Men who drank 2 to 3 cups a day had a 10 per cent chance of outliving those who drank no coffee, while women had a 13 per cent advantage, according to research published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Specifically…

The study found that men who drank 2 to 3 cups a day had a 14 per cent lower risk of dying from heart disease, 17 per cent lower risk of dying from respiratory disease, 16 per cent decreased chance of dying from stroke and a 25 per cent lower risk of dying from diabetes than those who drank no coffee.

But will this be enough to silence the cofee-haters out there? I doubt it. Nothing will silence them… unless we go into their homes, drags them into the streets and force hot coffee down their gullet.

LONG LIVE COFFEE!!

I was thinking about this sleep arrangement today. Would it work in the modern era? I had to concede that I have absolutely zero interest in talking to my neighbors at any point during the day. I’ve never really talked to them, but I have to conclude that they, like most people, would be incapable of meeting my standards for intellect and personal hygiene. I have to admit that I felt a tinge of sadness at the thought. I would like to like my neighbors. I would like to have someone I could go chew the fat with.

Nonetheless, I’m stuck with the conclusion that we of the modern era really don’t have a lot of interest in interacting with each other purely for the sake of interaction. I think most conversations and human interactions are fundamentally an act of bargaining favors. You play golf with your neighbor so you can feel out whether there might be any openings at his company that you would be a fit for. You chat with an old college friend because he’s on the board of a school you’d like to get your daughter into. We interact to engage in the act of climbing the social hierarchy.

So were people of the Middle Ages not doing this? I imagine some of them were. But I also presume the following: everyone was so shit eating poor back then that it was possible to converse as equals. There were very few favors your neighbor could bestow upon you — after all, he was living the same impoverished existence as you — so, you might as well just chat.

Now, you might be saying, “Wil, that’s horseshit. In the Middle Ages there were indeed different classes, and they were separated by even greater distance than today.” And that’s of course true. But a peasant in the Middle Ages had little interaction with the king on the hill. Additionally, he or she knew they had about zero chance of ever ascending their social station. But nowadays, we are aware how the “betters” live. It’s broadcast on television, in movies and romanticized about in music. (See “bling.”) On top of that, we can move through the class system (I recall reading a while back that most people will go through about three different classes during their life.) So how do we ascend our station? Well, partly, by engaging in social commerce — trading favors with our neighbors. Which isn’t a bad way to do things, but it does kind of corrupt human interaction. You can’t talk to someone without wondering what you can get out of them, and what they might be trying to get out of you.

It’s too bad we can’t all be shit eating peasants.

One might presume I have become cold and callous in my years; I offer another theory. I am actually the first in a new kind of advanced human – a human who has stripped away human weaknesses such as emotion. Within time, the most attractive of the less evolved human females, led by Scarlett Johansson, will recognize my superiority and mate with me. Our progeny will be a new race of meta-cyborg-humans who will declare war on the old weak human race. Emotional humans will fall, mewing and screaming, one by one, under the metal fists of their new masters – my children.

With this realization in place, I become a god.

Before I get into it, let’s be clear what the term “emotion” is describing. By Damasio’s argument, an emotion is a series of measurable body changes – fear is an increased heart rate and sweating, sadness is the dull ache of muscles and viscera, joy is perhaps a light warmth, a sense that the body is moving smoothly. These are not the complete list of body changes for each emotion and it can also be argued that many of the changes we experience in an emotional state are barely on the tip of our consciousness (e.g. Freud’s classic subconscious emotions.)

Damasio’s argument is that emotions evolved as a kind of short cut to reason. We employ emotions to make quick decisions that would take longer if we employed only logic. Let’s say a friend says to you, Hey [your name here], I’ll give you ten bucks if you dangle you penis into this swimming pool filled with flesh eating sharks.” Do you contemplate this offer by musing, “Well, if I do that there’s a likelihood that the sharks will sense my penis and bite it off in a mad feeding frenzy. Since this would deprive me of the many pleasures of owning a penis as well as the possibility of creating children I should decline this offer.”? No, you do not. Instead you instantly recoil at the thought of your proud phallus becoming shark chum. Emotions do all the logic processing for you and deliver a sharp sensations (physically felt) indicating that the idea is bad.

