How much people want to have sex with you.

      This mostly describes heterosexual relationships, because that’s what I know.

 

 

(As usual, totally made up and not based on actual data).

Most Hilarious Misuse of an Apostrophe Ever

 

   I remember when I was a kid; every Christmas, Dad would break out his Love Tools and… wait, what?

Which operating system is right for you?

Here’s a little flowchart I made, for people who are thinking of buying a new computer but aren’t sure which operating system to get:

Sorry if it’s hard to read; I can upload a larger version if necessary.

My own pet theory on why you see more male musicians.

Edit: Blogspot cuts off the right half of the picture; be sure to click on it for full view.

*Not based on actual data.

Words for Asshole

There are many ways to call someone an asshole. If they're a guy, you can call them a dick or a douche bag. If they're a woman then you can call them a bitch or a cunt. Either way, you can still just call them an asshole (although, like many gender-neutral terms, it is more often used for guys). All these words, when used as a pejorative, have basically the same meaning: that the person in question is self-serving, cruel, callous, greedy, or just generally evil. Yet, the connotations of the words are so different.
The most obvious difference is the gender difference. Cunt and bitch are used to describe women, which makes sense because they mean "vagina" and "female dog," respectively. Dick makes sense for men because it means "penis" (or a male nickname). What about douche bag, though? It's a female hygienic product, so it's kind of a mystery that it's used to refer to men. I guess it could be to create more of a gender balance in the number of words. Dick already provides a lot of permutations, though: dickhole, dickface, dickweed. It's kind of unique amongst these words. Cuntface? Bitchweed? You just don't hear it.
Another stark difference is the level of offensiveness. Obviously, cunt is the most offensive of these. Calling someone a cunt and calling someone a dick are basically the opposite-gender equivalents of each other - they're both words for genitalia that also colloquially mean asshole - and yet the former is so much more offensive than the latter. I'm not really sure why this is; possibly just a result of the fact that it's used less-often.
I've seen lots of people try to "reclaim" the word bitch, and re-invent it as a compliment. I've even seen a positive backronym create for it: "Beautiful Intelligent Talented Cute Hot." I'm against this reclamation. If someone calls you a bitch and clearly means it as an insult but you respond as though it were a compliment, then you're just being an idiot. I'm generally against people responding to the literal wording of what someone says when it's clear that the intended meaning is different, like back in elementary school when you asked your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and she'd say "I don't know, can you?" That's kind of the same thing that someone is doing when they interpret being called a bitch as a compliment, except it makes less sense because they're not using the literal meaning; they're using some crazy, made-up one. "Bitch," unlike other words that have been reclaimed like "queer," wasn't a slur against every member of a certain group but rather an insult against someone's personality. Plus, reclaiming the word bitch wouldn't really change much. If someone wants to say that a woman is an asshole, they'd just call them an asshole. Or cunt.

Tomatoes are vegetables

Tomatoes are Vegetables.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You heard from your textbook/biology teacher/girlfriend/dad/wherever that tomatoes are fruits because they have seeds. I'm going to get to that in a moment. First, I need to talk about the fact that the great Tomato Debate is, at it's core, a linguistic one. That is to say, the argument really boils down to definitions; in this case, the definition for "fruit" and the definition for "vegetable" (I think we can all agree on what we would define as a tomato).

Now, about tomatoes being fruits because they are seed-bearing ovum. If you were thinking this when you started reading this article, you were right. Tomatoes are fruits, because a fruit is "the developed ovary of a seed plant with its contents and accessory parts..."¹. You'll find a pretty similar definition in most dictionaries. So, by the dictionary definition, tomatoes are fruits.

However, tomatoes are also vegetables. Look up "vegetable" in most dictionaries, and you'll find a definition along the lines of any plant or part of a plant which is harvested for food by humans. Random House defines it as " any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food..."² So, according to the dictionary definition, Tomatoes are vegetables along with all other edible fruits and things like rice, peanuts, sugar, and soy. Not mushrooms, though.

So, tomatoes are both fruits and vegetables, right? Well, kind of. You see, both the definitions I gave you just now are sort of general definitions for "fruit" and "vegetable." Words can, however, have a general definition but also a completely different definition, for use in special situations. For instance, the word "virus" refers to (in general) a type of non-living microbe which uses the cells of living things to reproduce. However, in the area of computer science, "virus" takes on a completely different definition, and no longer refers to a microbe or a physical thing at all, but rather digital information which is designed to make a computer run instructions that would cause unwanted damage. This is a special-case definition of "virus."

And, I propose that when someone asks "are tomatoes a fruit or vegetable?," they're asking for a special-case definition of both those words. First, because the question implies that a tomato is one or the other, general definitions which overlap as much as "fruit" and "vegetable" do probably aren't the right choice. Second, because the categories of "fruit" and "vegetable" conjure up images of the classic Food Pyramid, and the boxes which appear on them. Often, when someone asks about tomatoes being a fruit or a vegetable, they're asking which Food Group it belongs in. And the Food Groups "fruit" and "vegetable" have different criteria than the general definitions of "fruit and vegetable." If they didn't, then every food we ate that comes from a plant would be in the Vegetable Group, and (needless to say) that is not how the Food Pyramid works.

So, which Food Group do tomatoes fit into? Well, they are savory and not sweet, they contain low amounts of fructose, and they are usually eaten as part of dinner rather than desert. For these reasons, I would argue that they are in the Vegetable Group. Furthermore, the USDA (the department responsible for creating the Food Pyramid) list tomatoes on their Vegetable page but not on their Fruit page. I'm having trouble finding an official list of foods that belong in each group for the "classic" Food Pyramid (the one without stairs running up the side), but a picture of said pyramid on the USDA's website contains something that looks distinctly like a tomato in the vegetable section.

So, for these reasons, I believe that the tomato falls squarely in the Vegetable Group of the Food Pyramid, and not the Fruit Group. If you choose to accept Food Groups as the appropriate method for which to determine if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable (which is the method I would prescribe), then it's a vegetable and not a fruit. If you choose to use the general definitions to decide, then it is both a fruit and a vegetable. QED: tomatoes are vegetables, no matter how you look at them. They are, however, only sometimes fruits. Here's a little chart to summarize things:









1: fruit. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fruit (accessed: January 21, 2009).

2: vegetable. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vegetable (accessed: January 21, 2009).