Saturday, November 21, 2009

Tim Dick re-dux, and why on line dating techniques are extremely handy



(Above: a bit of Glenn Gould doing Bach, and managing not to audibly grunt, with Bernstein waving the baton in the b/g. Shocking sound, the strings sound like wailing cats, but hey, that's what you get when you recycle content like Chairman Rupert running The Punch).

After reading Tim Dick's latest opus, Today the science of dating is not just weird, it's also wired, I thought I'd help him understand the convenience factor in web dating.

The poor lad is tortured, perhaps even alienated, and worries about discrimination:

One of the nauseating side-effects of dating websites is their inherent discrimination. The ability to classify humans by height, weight, colour and style not only commodifies us, it allows us to reject those we decide we don't like, before we've seen even their thumbnail pictures.

Sorry, you mean I can't get upset about someone with a comb-over? Or wearing a jacket with leather elbow patches? Or maintain my ambivalence at corduroy?

You can eliminate entire ethnicities at one click, so there's no need to see the races you don't like. It's as if sex makes racism OK. The real-life consensus - that if you couldn't stomach sleeping with, say, a white girl, you should keep that to yourself - doesn't extend online. Some profiles openly declare "No Asians", those behind them believing, presumably through experience, they will not be condemned by fellow users as the bigots they are.

Oh wait, I get the race thing is a problem, but hey why would you want to be with a bigot? Isn't there something to be said for truth in advertising?

What if my profile openly declared "No classical music haters", because if you hate classical music in a mindless way you can just bugger off?

Short and handy and to the point, and extremely relevant.

You see Tim that piece There's just no sound argument for being hooked on classics wasn't just a would-be, on line, possible wannabe lover's tiff or spat or even a quarrel. It was a major turnoff, seeing as how it was so revealing about a closed, and dare one say bigoted mind.

Yet you seem perplexed by efficiency and time management techniques, and remarkably even manage to enthuse yourself about the dangers of intolerance. Well blessed be the cheesemakers, I say.

The modern tools of finding sex have made it irresistibly efficient to decide on what our ideal is - or what our cultural influences say it should be - and seek only that. By increasing the number of potentials, they have focused our intolerance.

While looking for our real-life Lisa, we dismiss thousands of humans on the basis of their "stats", user names and photographs two centimetres wide. Weird science, for real.

Tolerance is everything, no doubt about it, but do we have to tolerate the intolerant? Or those that dismiss the taste of thousands of humans on the basis of their own feeble opinions?

Sorry Tim, I've already read your profile on classical music. If I'm not you're real life Lisa, then you're certainly not my real life Tim.

Next.

Golly this online dating business is fun. Fancy that.

Hmm, time to put up all the inhabitants of loon pond, with their foibles and their follies exposed to the world, as a guide to desperate daters. Could make a fortune. Oh wait, they've already done that. It's called the intertubes ...

Meantime Tim, perhaps I was a bit hasty, a bit cruel. There's some listening for you, of the sort normally reserved for primary school courses. It's a big task, herculean, and most likely you'll nod off during the first track, but I know you're in search of your imperfect Lisa, and someone's got to do it.

After you've completed listening to the discs below, why don't we meet at The Creation, the big Haydn bash coming up at the Opera House in December, with Martin Haselböck conducting? (here).

I know, I know, it's a bummer it's going to be in English (save on the sur titles) and it isn't atheist music, but we can't have everything.

But how will we recognize each other? I know, why don't you put on some snappy sunglasses as favored by Beethoven in the snaps below, and carry a little hand held sign reading "Classical music is really boring", and wear a big pointy paper hat reading "Dunce" on your noggin.

And if there's anything left of you after the feral old farts have clubbed you to death with their canes, I'll buy you a glass of champagne.





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