Katie Stalin in Creepsville
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Doomed from the Get Go: Creepsville’s favorite musical combo “The Midnight Creeps” performing at Maryland Fried Chicken House on Maynard Street.
Creepsville, USA – My friend Jonas told me Creepsville is best known for some all-ages punk band called The Midnight Creeps. Well, I’ve never heard of the place or the band, but the idea of visiting America’s only city-state was pretty cool, like being able to take a trip back in time to Greece, but without all the olive oil.
Boy was I surprised when I got here. One of Creepsville’s most important products is olive oil and the town is surrounded by olive groves. It’s the only place in the world where you can get “extremely super virgin olive oil,” which is pressed before the olives are even ripe; sometimes, before they’re even planted. There are two lovely, ivy-covered olive pressing factories in the city center, shared by all the olive growers. I like it when people share.
It’s probably not true that you can eat off of the streets, but they’re really clean. Tom Jorgensen, David Abernathy, and Astrid Santana are the street cleaners and all of them were hospitable when I stopped by the street cleaner depot on my first day in town. Yeah, I had to ask like fifteen times, but eventually they showed me the mopitorium where they keep the mops. Each mop has a special claspy thing on the wall and there’s a mop check-out log where you can sign your name to check out a mop. That Astrid was pretty cute, but she’s married.
Mayor Joanna Cyclone took me on a tour of city hall. The nation’s most pristine aquifer is located immediately below Creepsville, so they’ve got a lot of public fountains. City hall has fifteen! Made it real easy for Mayor Cyclone and me to have a whiskey and a splash at the end of the day. I ended up staying with City Planner Jones. That’s actually his name. He loves his job so much he had a justice of the peace legally change his first name to City Planner. Mr. Jones showed me some plans for the updating of the sub-divisions on the east side of town. Maple Road is totally gonna be rezoned light commercial. His designs for the Creep County Historical Museum were par excellence (I picked that up in Paris).
Doug Tadpole, the chairman of the Creepsville Chamber of Commerce, showed me some of the plans for expanding their culinary offerings. I was so happy to see that they were going to open a franchise of Nacho Mamma’s and probably will put it in my guide.
What can I say? Creepsville’s awesome. There aren’t any hotels, but the locals are so friendly you can ask anyone for a place to crash for the night. Lots of trees, three parks, excellent public transportation, friendly people and their only crime is the occasional theft of a pink plastic flamingo from someone’s lawn by local teenagers (those scamps). If you like nachos or fountains, you should definitely come for a visit.
Katie Stalin recently appeared as Rosalinde in the Willinois Farmyard Players production of Die Fledermaus. She is currently working on a restaurant guide for nacho enthusiasts.
Book Review
Not Even Wrong, by Dr. Peter Woit
One of our great laments is that science writers tend to be unable to properly convey scientific ideas to a lay audience. Some of this can be blamed on a liberal arts education based in the historic Greek emphasis on competence in the trivium (language) and quadrivium (science and music). In modern practice this divides the educational tracks of students, generally producing persons better at one than the other. As our system moves education into a very specific concentration in graduate school, these differences become more pronounced. Writers, the people who are trained to explain concepts via the written word, often have little knowledge of science and scientists often have little training in the use of language. This division greatly influences our view of Not Even Wrong, whereas other reviewers have focused mainly on scientific arguments.
At the outset we are in complete agreement with Dr. Peter Woit, lecturer in Mathematics at Columbia University and author of Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory & The Continuing Challenge to Unify the laws Of Physics. As educated laymen in physics, we feel there is something at the least fishy about string theory. Not Even Wrong could go a long way towards explaining the failures of string theory for the general public and physicists if it did not try to simultaneously satisfy both.
Not Even Wrong is at least terribly confusing to readers with only a basic education in physics. While the argument presented in the book is, to our eyes, internally logically sound, it is very difficult to discern because of Woit’s insistence on writing for a diverse audience and his often confusing writing style. Dr. Woit is attempting to reach his colleagues in mathematics and physics whilst simultaneously disabusing the general, interested reader of misconceptions given to her by popularizing physicists over the course of the last twenty years. We do not believe he accomplishes the latter, and are unsure if the message of his book has effectively reached the former.
Helpful Resources for Daily Life
Inaccurate and Thus Not Particularly
Helpful Tables
Cute-Pretty-Beautiful
A Discourse on the Subtlety of Attraction
It is a widely known fact that most heterosexual, and even some homosexual, men love attractive women. What is less widely understood is why certain women are particularly attractive; especially since many attractive women look nothing alike. You can take a big curvy Amazon, a little petite ballerina or even a scruffy tomboy and find them all to be highly pleasing to the eye, and to other parts as well. Some psychologists try to boil it down to facial symmetry, some anthropologists might point to the sphericality of breast shape, some biologists might talk of pheromones or child-bearing hips, but for some reason attractive women come in all sorts of different styles.
One way to look at the situation is to realize that there are cute women, pretty women and beautiful women; all of which are different yet still equally desirable. Cute, pretty and beautiful are closely related, often it can be difficult to distinguish one from the other. Usually this is because the person trying to distinguish one from the other is not thinking with his brain. All three types of women have a remarkable ability to shut down any male’s higher brain functions.
It’s most important to note that cute, pretty and beautiful are entirely separate from the other triptych; girl-next-door, virtuous virgin and wildly fun slut. It’s easy to pair each of these three terms with a counterpart; the cute girl-next-door, the pretty virtuous virgin and the beautiful wildly fun slut. This doesn’t work at all though. Any researcher should always keep in mind that there are plenty of cute sluts, pretty girls-next-door and beautiful virtuous virgins. The key question then is, what makes a woman cute, pretty or beautiful?
First, we will explore cute. Often, cuteness corresponds directly to stature. One will find more short cute girls than pretty or beautiful girls of small stature. Cuteness can also be dictated by the facial features; large, pronounced eyes, a small nose and mouth and generally rounded facial types are often the hallmark of the cute woman. One could, if one were so inclined, describe such features as mousey or child-like, although this is not the best comparison, as only the insanely strange enjoy sexual relations with mice or children while almost all men enjoy such activities with cute women.
The pretty woman, on the other hand, is perhaps a bit more classical in appearance. Her features are well arranged, and sometimes even angular in their appearance. Many pretty women are of a taller, but more graceful stature, and their looks could even be called refined. While one might easily call a beautiful or cute female of any age a girl, the pretty female seems to fit the word woman quite well. She is grown up, maybe even tall and elegant and perhaps more serious in her countenance then her beautiful or cute compatriots. There is a sly, cat-like grace about the pretty woman, and even if she is a girl-next-door, her classic exquisiteness always shines through.
Lastly, the beautiful woman seems to embody some of the traits of both the cute and the pretty. In many ways she combines the strengths of both styles into one package that is instantly appealing. She’s more grown up than the cute, but still more unbounded than the pretty. Drifting through all the styles, the beautiful woman is at once elegant and playful. Unlike the cute, who can hide behind bashfulness or the pretty who can hide behind her stoicism, there is no sticking a beautiful woman under a bushel; no matter where she goes she will be noticed by everyone. For it is the beautiful woman, who combines the allure of the cute and pretty, who always gets the attention, whether she wants it or not.
Each of us has known and has fallen in love with women who are cute, who are pretty and who are beautiful. Though each group has its own strengths and particularities that single it out, when it all comes down to the right moment, they are all the same; no matter if a woman is cute, pretty or beautiful, the only important thing is that at least she isn’t fugly.