I went out for nachos tonight at my fave Irish pub, late in the evening. As I was walking back home around 1 a.m., after stopping for groceries, I passed an entrance to the subway. Two girls and three guys were standing on the sidewalk in front of it, and as I approached them one of the girls asked me:
“Do you know where the Metro is?”
“Sorry?”
“The Metro? Groceries?” And she indicated the bags I was carrying.
“Oh, yeah!” So I gave her directions.
The thing is, in Toronto the subway/transit system is the TTC, but in other places—like Montreal—they actually call it “the Metro.” Whereas in Toronto, what used to be the Dominion supermarkets are now all called Metro. So I figured maybe these kids were just down here for the weekend, and were looking for the subway (“Ze Metro! Ze Metro!! Mon dieu!”), and for Chrissake, they were standing right in front of it, so I’m trying to be polite but how the hell was I supposed to give them directions for that?
They’re “not from around here,” you see.
Sigh. Sometimes I make things more difficult than they need to be.
Ah, but so many pretty girls out in the bars on a Saturday night in July. It reminded me of something PZ Myers recently wrote:
[I]f we rewound the tape of life and ran it forward again, and evolution led to intelligent cephalopods, an anthropocentric bigot like Klinghoffer might well regard them as “grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly,” but I’d think them pretty cool … and most importantly, these beings would consider their own forms beautiful, and us strangely twisted chordates as hideous.
Very true—that’s just how sexual selection works. Whatever sex hormones cephalopods have will produce certain patterns of growth in males and other patterns in females, with higher levels of those hormones producing different physical configurations (i.e., “fertility markers”) than lower ones. So the members of the species which have a genetic predisposition for finding the high-hormone-indicating patterns attractive, and the individuals which have those patterns themselves, will out-reproduce the other members of the species in the long run, spreading the genes which cause them to find those attributes attractive throughout the species.
And to those sea creatures, humans would indeed look hideously ugly, not just for being vertebrates but also because our sex hormones produce completely different patterns of growth in us—high testosterone leading to a square jaw in men, and high estrogen producing doe-like eyes in women, etc. Whereas, as every octopus knows, the thing to look for in a mate is well-formed tentacles.
I said “tentacles.” Why, what did you think I said?
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’s garden, with you
