Reading Railroad..

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a fairly addictive personality. After school ended last summer and Crystal reintroduced me to the library, I dove right in and started reading books like crazy. Crystal suggested that I keep track of the books that I read, and that kind of appealed to me, so I did it. The only problem is that with me being a geek, I took it one step further and made a spreadsheet with graphs and everything. As I finished a book the other day I religiously updated my spreadsheet and then glanced at the totals, I was actually surprised to see how much I have done since the beginning of the year. *****Brag Alert****** Since January 1st I have read fourteen books totaling 5564 pages. ****** End Bragging ******

I realize that this represents a significant amount of time but I try to limit myself to times when Crystal and Beepers are either sleeping, or otherwise occupied. I really enjoy it and I am excited to see how much I can accomplish before the year's end.

Equality = Equal?

The book that I am currently reading is titled, "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity" and is written by John Stossel of 20/20. To do a quick summary, this book is a compilation of a bunch of popular myths, propagated by the media, that many of us believe today. In his work as an investigative reporter, John has found out the truth that lies behind what we believe. I must say that even though I am only a few chapters in this book, I would recommend it, but that is not the reason for this post.

In the book John dedicates a whole chapter to the inequalities between men and women. I fancy myself as someone who is semi-enlightened and I agree that women should be treated as equals in our society. While I understand that discrimination still exists, I was appalled by some examples in the book, of people who are fighting this war on sexual discrimination.

There are groups of people who believe with all of their heart that men and women should be exactly equal with no differences whatsoever. For example there is a professor of law at George Washington University, that encourages his students to 'sue' people for discrimination. In his own words it's a "good class project." One of the lawsuits that he encouraged, alleged that having "ladies night" at local bars was discriminatory. For those of you that don't know many bars have a ladies night where ladies can get in at no or little cost. This is to attract women to the bar because statistically speaking, men far outnumber the women when it comes to bar visitations. Men enjoy these nights because it attracts more women, and women are motivated to go because of the significant benefit. Everybody is happy, right? Well, not everyone, because these students and their professor, decided it wasn't right. They filed a lawsuit and they won. Now in Washington D.C. it is illegal to have a "ladies night". So now there are even more lonely men in the bars in D.C.

Another great example is when the students decided that it was discrimination for a hair salon to charge different prices for mens and womens haircuts. To quote from the book,

"Charging women more for haircuts is a common sense adjustment to a real sex difference: Taking care of women's hair takes more time. Not always, but often enough that it's prudent to have different prices. The salons don't price their work to hurt women; they price it based on how much time they spend with female customers. If they did charge women "unfair" prices, the free market would punish them- women wouldn't go to these salons."

He goes on to explain how, that if price regulations did come, then certain salons, might stop servicing women altogether, in order to save costs. Plus the cost of lawsuits are passed on to the customer. The professor and his students see no problem with this and are eager to pursue.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most is the blatant disregard for logical thinking. Anyone with half a brain can see, that in most cases there are in fact differences between men and women. In fact, I am very glad there are. But in their efforts to bring equality to the equation they don't seem to care about that and the fact that they are hurting everyone else. They choose to focus on the mundane instead of perhaps the topics that might make a difference.

So in my opinion, Equality doesn't necessarily mean being exactly equal, it means having the fair chance to do what you choose to do (within reason, criminally speaking, etc.). So choose what you want to do, but don't go charging me thirty dollars for a haircut, because I don't have hardly any hair left.

Gettin' Freaky!!!

While recently watching an episode of Beauty and the Geek (one of my guilty pleasures), they were featuring a book from the bestseller list titled, "Freakonomics" . I thought that it sounded somewhat interesting so I picked it up from the library.

I throughly enjoyed this book. The book is based on research done by an economist that sees the world in a different way. He likes to ask questions that not a lot of people ask, or he likes to find different answers to those questions that we thought we knew the answers to. The book reads very well and even though jam packed with information, I didn't find it boring at all. Here are some of the questions that he asks:

• What do schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers have in common?
• How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
• Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
• What makes a perfect parent?

Even though some of these questions sound very obscure the facts behind it all tell the truth and link it all together. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes facts, odd questions, and wishes perhaps to see things in a different light.

On another note, I hated writing book reports in school, is that what I just did?