Aliens that resemble "little people who look strange to us" and possess technology that is much more "sophisticated" than ours and if they weren't so goddamn peaceful "we'd be gone by now." Which me wonder — and here's your "Jezebel angle," dykes! — are women more or less likely than men to believe this guy. Surely someone has polled them!

Okay, if you said "men" you can pat yourself on your surface area because 69% of men believe in life on other planets, to 51% of women, which reminded me I recently got an email from my uncle, an uncle who used to work at NASA, because he has a daughter who is somehow involved in this whole John Edwards love child scandal, and he thinks it is a shame that the mainstream media is not paying enough attention to it, not because it is so epically important but for the fact that he gave up on the space program a long time ago; decided it was a waste of money, that it was always going to be struggling for funding and relevance because too large a portion of its purpose was devoted to the investigation of Unknown Unknowns as they say, and people — women especially! I have the data to prove it! — don't really care much for investigating things they can't really control, which one one hand is fair enough, but on another hand, leaves us wasting time gossiping — oh my God, when in the UK I read this survey that said 80% of British women's workdays is spent somehow on gossip, which sounds doubtful to me but I can't prove it either way — about people and things we cannot control but at least know to be real, because they are incessantly being photographed, to the point that when some piece of gossip occurs like the Edwards scandal, whose credibility as I see it is primarily being undermined by the fact that we do not want it to be true, for the sake of Elizabeth or the children or whatever — we ignore it as part of an interesting new tradition I might call "Original Cynicism." We ignore it because we do not want to believe human nature to be that bad, even though we fully know it to be capable of far crueler, so we shut it out I guess and move on to the next animal picture, which is fine, sure, but puppies are not the beings with the far superior technology which could be deployed to obliterate us in a millisecond! Were their intentions malevolent. Which the aliens', apparently, are not! How interesting, right? That they are superior to us, and at the same time also possibly kinder! But Moe that is so sappy, you say, is that how you are going to end this post? But what can I say folks, if you have gotten this far into any of my posts without saying "I call bullshit" or "This makes no sense" you have made everything worthwhile for the past year and a half.

Aliens Exist, But NASA Covers Them Up, Says Astronaut [Telegraph]
Ed Mitchell Apollo 14
Edgar Mitchell [Wikipedia]
Do Americans Believe In Life On Other Planets? [Cosmic Paradigm]

"Sooo, sad girls? of course. that was my jam when i was younger. i think i thought sad = smart," said Don. Added Alex helpfully: "Well, troubled + hot = hotter." And Jeff: "Hmmm, kind of. i think a lot of people think they're gonna be the "solver" of problems. usually you learn after a little interaction that you're just gonna get to witness." Right. And you can't do anything about them. Because human life is meaningless. So...best to hook up with chicks who don't bother worrying about all that? Fuck if I know, but I think I just got bored with my own torment.

In A New Generation Of College Students, Many Opt For The Life Examined [NYT] (Btw, far be it from me, but I don't think this story is actually supported by any real data, not that it matters, especially considering we don't even know why we're here.)
Bonus: Something on Sartre and de Beauvoir for your pointless enjoyment [Literary Review]