Things have been busy. I’m actually going to let this entry be chopped in half because the second half is me just going on about all the various things I did this weekend. I’m not posting pictures tonight, so all there is here is text. Still, for those who find my blatherings about recent events in my personal life interesting, there’s a long description of my weekend. Which was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a while, by the way. If you’re curious, the Continue reading link is just below this line…
Month: December 2003
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …