Sunday, September 11, 2005



Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, But beautiful old people are works of art
-Eleanor Roosevelt

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.
-Mark Twain

Thoreau deplored the supremacy of work in this way: "It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work." And this is all that my wife is slaving 7 days a week and she will even miss on Alex’s birthday party due to some IT migration issues. Strange world we are living in ...
We often forget that going to work every day is often more a chore than a pleasure Working Hard at Nothing All Day
Nettle suggests that we would all probably be happier by trading income or material goods for time with people or hobbies. But most people do not do so. My enemies should never enjoy such a book! The Science behind Your Smile

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: What Women Want
Why do the poor have children out of wedlock? It's not just a matter of money

When it comes to single-parent families, Everybody's Doing It. That, it seems, is the received wisdom--but it's not true. As Charles Murray noticed decades ago and demographers have known for some time, the structure of families has diverged drastically by social class. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women with no more than a high-school education has skyrocketed since the 1960s but remains very low among college graduates. Divorce has declined among the well-off but is climbing among the unskilled. Although almost all college graduates still marry eventually, marriage rates are dropping steadily among those without a high-school degree.


Times of Me Me Me [It's time to recognize that America's poor need more help than we're giving them Castaways And Cuts; Pro-lifers branch out to poverty, health care—and war ]
• · If you want to finish your dissertation, it’s time to stop worrying about greatness and to start focusing on good enough Words on Paper ; What these firing-squad lists declare is not only what we should be reading but, of course, what we should not be reading Classics, literary canons of "great" works, prize short-lists and long-lists, certainly are exclusive ; Literary letters, lost in cyberspace Wilson: the search for love that fed a career in letters
• · · The struggle to get ahead in the suburbs makes for a memorable Australian movie Sink or swim ; NYT science writer Dean's evolution coverage wins praise: Cornelia Dean "presents a leading example of how not only to report on but also how to contextualize the intelligent-design strategy," write Chris Mooney and Matthew C. Nisbet. They note that the Topeka Capital-Journal appears reluctant to go beyond publishing letters on the evolution debate, running only two guest op-eds (both in support of evolution) and no in-house editorials or columns. "Silence is no way for an editorial page to respond to an evolution controversy in its backyard." Undoing Darwin
• · · · Podcasting for Readers ; