter Egg was IOI girl. Yes, the girl you all ranked as a 10 is… 14 years old. She is a Polish model who was kicked out of a fashion show last summer for being underage.

You sick pervs. How does it feel knowing that you imagined kissing, fondling… face fucking… a 14 year old girl? That you chubbed out to a bubble gum teen? We’re all Aqualung now.

How Good Is Your Social Acumen?

I met her at my usual first date lounge, ten minutes late right on schedule. As I sat at the bar (thin crowd, plenty of elbow room), she pranced up to my side from across the room, waving back at someone. I looked over my shoulder and saw six or seven people, half girls and half guys, sitting on sofas and waving at her in return.

“Are those your chaperones?”

“No, they’re friends of mine.”

“I see. So you brought them here for protection? Probably a good idea. I usually show up to dates with a chainsaw.”

She was starting to catch on. “I swear it’s just a coincidence. I didn’t tell them I would be here.”

I glanced back at her social circle. They were watching us. Fucking great. I’d have to hustle her to a new venue ASAP, no way was she going to loosen up with her friends judging her every move. But first, drinks.

Fifteen minutes into our conversation (going well) the bartender places a couple of shot glasses in front of us.

“Courtesy of the gentleman over there in the white shirt.”

We both look in the direction of the sofa and one of the guys is smiling at us. My date smiles back.

“How sweet. My friend bought us drinks.”

I lifted my shot glass and nodded toward him in recognition. He nodded in recognition of my nod. I returned to my date and resumed our conversation, paying close attention to her body language to see if she attempted any over the shoulder lookbacks at drink-buying dude. She didn’t. Another twenty minutes passed and I was getting itchy to bounce. As I prepared to pull the trigger, her friends walked by us and stopped to say goodbye to her. Many hugs and introductions were exchanged. I watched our benefactor closely, determined to figure out his designs on my date and his role in the group dynamic. Preliminary analysis: Ingratiating beta who wanted to fuck my date.

***

You are a student of human social dynamics. Your experience with and knowledge of these sorts of situations grows with every passing day. When your date tells you her friends are at your venue of choice by sheer coincidence, you assume:

a. she’s lying, and act accordingly; that is, move her to a new spot quickly or end the date prematurely.

b. she’s telling the truth but it’s virtually guaranteed that one of the men in the group has a crush on her and will come over and say something stupid to ruin the mood of your date.

c. she’s telling the truth and they are just friends who will not sabotage your date, so you are OK to stay.

d. she’s telling the truth but you believe it is unwise to linger in that venue as long as they are within line of sight of your date.

When one of the betas buys you and your date a round of shots, you assume:

a. he’s a cool guy buying his friend and her date a drink, and he does this all the time with no ulterior motive, so you toss him a friendly nod.

b. he’s a scheming punk buying his cute friend and her date a drink because he secretly wants to bang her and thinks this is the best way to undermine the vibe between her and you.

c. he’s a superb example of Beta Maximus in the field who thinks by buying his puppy crush and her date drinks she will instantly fall in love with him and forget all about you.

d. he’s just retarded.

Given the assumptions above, decide which is most likely to be true. Then, evaluate which responses you have available to you and the best way to handle this situation.

Female Beauty From 1 To 10

It’s Female Beauty Friday! You know the drill. You rank order the ten photos below, assigning a number between 1 and 10 inclusive for each photo. DO NOT USE A NUMBER MORE THAN ONCE. The photos are in no particular order. I was careful to choose pics that represent a woman at each point on the 1 to 10 beauty scale.

The best way to do this without biasing your ratings is to first look at all the photos before ranking them. Then go back and judge like a god.

The idea behind this rather pleasurable exercise is to demonstrate the conformity of men’s attractiveness standards, even across races. I get a thrill up my leg by smashing cherished shibboleths like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and I especially love watching people twist defensively in the face of stone cold reality as they vainly try to prop up their pretty lies.

In the interest of giving my detractors their due, I’ve gone the extra mile in this post and chosen “real” women from among the submitted female photos (and a few of my own choices) whose rankings are less clear cut than expected. I’ve also included other races, and I’ve avoided using celebrities or otherwise well-known women. Nevertheless, I predict, despite the increased difficulty level, that most of you will agree in the rankings, plus or minus one point.

I also predict, as before in the first female ranking exercise, that the most disagreement will occur in the middle rankings — 4,5,6 — where a woman’s looks tend to blend in with the masses of other women along the fat part of the bell curve, and at the very upper end where great battles will be fought to decide who is the 10. The latter is because once you get into rarified beauty territory personal whim looms large.

Note: Women older than 40 (barring rare exceptions) and obese women are disqualified from the competition, even as fodder for the rankings below 4, because age and fat introduces a potent variable that will skew the results too drastically away from underlying facial beauty. Obesity especially is the Beauty Destroyer, the Leveler of the Playing Field, that can turn a 10 into a 2. The problem with America today is that so many women are fat that they’ve pushed the beauty bell curve into an unsightly leftward bulge, where we are now overflowing with 3s and 4s at the cost of fewer 6s and 7s. Goddamn shame it is.

After the voting is complete, you can compare your preferences to those of your peers, and to me, in the follow-up post I will write.

For those who don’t like arched eyebrows and giant fake smiles, here is another photo of “fur smile” girl.

Did you find yourself lingering longer over some photos than others?

PS: There is an Evil Easter Egg in this post. If you’ve found it, try not to blurt it out too soon in the comments. Give people a chance to stumble into my dastardly ways for themselves.

My Time Inside The Housing Bubble

A few years ago I briefly toyed with the idea of getting a second job on the side for some quick and easy supplemental bling. Acting on a tip from a friend, I walked into the office of a mortgage broker in northern Virginia to begin my second life as an intermediary taking advantage of information bottlenecks and client ignorance.

The president mob boss of the small company was a short Vietnamese man with manic energy, a giant gold watch, and a quick tongue. I mentioned my referral and, after sizing me up, he told me there would be an all-hands meeting in a half hour and I was invited to sit in and see if this business appealed to me.

I scanned the office. Lots of empy cubicles with flickering monitors full of excel spreadsheets being operated by invisible employees. Along the wall were closed door offices with nameplates designating various positions – VP this, VP that, CFO (!), Executive manager. Really? I popped my head into one office and another South Asian greeted me. We bantered a bit then he showed me his trophies and certificates for excellence in mortgage brokering. A huge photo of him sitting in his Ferrari hung prominently behind his desk. He noticed me checking it out and said it took him only three years to build his client list to reach the point he could buy that beauty — all it required was a solid work ethic. He was wearing a Rolex.

Just prior to the meeting a tall white guy with a frat boy striped shirt approached me and stuck out his hand. I asked him what he thought of the business. He told me what it was like getting loans for marginal clients and how to deal with Countrywide. He said he was 27 years old and was planning on making 2 million for himself by the time he hit 30. Business was so good he had no doubt his goal would be reached. He talked of a luxurious retirement by age 40.

We all sat down in a semi-circle in a large conference room. The only white guys were me and Mr. Early Retirement. There were four women, three East Asians and one white chick who looked Italian by background. The rest of the group was a polyglot of East Asian, Vietnamese or Thai, Hispanic and indeterminate ethnicity men. The two Vietnamese/Thai guys wore the sharpest suits of the bunch. Crisp like new dollar bills.

The high energy Vietnamese don entered and began a free form discussion of life in the commission based mortgage broker business. Acronyms and jargon were flying — MTAs, COFI loans, COSI arms, A-paper, Alt-A, subprime (this was before the housing bubble burst, so the word subprime didn’t trigger instant suspicion at the time), DUs, Full Doc, SIVA, SISA, No Ratio (later learned this meant no stated income), No Doc, PITI, origination fee (fancy word for screwing the client with a skim off the top), PMI, DTI, NVAR, and on and on.

Then the Vietdon looked carefully around the room, eyeballing each one of us.

