The Creep Factor

Yesterday I had lunch at the counter of a local diner. I’ve mentioned in the past how guys at the counter are oddly invisible to patrons in booths. Few folks in booths bother to lower their voices even if only four feet from someone on a counter stool. On that stool, one can’t help but unintentionally overhear booth conversations that are often anything but sotto voce. Yesterday one young lady at the booth in back of me said to another at her table, “What a creepy guy!” I of course hoped I was not the creepy guy (one never knows), and fortunately on this occasion I wasn’t. They were referring to a fellow who had just exited the diner. I barely caught a glimpse of him from the back. I don’t know if he interacted at all (such as eye contact) with the ladies. So, I don’t know why he qualified as creepy. How, for that matter, I wondered, does anyone qualify as creepy? The question stuck with me long enough to investigate a bit when I returned home.
 
Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke of Knox College were intrigued by the same question. In 2016 they published their empirical study on the subject. One of their key findings was that creepiness involved an ambiguous threat: not a definitive threat but a possible one. An angry man with a knife is not creepy: he is just flat out scary. But someone making furtive glances while keeping one hand in a pocket on what might or might not be a weapon is creepy. We feel uneasy about him but not quite enough to trigger a fight or flight response. The situation is ambiguous. He might mean no harm at all (and have a harmonica in his pocket) or he might be truly dangerous.
 
Women were more likely than men to identify a man as creepy simply for being unattractive. This is not unreasonable since women are in fact more likely than men to be approached sexually by men of any age, demeanor, and appearance – especially in bars and concert halls and the like – so there is always the possibility of having to deal with the approach of some decidedly unappealing character. The “creepy” fellow might in fact have no intention of approaching anyone, but the situation is inherently ambiguous. Men do not have a monopoly on creepiness. Creepy women are not rare. Nevertheless men are a solid majority of the creeps identified by males and females alike.
 
What were some of the manifestations of creepiness offered by respondents in the study? Among them were:
standing too close
greasy hair
a peculiar smile
long fingers (really?)
unkempt hair (me most of the time)
very pale skin (vampires need not apply)
licking lips frequently
dirty clothes
inappropriate emotion
staring or (alternatively) avoiding eye contact altogether
being extremely thin (?)
and having a weird job or hobby such as clown, taxidermist, or undertaker.

Taxidermist Norman Bates managed
to be creepy even in his Norman persona

Atypical appearance and behavior of any kind can arouse wariness: “While they may not be overtly threatening, individuals who display unusual patterns of nonverbal behavior, odd emotional responses, or highly distinctive physical characteristics are outside of the norm, and by definition unpredictable. This may activate our ‘creepiness detector’ and increase our vigilance as we try to discern if there is in fact something to fear or not from the person in question.” Once again, ambiguity is at the core of it.

 
One can see how such judgments can be hard on harmless people who unwittingly check some of the creepiness boxes. They can be socially isolated as a result, which is likely only to increase their social awkwardness. On the other hand, the ‘creepiness detector’ evolved for a reason. Some of the creeps may well be dangerous – or at least troublesome. Standard advice from police is to “trust your gut”: choose safety over avoiding seeming rude. All we can do is to try to keep an open mind about long-fingered lip-licking taxidermists (among others) without entirely ignoring our internal alarms. Besides, each and every one of us is likely to be on the other side of that judgment at some point in life. Anyone who hasn’t creeped out someone sometime just isn’t trying.

Radiohead – Creep

Rejuvenation

The spring equinox has at last arrived. It is the traditional start to the new year in many ancient calendars, competing with the winter solstice for the honor. The trouble with the solstice option, at least in northerly regions, is that, while the days do start getting longer then, those subsequent days are awfully cold. It’s… well… winter, and flora is still dying (or at least slumbering).  With the equinox we finally get a break from the cold. Green buds start to pop. There is a rebirth of life. It’s a natural pick for New Year’s Day. (Ancient calendars that tried to incorporate lunar as well as solar elements sometimes opted for the first full moon after the vernal equinox.) The time was commonly marked by festivals akin to the Anthesphoria, the Greek celebration of Persephone’s return from the Underworld for a 6-month stint above ground thereby making her mom Demeter happy enough to cause spring to spring. A hint of the old springtime New Year’s Day from the pre-Julian Roman calendar remains in the names of the months: e.g. “December” means “10^th month” even though since 46 BCE it has been the 12^th.
 
The whole theme of new life and rebirth at the equinox is all very cheery, at first, but it can’t be separated by thoughts about old life and death. After all, it’s not our new life and rebirth in particular, is it? No matter what date you choose to mark a new year, it’s still the notch mark of another year, and each of us gets only so many notches. This limitation has long been irksome to many of us, but in recent years researchers and entrepreneurs with credible credentials have undertaken to do something about it. Do they have a shot? Can we get a new springtime for ourselves? If it is possible it probably won’t happen in time for me. As for the reader… how many notches have you so far?
 
Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walker writes about the surprisingly well-funded efforts of several key personalities to extend life – more importantly, to extend or even renew youth – in his book Immortality, Inc. Among them are former Apple chairman Arthur Levinson who founded Calico corporation in 2013 with hundreds of millions of dollars from Google and hundreds of millions more from big Pharma investors. Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) was founded soon after by J. Craig Venter, whose sequencing method for DNA had been key to the completion of the Human Genome Project. HLI, too, attracted serious funding from Silicon Valley investors. Then there is MIT’s Raymond Kurtzweil, who has written conventional books on health (e.g. The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease), but is best known as a transhumanist, who foresees a blending of biology and AI technology so that the boundary between them blurs into insignificance. What they have in common is a view of aging as the core problem. Modern medicine long has treated its symptoms, but they want to slow or reverse the process itself.

So far, the remarkable rise in average life expectancy (globally and nationally) over the past 150 years has come from reducing the risk of dying early from accident or disease. But a 90-year-old in 2022 is much like a 90-year-old in 1872. The modern ones are not more youthful; if anything on average they are sicker because ill seniors are more likely to receive medical treatment today and so survive longer. Annual new cases of age-related illnesses from osteoarthritis to dementia climb each year. In countries with high median ages (e.g. Japan) adult diapers are a bigger market than baby diapers. Life expectancy rises, but aging itself continues – and ultimately the reaper can be kept waiting at the door for only so long. Human cells simply stop dividing (or at least stop dividing healthily) after a certain point, so there is an upper possible limit to human lifespan, calculated by most scientists to be about 130, though in fact no one is known ever to have lived that long. But what if this could be changed? Is some sort of genetic reset possible that, at least in principle, would allow humans to remain young and vital for two or more centuries? (Point of interest: holding steady other current risks, such as accident and murder, in the absence of aging and age-related diseases the average lifespan would be about 650 years.) Walker tells us about the scientists working hard to find out.
 
How are they doing? Calico’s website is https://www.calicolabs.com/. Perhaps the reader can glean more from it than I did. There seem to be some pharmacological studies in progress that are promising. If so, given the nature of the industry there are sound commercial reasons for the firm’s coyness about them, but this also makes it hard to do more than guess at what they might be.
 
Despite the talent and money invested in these and other longevity projects, I suspect (once again) that any fruits will be too late for me. It’s not too outlandish an idea, however, that they might have some eventual success. There is one mammal that can survive 215 years without obvious deterioration thereby showing such a thing is possible: the bowhead whale. It spends its life in arctic waters. I doubt that would work for a human though. Besides, even if it would I’m chilly just thinking about it. 
 

Bob Dylan – Forever Young

The Price

It’s 2022 and much of the world is, as usual, at war. Hot spots include (but are not limited to) Ethiopia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Myanmar. A nasty civil war in the Central African Republic has left (according to reliefweb.int) 63% of the population in need of humanitarian assistance. Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has (largely) abated for now though territorial questions remain unresolved. (Also unresolved – more dangerously since two nuclear powers are involved – is the border dispute between China and India.) In addition there are numerous terrorist insurgencies that might not quite rise to the level of civil wars but nonetheless cause ongoing casualties, as in Algeria, Nigeria, Chad, DR Congo, et al. Ukraine dominates the news at present as it struggles to fend off a far larger power.
 
The US is no stranger to wars, having been at war 226 out of its 246 years. 1.2 million Americans have died in them. A two-decade-long one ended last year. (I don’t intend to discuss the nature of the ending.) I have nothing but respect for the military personnel who deploy to those wars. The politicians who send them there, not so much. Even in the most ill-considered (by politicians) military actions the troops who fight them make the point to their opponents that it is costly to engage the US military, and they thereby defend their country every bit as much as those who fight in more necessary conflicts. Some interventions are in fact necessary, but most have been questionable at best. American power is limited, and there is danger not just to the troops but to the homeland from overextending it however tempting it might be in light of tragic images from war zones – and never more so than when facing another nuclear power.
 
I was 11 years old when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution “began” US participation in the Vietnam War in 1964. (In fact there were already 23,000 troops on the ground officially acting as advisors.) I was 20 when US troops withdrew in 1973. Saigon fell two years later. Conscription ended in 1973, so my student deferment had outlasted the draft. Other members of my family weren’t so fortunate. It was the first televised war, which had much to do with the shift in public opinion about it between 1964 and 1973. It was a magazine article that shook me the most however. On June 27, 1969 LIFE magazine published The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll. The article contained the names and photos of 242 Americans killed in the week of May 8 – June 3. It was an average week in 1969. I urge a look at it. 33 of those pictured were 19 years old. 16 were 18 years old.

I am not offering an opinion about the wisdom of direct intervention in any regional conflict now underway. My opinion counts for little in any event. I only can hope that those who do have authority in these matters revisit those pages from 1969 and ask themselves how many more faces like these they are prepared to sacrifice. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do. But it’s something about which they (and we) should be sure.
 

