Book Hippo

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Crimes Of Averages

Now, I have a question to ask. What is average? What is an average person? Does that notion play out in reality? You often hear, when people talk of someone who's done something out-of-the-ordinary, that's they're 'not your average person'. Well, what does that mean, I ask again? Who's really average? If there is a tribe where every man is six foot and all the women five foot, the average height is five foot six inches. Yet, no one in the tribe is five foot six inches. Or how about that 2.2 kids that the 'average' Canadian is supposed to have. I have never seen or even heard of (other than in averages) a .2 kid. What you be if you were .2 of a person? Only an arm? I'm just saying that the idea of average is only good for pretending. One middle-class family my make $10,000 dollars a month. Another may make $4000. So which is average when they're not even the same? Of a family may have three kids. Another two. But the fathers and mothers have the same job. So the four person family can afford more 'goodies' with their wages while the five person family may have to hitch in their belts to make ends meet. Or how about someone who's job changes because of some government law that comes into force. A good example is man I know who sold pesticides in Ontario. The government of Ontario passed a law prohibiting pesticides. Overnight, his job was gone. Is that average? Did that happen to the 'average' Canadian? Yet he had about a 50,000 dollar per year job. (Just as an aside, he moved to BC and now landscapes out there. Happy ending) So what about this 'law of averages'? To me, it's just so much blah, blah, blah. Let's be real about people and in that way, we can be fair to the reality of people's lives.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

TMZ Girlie Punch

I was watching television yesterday, a program called TMZ. This is a celebrity gossip show which masquerades as news. But that's okay. Anyway, there was a security camera shot of a girl and famous professional football player arguing in a bar. She makes a fist with her right hand. He grabs it to defend himself from being punched. She then punches him with her left fist. He punches her right in the face, almost dropping her to her knees. Some were saying, a man shouldn't hit a woman. But I wonder if the real problem is women who think that to attain equality, they have to be tough like a man. For me, the male mammal instinctively knows all about challenges and threats. They deal with it all the time. Women seem to think that challenging someone like a man is a cute personality trait and something they should attain to be 'equal'. If women are going to say that they have the adult choice to go to a bar and if they're going to get drunk and fight, then they're bound to get a fist in the face once in a while. I don't want to seem old-fashioned about women. I'm not saying they should stay home and defer, I'm just saying that women should understand what they're doing. When a women acts tough and hits a man in the face, she's challenging him. She's saying, "I'm tougher than you." In this dog-eat-dog society, if he doesn't want to be seen as someone who is a push-over, he has a right to fight back. If a weaker person challenges a stronger one, he gets pushed out. It should be the same for women