Wed 23 Nov 2005
A reader asks:
Darling,
Every week you give out a “Weekly Wanker” award for the biggest wanker of the week. But the trophy for the Weekly Wanker is the “Golden Winger”, which implies that it’s really an award for wingnuttery. So I’m confused. Is it an award for wanking, or wingnuttery?
Still Craving Your Body,
Julia StilesThe answer to this question requires that we turn to SCIENCE.
“But The Editors,” you implore, “what is this SCIENCE of which you speak? It sounds terribly frightening and dangerous!”
God, you are such babies. SCIENCE is nothing to be afraid of - it is merely a method of inquiry which makes use of empirical data about the world and fits it into an abstract, predictive model. For example, suppose you ask me the question: “what is the volume of an average human being?” This is a very stupid and pointless question, exactly the sort of question I would expect someone like you would ask. Why do you care? If I refuse to answer your question, you may become violent, so I will attempt to do so, quickly, by making a few simplifying approximations. First, in order to make the math simpler, I will assume that the average person is a uniform sphere, 3 feet in diameter. Why, when I look at the problem that way, it turns out that I’m really quite extraordinarily tall and svelte! Indeed, I’m far too attractive a physical specimen to have to answer your damn fool questions, so I roll you out the door like a beachball full of cottage cheese and have the chicks from “Coyote Ugly” over for a week-long orgy. All thanks to SCIENCE!
Using these same powerful analytic tools, we can begin our investigation. First, we abstract the the concepts of “wankery” and “wingnuttery”, and represent them as the perpendicular x and y axes of a graph, respectively. We define our zero of wingnuttery as Charles Darwin’s classic “The Origin of Species”, and our zero of wankery as Steve McQueen, the only man to live through the 1960’s without ever having a stupid haircut. Moving upwards from our axis of wingnuttery we pass through lines of increasing wingnuttiness, while moving to the right from our zero-wankery line implies ever higher degrees of wankitude, until, after many, many sheets of graph paper, we find ourselves at the Burning Man festival. With this as our guide, we can objectively plot the wingnut and wanker ratings of any individual, and determine what relationship exists between these two seemingly unrelated characteristics.
Figure 1: Wingnuttery vs. Wankery
(Click for larger image.)
Firstly, we note that Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristof and David Brooks all lie on a single line which exactly bisects our graph. This is no coincidence: this line of equal wankery and wingnuttery is used by the NY Times to determine who gets a regular spot the editorial page. (Note that by projecting this “Line O’ The Times” out, we discover that Assrocket will soon have a regular gig at the Grey Lady.) We also observe that people may evolve over time along lines of constant wankery, although only in the direction of increasing wingnuttery, which, like entropy, can only be created, never destroyed. Finally, we note that the quadrant of high wingnuttery and low wanking is completely empty. You can have wanking without the wingnuttery, but not wingnuttery without wanking.
So, Ms. Stiles, the answer to your question is: both! When determining each week’s Golden Winger, we at The Poor Man use our own patented technology and proprietary analysis techniques to find out who achieved the maximum distance from the (0,0) point of sanity and dignity.
