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I was walking back home from work the other day and I saw yet another car on the streets with a big Decepticon decal plastered on the hood (for the cartoonistically-challenged amongst you, the “Decepticons” are the bad guys from the Transformers series, out to conquer the universe and all that good stuff). That makes 3 sightings in a span of 2 weeks. And that got me thinking: why is it that i’ve never seen a car here with an Autobot (the good guys from the series) logo on it?On some level, it must reflect the mentality of the drivers, who invariably own colorfully pimped-up coupes with modified body trims and massive, ugly spoilers that serve no functional purpose. The Deception logo is yet another piece in their facade with the implicit message ”look at me, I’m such a badass”.

My personal opinion is that If someone needs an 80s cartoon emblem to prove his machoism, he’s got some pretty serious credibility problems. But the other issue, though, is why is it so fashionable to be perceived as “bad” or dangerous? Our obsession with it is evident. Gangstas rap about drive-by shootings and slapping hos in the ‘hood, punks decorate themselves with piercings of all sorts, and Singaporean wannabes with their decepticon logos - all of which are essentially declarations of their ostensible “badness” (albeit to different degrees), and the rest of us (chicks especially) readily gobble it up as if it were so.

I can understand this from an evolutionary point of view. After all, 20,000 years ago the aggressive bad boys in our cavemen society were also the likely to be the ones in the ruling class running the show. If you were living back then, you wanted to ally yourself with the bat-swinging alpha male of the group, not the sensitive copper-age pansy painting on the cave walls. In that epoch, being an aggressive and dangerous in general conferred a certain amount of social and practical advantage. This tends not to be the case anymore, but the more primitive portions of our brains just hasn’t realized it yet.

Still, just because evolution has been slow to catch on doesn’t mean we have to be stuck in a paradigm that tens of thousands of years old. The pseudo-badboy image in particular is a cliche that’s been packaged, commercialized, and sold to unsuspecting wannabes in a fashion not dissimilar to emo rock. Admittedly, I may be overly optimistic about humanity’s prospects for change, but If humanity can get over major crises like the cold war and the backstreet boys, there may yet be hope that one day it could be cool and fashionable to be seen just a “nice guy”. Imagine that.

And to prove a point, I intend to buy a T-shirt featuring an Autobot logo the next time I come across one, just so people know which side of the fence I’m on.

It is said that Buddha once delivered a silent sermon to his disciples where he simply stared at a flower and smiled. The gist if it was to get them to appreciate the “stillness” of the universe and the beauty inherent within all of nature. Something along those lines, anyway.

Yesterday as I was sitting in Carl’s Junior munching down a supersized onion ring I took a moment to admire its crummy asymmetry and cholesterol-laden goodness and wondered, “why couldn’t it have been an onion ring?” Surely Buddha would have been equally happy staring at a big onion ring. Who wouldn’t be? Everybody loves onion rings.

And I smiled like an idiot because, for a moment at least, I was dead certain I was the happiest person in the restaurant.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Vladimir Putin looks looks like a textbook James Bond villain. So happens I stumbled upon this picture of Putin err… thinking about something and I knew I had to blog it. Isn’t amazing this guy has exactly 1 expression he wears all the time? You couldn’t tell if he was plotting world domination or thinking about doing the laundry.

My friend sent me this rather amusing web comic the other day. “You’ll like it” he promised, and to his credit it did bring a smile to my face. But one thing that was immediately clear to me was that the whole evolution-creationism controversy no longer pumps me up like it did back during college. I just don’t care that much anymore.

A little background info: Kansas in 2005 was a hotbed for the Evolution-creationism debates. The state board of education was about to introduce creationism into the school curriculum and as the only columnist in the K-State collegian with any sort of science background, I felt like I had the burden to say something. Yes, college. Where everything you do happens with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. So I wrote a couple of columns in the school paper on the matter and promptly received a mountainload of hate mail (of varying degrees of coherence and profanity) from fervid believers as far away as Florida. Not that I was ever deterred by them; the articles did give me some serious street cred with professors.

But that was back then. These days I look at the whole issue with only detached interest. Part of the reason, I suspect, is because I’m no longer in Kansas. After all, Its a lot harder to get excited about an issue if you’re not physically there to see any tangible implications. But the other reason is that the unabashed idealism I once had in college has since worn off. Coming to think about it, there there aren’t that many issues that incite the same kind of fiery passion I had for almost everything from the Iraq war to how I wanted my steak done.

Its not that I’ve become jaded, just that I’ve discovered other things to focus my energies on. Perhaps its a natural progression in the evolutionary course of the psyche, so to speak.