Hey Guys, Feeling Stupid? Lucky You!

I found a link over at 2Blowhards for a very interesting article over at New Scientist:

Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website ‘Hot or Not’. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward. They could either accept a cheque for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50-$75 at a variable point in the future.

Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an “irrational” way – they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.

Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.

That’s right! I can now explain so many of the stupid things I’ve done in my life… It was because of all these pretty women I know. I knew it somehow had to do with them!

Home Remedies: The Friday Five

This week’s Friday Five is courtesy of Laura. I’m in Iksan, at the Language Center where I taught for my first year and eight months in Korea, killing time while everyone is in class. So, I have a chance now to peruse this question and attempt a response.

If you are anything like me, you’ll go to lengths to avoid having to go see a doctor. I actually made an honest-to-god attempt to get to see mine today, but I was rejected out cold by the Secretary From Hell (never mind the fact I can’t eat or drink anything). But that’s not the point… My question for this week is short and sweet:

What are your five most popular (or common, rather) home cures, Granny’s Recipes or magic tricks even for curing or preventing any old disease?

I’ll gladly grant extra points for anyone whose tip kills my throat pain (preferably without killing me, but I’ll consider other options as well)!

I’m going to include only remedies I learned in Korea, most of them learned from Koreans, though one I learned from a foreigner… I’ll also vouch for or criticize them as I go along…

  1. After swimming, put some Rubbing Alcohol in your ears to prevent infection. It dries out your ear canal. Learned this from my friend John Wendel after a horrible infection I got from not drying out my ears properly after swimming indoors during the winter. It’s served me well for a year.
  2. For a hangover, which I basically never get, eat some Spicy Bone Soup (Bbyeotagi Haejanguk) and go to the Sauna. This has actually worked for me… something about a really involved bathing experience refreshes one, even if the hangover isn’t fully gone by the end of it.
  3. If you have an upset stomach, have a friend prick your finger and squeeze it. This will Let Out The Bad Blood. If the stomach problems persist, then have your friend slap your back and rub your arm while squeezing the exit point of the bad blood. Nobody’s ever done this to me, but I have seen it done not only in a bar, but also in the office at work. I don’t think you need me to tell you what I think of this “medical wonder”…
  4. In order to ensure virility and top performance in bed, men ought to regularly eat dog-meat soup and eel. I can testify that these foods are delicious, but I’ve unfortunately not been lucky enough to have the chance to test the effects of these foods extensively, or, well, very much at all. Hmm. Ah, but it is the nature of man to live in hope of a future testing regimen, is it not?
  5. For a sore throat, use Ginger Tea. Now, I don’t mean anything made with a teabag, I mean you take a bunch of peeled ginger and drop it in way to much boiling water and boil the living hell out of it. All the living hell goes into the water, which you boil down to a thermosful, and then you drink that. You can add honey for the sake of taste, because this stuff is strong. (In Korea I also add tetchu, which in English are called jujubes.

    6. Runners-up include eating sticky food before a test (to ensure knowledge is not “lost” on the way to the exam (it sticks to you like the sticky food), and getting horrific burnt spots seared into your skin in order to suck out bad blood, similar to the point above. A lot of these remedies seem a little weird to me. But one of my friends told me her friend got acupuncture treatment to reduce his sweating, and I’m considering trying it out when I return to Korea, because it apparently did this guy a lot of good.

    We’ll see.

    If you want to see other Friday Fivers, check out the drop-down menu in the right sidebar.

Opinionated

A great article by Stephen Bayley, author of A Dictionary of Idiocy (not yet listed on Amazon), about the importance of being opinionated… which makes me feel pretty good!

Here’s a taste:

Opinions flourish only in periods or cultures without a dominant religion. A medieval monk in his Cluniac abbey or a contemporary mullah in his mosque and, indeed, a fine Victorian gentleman, had little use for original opinions. The collective opinions of religion are inflexible dogma, not interesting expressions of private thought. The best opinions are contrarian, not conformist, although that is in itself a matter of opinion…

In this sense, human progress depends on the continuing practice of forming opinions. So progress, or at least a form of it, is assured. And so it is enchanting to consider the etymology of “idiot”. Nowadays meaning someone of deficient intellect, it originally meant an independent person with ideas of his own. So if you are idiotic, you are civilised. Some may find that a challenging opinion.

It’s well worth reading, this little opinion piece.

Writers and Drugs

The other day I mentioned in conversation that we often romanticize jazz musicians, thinking that they’re usually best enjoyed once they are destroyed by some kind of awful oppression: Billie Holiday and the way her husband used heroin as a leash on her, for example, or the way Charlie Parker was pretty much controlled by his additions. Even Coltrane after he went clean had an air of a man who’d “seen the air of other planets” (to crib a line from the German poet Stefan Georg).

It seems the same is true of writers… the romanticization, I mean. From Arts & Letters Daily, a link to an article about writers and whether they need drugs more than other people…

Constant sobriety is not a natural or pleasant condition, and intoxicants are an essential part of life and literature. “Life is an incurable disease,” Abraham Cowley wrote in 1656, and until the 20th century there was little shame attached to using drugs as a crutch to help with life’s emotional strains or as an aid to productivity in work. Sir Clifford Allbutt, the great Victorian physician on whom George Eliot modelled Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch, believed that all human beings required drugs “to soothe the nervous system, to restore it after fatigue”. Even opium, he wrote, could be used “not as an idle or vicious indulgence, but as a reasonable aid in the work of life”.

The article is mostly a litany of cases of writers using drugs, but interesting to read. The author’s definition of “drug” seems curiously narrow, though: interestingly, I cannot remember in all my years at creative writing school, ever meeting a writer who refused to drink alcohol. If one includes liquor, I think every writer in the world uses drugs.

I love the conclusion of the article, anyway, where it’s found that writers are “pretty much like everyone else”.

Austinmama offerings

Okay, I likely wouldn’t be perusing a website called Austinmama unless friends had something up there, but… that said, this month’s offerings are very good, and especially Melissa’s domestic disturbance column, this month on the effect parenting has on a marriage.

Stop reading my page for now and go look at Austinmama instead for a while.

Then, of course, come back and read my page. Heh. I don’t want you abandoning me just yet…