Sometimes people think that, because I write this column for peanuts, I am somehow available for free science consulting services. Obviously this is not the case but I don’t mind the occasional question, especially if it concerns real puzzles like how a car in China doesn’t cause global warming but a car in America does.

Lately I have been pestered with questions about this whole Christmas thing. It’s a troublesome issue, I agree, but I am not in the free science business so most of the questions I just ignore – however, one of the many,many,many (not that many – Lady Scientist ) groupies that flitter about me on the internet caught my attention recently with their query about Yule physics because they had the creativity to put it in seasonal rhyming form;

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I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Numbers are significant because on a personal and a collective conscious level numbers help us understand the world in a way that letters cannot. I can go anywhere in the world and hold up two fingers and the most illiterate peasant in China knows that means I am with two supermodels. Can I speak Chinese? Well, yeah, Mandarin actually, but you can’t.

Plus, there are 400 dialects in China so I certainly can’t express how many supermodels I am with in any other way and have it be so clear. Numbers are the magical language. I can do music with numbers ( the circle of fifths ), language, art and science. Even when I do TKD I am using a sine wave.

Numbers work for everyone. Numbers have order and meaning. To pseudo-scientists they even have esoteric definitions. Numerologists, for example, claim that 1 is the Yang and 2 is the Yin, staying in our Chinese theme. More on that later.

My favorite? Six.

Six is important. Six is famous. Six was the magical number of ancient Avalon. Christian authorities labeled six “the number of sin” and 666 is certainly a bad thing. One of its Egyptian forms is seshemu (“sexual intercourse” ) ­ shown in hieroglyphics by male and female genitals doing … you know, what I do a lot more of than you … and we still know of it today in the Sufi love-charm designed to open the “cave” of the Goddess: “Open, Sesame.”

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6. Some people can’t accept that humans are smarter than animals. This panda accidentally crushed one of the twins she birthed. Which isn’t all that smart, since she didn’t even implicate the butler.

Want to impress me, zookeepers? Teach pandas to imprison siblings they don’t like behind an iron mask, like humans do.

5. There’s some confusion about Evolution. Americans are skeptics by nature. A study shows America is just above Turkey in percentage of people who don’t believe we magically evolved from bacteria. Evolution theorists don’t do themselves any favors by trying to convince people biology doesn’t require proof – which sounds a lot like religion to non-biologists – and changing their definitions to match the evidence they have.

Want to impress me, biologists? Convince me Angelina Jolie evolved her nose.

I think her nose is made of plastic and some kind of cement-like goop. Knowing what it is made of does not invalidate the existence of her plastic surgeon, if you catch my drift.

4. We have spent billions of dollars on The War On Fun … errr, I mean The War On Drugs … yet baby boomers are still getting stoned all of the time. Why are baby boomers, the people now in charge of government, such hypocrites?

I don’t even take aspirin but do you want to impress me, sociologists? Convince me that if I get random brain cancer I shouldn’t spend my final months awash in an ocean of 8-balls and hookers.

Continued Here …

Okay, before all you crazy feminists get upset and menstruate all over your computer screens because of that headline, hear me out.

Well, get in the kitchen and bake me a pie. Then hear me out.

Mistresses are getting popular in China. Some Commie bigwigs spend their days bilking the proletariat and then their nights canoodling with as many as seven mistresses who all live in lavish apartments.

Okay, I agree anything in excess is bad. And seven mistresses would be a lot even for me. And I have two penises. But let’s get back to the core argument, that being the mistress of modern times or the plain old concubine of yore. Why did it ever fall out of fashion? What are the pros and cons?

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It may be indefensible but it wouldn’t be a fun day if I didn’t try and defend it for that very reason. Why bother, you ask? Sure, you’re thinking ‘he’s the cracker mack daddy of science’ so I never need to smack my b*tch up to get her to act proper, but this doesn’t mean arguing the merits of the occasional love tap can’t be valid as an intellectual exercise.

