Whom do you believe?

Brian Eno, who says the “long tail” of online media means infinite artistic styles are in circulation at once, result in “the death of uncool”?

Or Lee Gomes in a year-and-a-half-old Wall St. Journal essay, refuting the whole Long Tail theory and insisting that “hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online”?

I’m sure Time speaks for a lot of you in describing the past 3653 days (including three leap years) as having been a “Decade from Hell.” The bright clean new century we were promised so long ago turned out to have started with the Bush coup, 9/11, two useless stupid wars, continued eco-deterioration, and a world economy that just kept contracting for most of us even in its officially “good” years.

But at least we got Ratatouille and the iPhone.

Former WTO protestor Trevor Griffey argues that the biggest legacy of the big protests in Seattle 10 years ago may be routine, pre-emptive crackdowns on civil liberties at big official confabs worldwide. Locally, Griffey (no relation) claims, the protests’ biggest consequence could be a massive dilution of police accountability enforcement.

With all the aborted/infanticided girl babies in China these days (despite heavy-handed government efforts there to stop those practices), where will that nation’s rising population of surplus males find mates? Would you believe, Tanzania? (From the (London) Times.)

Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.

The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.

You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.

But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:

• He cooked a really great dinner.
• He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
• There was nothing good on TV.
• The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
• Pilates just gets too repetitive.
• That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
• To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
• She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
• She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
• She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
• Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.

Some research study claims “love inspires creativity, but thoughts of sex stimulate analytical thinking.” The reasoning: “Love… is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”

Marie Claire magazine just declared Seattle the “best city to find single guys.” I know why.

This is a city of men who need women and women who don’t need men. A city of socially repressed geeks all vying for the attentions of empowered career women. And the more the women snub the men as unworthy of even a returned glance, the more the men ramp up the chase.

…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)

…in her new anti-corporate-scheming book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, makes the provocative allegation that (as paraphrased by a Salon.com reviewer) “IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart.”

To Ms. Shell, it doesn’t matter which social caste a company courts. As long as it imports kilotons of future-landfill consumerist stuff from low-wage countries, she doesn’t like it.

Her consistency is a welcome change from the classism of many anti-corporate leftists, whose disdain for any particular corporation seems to increase with that corporation’s connection to “the wrong kind of white people.” Thus, we’re all supposed to loathe Wal-Mart (purveyors of cheap disposables to stereotyped white trash), but be at least ambivalent about Taret (purveyors of near-identical cheap disposables to hip social climbers).

While our country faces the folly of abstinence-only sex-anti-education, and the resulting ignorance/pregnancies/STDs, Britain’s National Health Service (you know, one of those efficient, money-saving, inclusive government health systems we’re supposed to hate) just published a leaflet recommending that teens have an “orgasm a day” to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

For its first 50 or so pages of his novel Happinessâ„¢, Canadian satirist Will Ferguson provides a quaint send-up of office politics and the book industry (historically, literature’s second most boring subject, after writers themselves).

But the humor picks up once the main story gets underway. This is really a book about a book, the ultimate self-help book, a meandering 1,000-page series of life lessons entitled What I Learned on the Mountain and credited to a pseudonymous guru calling himself “Rajee Tupak Soiree.” Our hero, downtrodden book editor Edwin de Valu, gets the typewritten manuscript in the slush pile at the middling publisher where he gruelingly toils. After some initial misadventures, Edwin has the text published with no changes.

Without the blanding-out process of the industry’s professional prose-polishers, What I Learned on the Mountain gets unleashed full-strength upon an unsuspecting world. Within days (the book biz’s notoriously slow operational pace is highly compressed in Ferguson’s fictional world), it’s the #1 best seller of all time.

And it really works!

Soiree’s turgid prose turns out to have a hypnotic effect, subconsiously leading most of its readers into a new way of thinking. (Ferguson doesn’t attempt to show us how this works; he only directly quotes from What I Learned on the Mountain in very brief snippets.)

The result: Pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.

Millions of North Americans suddenly convert to inner peace and contentment. The alcohol, tobacco, drug, fashion, and baldness-remedy industries collapse. So does the book industry, except for spinoffs and ripoffs of What I Learned on the Mountain. Vast swaths of the U.S. work force just up and quit their posts to embark on vision quests or to join Tupak Soiree’s Colorado ashram/harem. This heaven, like David Byrne’s is a place where nothing ever happens.

Edwin de Valu sees everything he’d known (including his wife and his ex-lover) disappear around him, and feels responsible for it. This milquetoast salaryman reinvents himself as an action hero (or antihero), determined to strike his revenge on Tupak Soiree and all he represents. In the process, he learns the real lesson of life—it’s meant to be a struggle. Happiness, real happiness, is a journey, not a destination.

And (spoiler alert) Edwin also finds out that Tupak Soiree is a total fraud. What I Learned on the Mountain, the book that conquered humanity’s cynicism and greed, was a cynical attempt to make money.

I found Ferguson’s ending to be a real cop-out. I wanted to read about the ultimate battle for humanity’s soul, between evil-disguised-as-good (Tupak and his blissed-out hordes) and good-disguised-as-evil (the now angry, gun-toting Edwin).

That story remains to be written.

So does the heart of Ferguson’s conceit, a sufficiently-long example of Tupak’s seductive prose stylings.

But these failings may simply mean Ferguson’s conceptual reach exceeds his stylistic grasp.

In other words, he’s also still striving.

(Sidebar 1: The novel’s original Canadian title in 2001 was Generica, referring to the uniform state of bliss people adopt upon exposure to Tupak Soiree’s teachings.)

(Sidebar 2: Could there actually be a style of writing that, like monks’ chants or recent attempts in “binaural-beat” electronic music, rewire the human mind? The story possibilities, oh the story possibilities…)

(Sidebar 3: What would US/Canadian society really look like after a mass conversion away from anxiety/depression/addiction and toward inner peace? We’d still have to feed and shelter ourselves, and we’d still have tribal/social/political differences. More story possibilities…)

Then you’ll like Anitra L. Freeman’s “Homeless Declaration of Independence.”

…jump start the economy? Felix Salmon sez, “Pay the Artists!”

…victims of discrimination by female theater-company managers?

I’ve got another piece on Seattle PostGlobe. It’s about the folks who really, really love the Film Festival.

Remember, gang: PostGlobe is not the downsized version of the old P-I Web site. It’s an all-new local news site started by P-I refugees. And it could use your suggestions and your support.