Tiny Tim’s 1968 rendition of Irving Berlin’s 1914 song Stay Down Here Where You Belong

Soundtracks

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Without music life would be a mistake.”
 
Few new vehicles have CD players as standard equipment. They are regarded as obsolete. The automakers just assume that everyone can link to the car's sound system via a smart phone full of favorite MP3s, and that these plus a Sirius radio subscription are enough. Neither my pickup truck nor my car (both 2021 models) has a CD player, and I refuse to pay a monthly fee to listen to the radio. I do not collect MP3s on my phone or on other devices. There are a couple of local free commercial broadcast stations I find congenial, but when playing music of my own choice I generally prefer full albums to an out-of-context mish-mash of tunes. (When reading, I also generally prefer full novels to a chapter from this book followed by a chapter from that book.) A deeper dive into an artist’s work can be rewarding; OK, after a few full hearings of an album I might start skipping a track or two I don’t much like, but not every time even then. For this preference, a CD format is perfect. Besides, there are plenty of Best of… CDs for when I am in the mood for a more anthological playlist. So, a little over a month ago I bought a little portable CD player for $50. It plugs into the auxiliary jack in the console, which lets it use the car's stereo speakers. It's a small thing, but I actually missed having a player in my car.

Portable player

Anyway, having entered my car to drive to a local diner for lunch the other day I removed a fairly recent CD (Dorothy’s 2018 album 28 Days in the Valley) from the player and replaced it with one by the Animals. 15 minutes later I parked the car, entered the diner, and sat at the counter. The diner plays an oldies channel for background music. In one of those odd moments of synchronicity that statisticians tell us are to be entirely expected, The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals began to play. Apparently noticing my quizzical expression, a waitress decades younger than myself asked, “What?” Instead of just saying “I played this in my car 10 minutes ago,” I instead (influenced, I suppose, by the age spread) commented, “I try not to consider the implications of the fact that I know the lyrics to 50 and 60-year-old songs.” “I do, too,” she said, “because I hear them every day. Actually, I like them better.”
 
Presumably the young lady meant better than contemporary music. That might have been a case of humoring the old guy for the tip, but perhaps it was true. It is no surprise that I find the current Top 40 virtually unlistenable. It’s my generational job to disdain contemporary popular music as my parents (and grandparents) disdained mine. (I do shirk many of my other generational duties, however, such as standing in front of my house and yelling at kids to get off the lawn.) The surprising thing, though, is how many young people agree. Music sales tell the tale. Ted Gioia, a songwriter, worried about the trend in a recent article in The Atlantic titled, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” Gioia reports that old music now accounts for a whopping 70% of the US music market. The market for new (defined as the past 18 months) popular music is actually shrinking both as a share and in absolute numbers. “The 200 most popular tracks account for less than 5% of total streams,” he notes. He adds that they account for an even a smaller percentage of songs actually purchased. This would have been unimaginable in the 20^th century when the top 200 at any given time dominated sales

There are many reasons proffered by analysts for why the appeal and cultural impact of contemporary popular music have diminished steadily over the past 20 years. I don’t pretend to have expertise in the matter, but many people who are in the industry have speculated about it. Correct or not, this article by Benjamin Groff is pretty representative: 10 Reasons Why Music Sucks So Hard Right Now.
 
In truth, I do like a number of contemporary bands, e.g. Dorothy, Rival Sons, Halestorm, et al. But, while these groups are certainly successful, they are not chart toppers. They offer new material but they have classic rock sounds, and rock is now a niche market that hasn’t put a new album in the Top Ten (based on annual sales) in a decade. It’s a big niche, to be sure, but still a niche. Youthful fans of new rock are ardent but a minority.
 
As for the old music that still sells so well, I’ve come to appreciate it more than (strangely enough) I did when it was new. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the popular music back in the day, and even took it far too seriously in the way that teens do: not just the arcane poetry of Dylan but the lyrics and sounds of the Stones and Joplin and others, too. Yet, I didn’t imagine it had staying power. I figured that, like Nehru jackets, it would be here and then gone. My sister was always more in touch with the Zeitgeist than I was. I remember her saying to me sometime in 1969 that we were in a golden era of popular music when sounds and songs were being created that would last like the standard songbook then being sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra: they would be part of the repertoire of future bands. I didn’t believe it and said so. I was wrong. Sharon, as usual in such matters, was right.
 
Contemporary music forms a soundtrack to our lives. Nothing takes me back to a moment in time as readily as a song that was in (and on) the air at the time. I can’t hear White Room by Cream without a part of me re-experiencing being 17. It seems to me this must still be the case today, so perhaps the naysayers are underestimating the lasting impact of contemporary popular music after all. Will current 17-year-olds decades from now be carried back to 2022 by Smokin’ out the Window by Silk Sonic? Will septuagenarian Glass Animals be filling arenas the way the Rolling Stones still do today? Will Gayle sing ABCDEFU from a wheelchair as Peggy Lee did Fever toward the end? Maybe. If Sharon were here she’d tell me.
 

A Few Seconds Each of 100 Songs from 1969