I am inspired by this topic because Sean Connery’s ex-wife says he used to slap her around and if it’s good enough for the original James Bond it is at least worth thinking about. Obviously publicists denied the whole thing ever happened and sometimes you have to go right to the source, so I called up Mr. Connery and asked how things were going with his current bride after three decades.

“She needs a firm rein,” said Sir Sean, “I’ve whipped her when she was ripe for it, and it has settled her down nice and grateful for it. This isn’t on the record, right?”

“No, Mr. Connery, my blog is nothing if not discreet.”

That put him at ease and he expounded a little. He was quick to say you can’t punch your chick like you would a man. “There’s a difference,” he said, “between firm and being the kind of creepy wife beater you and I would knock on his ass. And then there’s sex.”

That made sense to me, especially since someone as cool as Sean Connery made it sound like we were compadres. Wait, did he just say sex?

“Cash, a girl’s bottom is a prime erogenous zone but the sexual arousal nerves in the bottom are buried in a layer of fat and require harder stimulation — like in spanking — to trigger them. You really should know all this. I have read your stuff. On your blog you always sound invincible.”

His sarcasm didn’t go unnoticed and I didn’t have sex last night so my temper was short.* “Hey, I am not sure I have to take that crap from a guy who starred in Meteor.”

“I nailed Natalie Wood every night during that shoot. Who have you done?

“I don’t see how that is relevant …”

“Easy, lad. All I am saying is I read that crap of yours about a line of women longer than the Wall of China and I am telling you, if you really want the chippies, star as James Bond in a movie some time.”

Well, I had to concede that point. I couldn’t even get cast as Rick in the Magnum P.I. feature film. But we still hadn’t gotten to the part about whether or not he slapped his ex-wife around.

“Cash, I have gone over this a million times. It was a different era. Before disco. We didn’t have guys wearing gym shorts to go to clubs. Do you think Leo Sayer could have gotten a girl in the ’60s?”

“No, you needed to be a man,” he continued. “Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That’s what they are looking for — the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack. Don’t tell me you’ve never done it.”

“Well, my girl isn’t from the ’60s. I’m pretty sure she’d set me on fire if I did that.”

“You never know, Cash. You never know. The divorce rate is probably a lot higher today because women don’t respect men enough. A good ass whippin’ might take care of some of that.”

I thanked Sir Sean for his time but came away feeling like I hadn’t come up with a slam-dunk defense for hittin’ your chick. Plus, today isn’t all bad. Today’s youth don’t wear gym shorts on television but they perfected the concept of “friends with benefits” and I think that is a reasonable trade-off. And I don’t care who invented that whole Brazilian Wax thing, they pretty much deserve a Nobel Prize.

* How did I not have sex last night, you wonder? Sweety said she had an appointment with her gynecologist the next morning. “Do you have an appointment with your dentist too?” I asked. This was, apparently, not the appropriate response.

You don’t need a Master’s Degree in History to know that the casting in the movie Memoirs of A Geisha was going to cause some problems – and if you do have a Master’s Degree in History, I ordered a grande Mocha extra hot, with the whipped cream. Anyway, back to the movie. The movie, you see, is about Geishas. Those are the Japanese girls who make you tea and generally keep their traps shut. And the movie has two Chinese girls as the lead actresses.

Get it? No, of course you don’t. No one does, except the Chinese and the Japanese and every other country in Asia which happens to hate every other country in Asia. These people are livid. The Chinese are angry because their Chinese actresses are acting as Japanese women and one of them even has a sex scene with a Japanese man – much as tens of thousands of Chinese women did while being raped during the occupation of Nanking in 1937. Japan is angry that director Rob Marshall couldn’t find a single actress in Japan to portray Japanese women. And that their grandfathers still talk about how hot the women in China were during the occupation of 1937 and that they can’t get any today.

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