We haven't changed much.

So the banality we find on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook isn't simply the product of a culturally overfed, yet intellectually undernourished generation. Sometimes I wonder whether our excess of stimulation, of TV, internet, print media, etc., just forces us to excrete overly simplistic world views, OMG!, via microblog and email. We truly have nothing in history to compare with our lives. Almost no record of day to day life exists from which we can learn just how our earthly predecessors thought.

Yes, of course that's bullshit. These records exist, but like you, I won't spend the time to research them. But thankfully, some people in England are making some of the research easier for the rest of us.

Check this out: the University of Cambridge Scriptorium Project is scanning and transcribing personal documents, hundreds of years old, and offering us a glimpse into the private lives of people who had probably no free time and minimal education, and they have discovered that those people from the Fifteenth Century are exactly like us.

One household record (according to the MSNBC story) lists what the recorder served for lunch: "gruel, boiled meat for my lord or lady, puddings, or a calf head." Yum. Do you get the whole head with that order? Because after the lips and an ear, I'm stuffed.

How about "oystyrs in gravy" and a Diet Coke. And then there's something about "dayes after gyff her sporge & þat shall open her bowels" which usually happens to me when I eat oystyrs; the opening of the bowels is a revered tradition around our household.

So people jotted down what they ate and passed this information down through the family, from parent to child. They wrote down jokes and quotes and sonnets and cures for ailments, and all this, at a time when paper was rare and expensive.

I knock Twitter for giving us a window into the shallowest of our souls, but it seems that modern humans have always enjoyed telling others about their day so far. It's important to report to the world that I exist. I think, therefore I am. I think we just want tell people what we're thinking because we can.

It's like that Steven Wright joke:

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, "So. What did you think?"

Sometimes when I read what people have to say about their lives, those trite exchanges that seem like a promise wasted, like our species has plateaued and we will never reach our true potential, I now understand that our sucking isn't really sucking at all, it's just being human.

We have no potential to be something greater in the sense that we might one day travel to distant worlds or construct delicious tacos with our mind power. We are what we are, a creature with severe physical limitations but also with vast untapped capacity for emotional change and caring.

Which is just more proof that knuckle-bumping, air-kissing, annoying, gossiping space aliens crashed onto our planet 100 million years ago then humped some large rodents to create the creature that eventually became us. So tweet on, ratboy, this could be the best we'll ever get.

Will Gen X be the last generation to walk upright?

One day, I saw a girl sign her name by printing it, and it freaked me out. Letter, pause. Letter, pause. Letter, pause...

But it turns out that this was just a sign of things to come. I asked if that's how she always signs her name, and she said, yes. Her penmanship was neat, but it wasn't in any way unique.

Schools no longer teach cursive writing according to the Associated Press,
"Cursive writing may be fading skill, but so what?"
[Tom Breen, Associated Press Writer, Sat. Sept. 19, 2009]

So what? You know why cursive is so awesome? It proves sustained thought. It reinforces an understanding of spatial relationships and proportion... better than video games. Printing is for someone with a short attention span. Printing is what we teach apes to do. Except that damn orangutan that keeps writing, "ape must never kill ape," whatever that's supposed to mean.

"'We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030,' said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University..."

Fine, they'll be ready for the year 2030, but fifty years from now, when the world goes to hell because of some natural or man made catastrophe, or because some idiot shoots Michael Rennie, or because God stops by on his way to a planet where they didn't murder his son and sees all the shit we've been up to for the last 2,000 years, and whups us with His galaxy-sized belt (yes, He's put on weight), there won't be any more Internets.

And then where will the printing people be? Society will split between the "chickenscratchers," who can't get a car loan because they can't sign their own names, and the "penmasters" who rule the lands the dashing flourish of their John Hancocks.

As evidenced above, today's kids don't even have signatures. Are they going to print their names on their credit cards? What is the percentage of identity theft going to be when they can't sign their names and every fact about them is already shared online?

"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she [Katie Van Sluys] said.

So today's schools only teach kids what they already know? WTF???

I always thought school was supposed to teach new shit. But I guess we've given up on that because it's too difficult. You know how they teach a bear to ride a bicycle? Torture. It works. Now teach the damn kids how to write a letter in cursive.

"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she [teacher Sharon Spencer] said.

There's a teach who understands the problem. But ask any kid what he would do if the Internet was down and he'd probably answer, "Nothing." Why are schools teaching kids to do nothing? We should be preparing them for the days of no electricity.

And what about printing? Isn't it good enough for communication? It's good enough to write, "Employees Must Wash Their Hands After Using the Restroom." But it for damn sure isn't good enough to write, "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, ..."

Okay, fine, you looked at a copy of the Declaration of Independence and saw that the word "When" is printed.
But you see that "W"? That W took Jefferson an hour and a half to make. If he printed out the entire document like that, we would all still be British. And The Beatles would have come from The Bronx; and what would Rubber Soul sound like then, huh, smartypants? You think you know everything.

Evolution: I don't think so.

Please forgive this outburst.

People are assholes.
If anyone ever asks me if I believe in God or some other higher being who is responsible for us being here, that is the reason for my belief in Him or Her or It.

Why are people such assholes?
I will continue to doubt the theory of human evolution so long as no one is able to catalog the asshole behaviors of this planet's flora and fauna. Where are the porpoises who are pricks? Cockknocker clown fish? Dickhead dalmatians? Shitbag boa constrictors? Where is that asshat American Beauty Rose? And I don't mean that monkeys are assholes, but which monkeys? Which sea lions? Which oaks? (And I don't mean the ones from that Rush song because that was all of them.) I want someone to drive down my street and point and say, "that palm tree can kiss my ass" and give me a good reason why.

Why is there such a disproportionate share of shitheads among Homo sapiens?

Because God in his infinite wisdom, gave only man free will. Every other creature has a predetermined DNA that ensures they tow the line. You can argue the evolution of plants and animals all you want, but how are we here?

If you look for proof in the Bible stories, when God made Adam and Eve and they screwed up and ate the apple, why didn't he just blink them out of existence and make two more idiots to follow his rules? Because that was the goal! He probably made a thousand other Adams and Eves who did exactly as they were created to do, and they got blinked out, or left on other planets or tossed into a volcano. Maybe he came from another planet and was tired of everything being the same and sat down at his Sears and Roebuck's Little Science Whiz chemistry kit to make something different.

Until someone lists all the other asshole plants and animals on this planet, I will continue to believe that we are special and were created by some overworked bastard who should have taken a sick day in the middle of the week so that he wouldn't have produced such sloppy work. Until then, I will continue to argue that there is a God because the actions of you and me and everyone else prove it.