A Second Look

I realize you don't constantly flip through the pages of this work. It's your loss of course, since I have been known to go back and change a few things ... style is my style. Jack "Style" H, in fact. I did it just now, with Duh, and it's so fascinating to all right-thinking people that I feel the need to share the changes, re-edited here to stand alone. Because I know how you are.

Context: a comparison between human and ape skulls, from an Evolutionary perspective. Some sarcastic evidence adduced on my part, taken from a racist website:

Rodney Rhines, whose extreme racial characteristic, specifically of the prognathous jawline, is taken as a sign of primitiveness. And also, Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev:

whose forehead is something to behold.

One of the burdens of being incomparably brilliant is that I think beyond the mere surface at which people of your ilk are stuck. So I wondered what appearances would yield if I took up God's chisel and crafted a few sculptural changes.

Hmm. It seems there is room for a human brain in that skulls. It's not that he doesn't have cranial capacity. It's that he has extra bone. Like me! Well then. He must be a genius.

As for Rodney, La!

Oh my. My my my. Rodney is quite a handsome black man. If I, with my crude Paint skills, can so recraft Rodney's features, imagine what a slightly more benevolent Providence could have had in store for him. We might know him through his pictures in fashion mags, rather than municipal police department mug shots. Fellow looks like Mario Van Peebles. Beauty is a game of inches. He's a rock star if you shorten his profile by three inches. That's what she said.

As if we knew a man's character by the shape of his bones. I saw a man once in a Staples store, who had marble-sized lumps all over his visible skin, placed about two inches apart. Not warts, not pimples, just lumps, like a horned kiwano melon.

It must take incredible character to face the world with good cheer, when one is deformed in one's face. But let's Move On.

So here's a lament over the flood of Irish immigrants in the last quarter of a previous century, combined with the disaster of the emancipated slaves. Both groups could vote, you see, and that couldn't be a good thing, ruining the North now, and the South.

We know they're bad, because they have big jaws. They're after our Lucky Charms, begorra, and our White Women.

Moving from the minefield of political opinion to the comfort of objective measurement, we have Camper's Facial Angles, scholarly monograph from 1821, offering empirical proof of Evolution:

A. B. C. D.

E. F. G. H.

A. tailed monkey 42º, B. orangutan 48º, C. Negro and D. Kalmuck 70º (Western Mongol tribe), E. European 80º, F. Grecian and G. Roman busts 95º, and a diseased H. hydrocephalic 100º. See? That proves it. The best thing to be is hydrocephalic. I think that's the point. Maybe European. Northern European. Scandinavian, specifically -- Danish and Norwegian. From Østre Toten on the maternal grandmother's side.

Well, Camper was not an Evolutionist, but we drink from many wells.

Yes, there's so much more to say, but you are insufficiently appreciative, and therefore unworthy of my further notice. I do however trust that you had a Merry Nine Eleven holiday, enjoying all the customary festivities. I got sunburned. First it hailed, I kid you not, then it made the side of my neck red.

I hate it when stereotypes are true.

J