Alpha Male Syndrome Syndrome

This is what happens when you go to the library thinking you have three hours until closing time, it turns out you only have ten minutes, and you grab and check out the first book that you see.

Alpha Male Syndrome is a book about dealing with alpha males in the workplace, written by self-described alpha couple Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson. Which I thought was one of those things, like being cool, where if you're saying it about yourself, it doesn't count. But these two bring a lot of evidence to the table to prove that they both are, in face, seriously alpha, and have been since as far back as the first grade. Seriously, these two are alpha as fuck:

Even as a child, Kate exhibited the ambition and drive of an alpha female. She was also fascinated by the alpha males she encountered growing up in South Texas.

I like to imagine that she was already using that jargon while growing up, too.

In the first grade, she figured out how to beat the strongest boys at the game of red rover, using direct eye contact and a smile to break through their supercharged strength as approached the line.

That is solid alpha material.

Later, she found a way to entice alpha boys to attend a summer school she organized in her small town,

and in the fourth grade she bit the wrist of a bully to get him to quit bothering her friends.

Kate's husband, Eddie, is also very alpha, even though there is no evidence in the following biography that he ever bit anyone.

At age 29, Eddie was a surgical resident at the University of Michigan, holding down two outside jobs and trying to live a normal family life with his two young children. But that wasn't enough for an achievement-obsessed alpha.

Which he was.

He decided to become a marathon runner. After 50 marathons, the 26-mile run wasn't enough of a challenge, so he took on ultra marathons, becoming so obsessed with each 100-mile race that he ignored medical advice and ended up with stress fractures and a broken leg.

So alpha it hurts.

When he became chief of staff, he learned how to use his own alpha strengths to corral the energy and egos of other alphas,

I hear that corralling alphas is like herding cats, so that's pretty impressive, as well as pretty alpha.

who were waging turf wars at the hospital.

Not LITERALLY, of course.

He also learned valuable lessons from his patients: of the approximately 10,000 surgeries he performed, about 75 percent were on alpha males.

That statistic is from page 6, just five pages after Kate and Eddie admitted to not knowing a damn thing about statistics:

Although there are no hard numbers to support this approximation, we estimate that alphas comprise about 75 percent of top executives.

To paraphrase a friend of mine, I am somewhere between 14 percent and 97 percent sure that I will finish this book.

A Shift-Your-Gears Mach 6 Friday

The Wachowski Bros. really seem to have it in for the number 5, as the erstwhile digit is often cast in an antagonistic light in their movies. To be generous, it is possible to say that 5 as portrayed in their movies is, at best, representative of a life that must be escaped from, and that it is indicative of, if not outright Evil, at least a hive-mind mentality. Put bluntly, the number 5 is anathema to Wachoski-written protagonists, individuals who must separate themselves from the pack (although really, this makes the protagonist anathema to the hive-mind).

This is all pretty clear in the Matrix trilogy, with Neo designated as the sixth integral anomaly, and the world of the matrix downright plastered with 101 designations (addresses, highways), what in binary is 5 decimal. And in V for Vendetta, V's instigation of an anarchic uprising leads to thousands of individuals donning Guy Fawkes masks, as they all symbolically become V (5) in an act of public disobedience that glorifies the hive mind while doing nothing to effect real change (the promise of 6). Of course, in V for Vendetta, they had to radically change the original work to get there (upsetting author Alan Moore), but you could say that 5 didn't come out looking like such a pillar of "right number behavior" in the comic, either.

Anyway, it was with those examples in mind that I wondered how the Wachowski Bros. would deal with the presence of the Mach 5 in their new film, Speed Racer, opening today. I mean, that's Speed's car. And what about the delightful pun of "go" meaning 5 in Japanese? Surely the protagonist's car isn't a symbol of the hive mind?


Well, okay then. If you want to break away from the pack, I guess you're gonna need a Mach 6. Roku, Speed, Roku!

Party Party Join Us Join Us

Today we celebrate the birth of a real swell guy, who had the good sense to be born in San Francisco on the 77th anniversary of the 7.7 earthquake that fucked up that city pretty raw, a confluence of sevens that might account for certain stores of good fortune. Or, since the quake tied for the 17th largest to ever hit the U.S., it might just be random chance.

Love is always the Feller Number.

Slate ran an article earlier this week about why Italians grab their crotch, and at least part of the reason is that grabbing your seat of fertility is a good way to ward off bad luck, particularly nuns and the number 17. Nuns I can understand, I can totally see Italians thinking nuns are bad luck, no doubt. But the number 17? That is random.

All the way random, as it turns out, as 17 has been officially marked as the most random number between 1-20, by no less an authority than William Feller, a mathematician who taught at Princeton. Later, he died. Arnold Zwicky, who studied mathematics at Princeton, wrote about 17 several times, and even presented a proof of its randomness:

"A completely random number can't (should not) be too large. Say, less than or equal to 20. After that it's a breeze. Working from below, it clearly can't be 1, nor can it be even, and hence neither 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, nor 20. 3 is for the Trinity and 5 is too important in base 10 notation; 7 and 11 are lucky, and 9 is a perfect square and hence hardly random. 13 is unlucky; 15 is a multiple of 5; and 19 is too close to 20. That leaves 17 as the only possible candidate. Q.e.d."

So there's that, and although there are plenty of cultural signals for 17 (many by Abba), the number by itself doesn't get a lot of play in numerological circles or society at large. However, 17 does have its share of claims to fame. Notably, it is one of several numbers closely associated with Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and strife. Eris is most famous for tossing the apple that started that Trojan War, and slightly less well-known for fighting Wonder Woman.


And while that's kind of a crap association, things could be a lot worse for 17. It could be 23, another number noted for randomness, the number most closely associated with Eris, and a number that may never live down the ignominy of being the subject of an awful movie about Jim Carrey peeing on things and calling it synchronicity. Joel Schumacher's The Number 23 2: The Number 17 probably won't be coming to a theater near you, but that's just the kind of random and unfortunate nonsense 17 is infamous for.

For my part, I tend not to notice the number 17 unless it's in conjunction with an incongruous element, but that might be appropriate. My favorite of these is from the April, 2002 issue of "Seventeen," with a photo of the lovely Keri "Felicity" Russell, oblivious to the fact that the cover copy was going to ask the eternal question, "Is that my butt?"


It made me laugh in April of 2002, and it makes me laugh today.