I described a similar example of this kind of emotional processing, complete with physical sensations, in my groundbreaking article, “What is Emotion?”

I recently hiked up a mountain near my house. As I stood atop a boulder overlooking the view, I observed some power lines that ran down the mountain and crossed just below me. As a kind of mental joke, I considered the possibility of leaping off the boulder and wrapping my sweater over the powerline so that I could literally slide down it as a kind of human ski lift. I had no serious intention of doing this, but even so, I could feel my body revolt. My viscera churned slightly and my chest got tight. What surprised me was the sensation in my knees. They tingled and weakened, almost as if my body was saying, “if you are considering this insane action, then I’m going to take away your ability to jump!”

So the idea here, again, is that emotion is a shortcut for logic. Problems that a computer, or Mr. Spock, might solve by “pure reason” (a questionable concept) are instead solved by emotion. In many ways one can see advantages to this – emotions are faster than logical processing and speed can be important in many situations. But there’s a downside – emotions can get “confused” and find joy or fear where there is really none to be had. The classic horror film, “Silent Night, Deadly Night” explores this. As a boy, the lead character sees his parents murdered by a man dressed as Santa Claus. As a result, he grows up associating every Santa with fear (and eventually, ironically, himself becomes a killer wearing a Santa uniform.) This is unfortunate since most Santas are harmless. But the movie’s lead is not processing the sight of Santas logically; he is processing them emotionally.

Thus you get to the cruxt of all problems in society. Take an issue – gay marriage, national defense, taxation, animal rights, etc. People argue and debate these issues, but they “feel” their viewpoints more than they “think” them. They process these issues emotionally more than logically. Frankly, I’m not sure there is a “logical” resolution to many of these issues. But you can no more convince someone to “feel” they way you do about something than you can convince them to like a food they do not like. They have their emotional sensations, you have yours, and never the twain shall meet.

There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co. … Guitars first appeared in the catalog in 1894 for $4.50 (around $112 in today’s money). By 1908 Sears was offering a guitar, outfitted for steel strings, for $1.89 ($45 today), making it the cheapest harmony-generating instrument available.

* I’m not saying this is easy.

As I’m reading through Antonio Damasio’s “Looking for Spinoza” I stumble across the description of a scientific study that gets into this very concept. In the study, a group of people were “subjected to hand pain (their hands were immersed in ice cold water.)” Another group was exposed to a vibratory stimulus on their hand (the book doesn’t say, but I’m guessing it’s a French tickler.) While this was going on, the subjects’ brains were being scanned. Now, our brain has several regions that activate when we experience the sense of touch. For the people exposed to pain (the cold water) to regions — the insula and was called the SII — lit up. Both those areas are known to be related to the processing of emotion. In the case of the people holding vibrators, another area, called SI, activated.

Then the experiment was repeated but in this case, the subjects were given painkillers. The people whose hands were being doused in water reported less pain, and there was less activity observed in their insula and SII. For the people with vibrators, there was no change.

This seems to make a couple points. One, pain can be broken down into different components. And we can directly correlate this emotional component of pain — the “agony” of pain — to the insula and SII. I’d be curious as to whether those mystics who walk on hot coals or sleep on a bed of nails have figured out some way to quiet these particular parts of the brain.

Assailants clubbed and knifed both De Witts as they dragged them on the way to the gallows, and by the time they arrived there was no need to hang them anymore. They proceeded to undress the corpses, suspend them upside down, butcher-shop style, and quarter them. The fragments were sold as souvenirs, eaten raw, or even cooked, amid the most sickening merriment.

To be fair, if you’re going to eat somebody, you should cook them. It’s just good form.

Stuart Gordon turned his 1985 cult classic film “Re-Animator” into a musical horror comedy with the help of producer Dean Schramm and witty composer/lyricist Mark Nutter. Based on an H.P Lovecraft tale, the film and play both involve a gifted but mad student who has found a way to bring the dead back to life. Only problem is that when they re-animate, they are pretty pissed off and braindead.

Just recently the play took home an armload of awards (six L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, an Ovation Award and L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards for everything from Best Musical to Best Blood Effects) and deservedly so. The play does everything bloody right.