“This is good, very good.” He was smiling and nodding his head. “The way it works here is simple. Trust. You earn the client’s trust and your business takes off. They trust you, they sign on the dotted line. So, for instance…” He pointed at the Asian women. “These ladies are assigned to female clients. Asian women in particular. They will trust them.”

The Asian girls snickered and one uncrossed and crossed her legs. I watched her crotch as she did this.

The Vietdon continued. “And my boys over there…” The Hispanic guys laughed. “They get the Hispanic clients. This is the way it works in this business. Now let’s be real. Most of our Hispanic clients aren’t high rollers. They’re struggling, making ends meet. They got families. They need houses to put those families in. They work hard. To get them to sign on the dotted line…” (He loved that expression.) “…you’ve got to put their minds at ease that you’re looking out for them. They trust someone who looks like them, you know?”

More nods of agreement from the Jose contingent.

“Then we’ve got our white guys.” At saying this, the Vietdon smiled broadly. “You guys, you go out in the field with a casual button down, one button at the top undone, nice shoes, real tall all-American look, and people with money trust you. I get some white clients… not too many because, you know, we mostly deal with the underserviced community…” (The group chuckled.) “…and these white clients feel comfortable dealing with a white agent. It is what it is, right? No morality tales here, we just do what brings in the business. I think we can all agree on that.” Heads nodded in unison. “It’s a little different for our Asian clients. They want to see their agents dressed in shiny pressed suits at all times. Isn’t that right, Phung!” Laughter from everyone.

“This is a good time to be in the brokerage business. The money is there. Work hard, make your calls, show up at the houses for that extra attention people love, and you can see a nice little profit for yourself.” With that, the Vietdon ended the meeting.

I showed up at the office for three more weeks, then decided it reminded me too much of cold calling old people over dinner to sell investment advice. Something about the whole operation felt sleezy, like an Amway scheme. I didn’t think the odds of me scoring easy money on the side were that great, at least not with this firm, so I abandoned the mission.

Two years later, the housing bubble burst spectacularly. Today, I wonder why all those really smart guys back then propping up the mortgage brokerage business on phantom assumptions couldn’t see the sleeziness in what they were doing like I could after only a half hour inside the business. Or maybe they did and didn’t care. And I wonder if Mr. Early Retirement achieved his goal.

Despite the unsavory nature of the brokerage business, I have respect for the Vietdon. He knew the score and didn’t shy away from it. He told it like it is. He probably violated every anti-discrimination law on the books, but he made money while the making was good.

Plausible Apocalypse

I watched “Knowing” on a free movie internet database site. It’s about a kid from 50 years ago who predicts the future with dates and locations for tragic events that hadn’t yet occurred. The end times event prophecied by the kid is a giant solar flare that literally scorches the earth to a crisp. It was a silly but entertaining movie.

I wondered about the odds of such an event happening, and if a real life rogue monster solar flare would cause the worldwide firestorm depicted in the movie. Then I read this:

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection. If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

A coronal mass ejection causing the deaths of tens of millions? Yes, but not by firestorm. By a total disruption of services.

The second problem is the [electricity] grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen.

[…]

First to go – immediately for some people – is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The article goes on to describe more nightmarish consequences of an unanticipated CME. And how difficult and time-consuming it is to replace the transformers fried by a massive solar plasma ball of death. Our entire way of life — the decadence of our modern economy — would begin to grind to a halt within days of the event. You wouldn’t even be able to recharge your Ipod. The SWPLs would be running around useless like chickens with their heads cut off.

Right now, the only countermeasure we have is NASA’s ACE orbiter probe which can relay information about solar activity to earth with 15- 45 minutes of warning of any incoming solar storms. But this probe is old and failing. And a huge CME can travel much faster than a typical geomagnetic storm, leaving our power companies with too little warning to prepare by either shutting down or re-routing the electrical systems.

This should be a priority for NASA before any manned space flights to Mars. I don’t want my Quake Live interrupted.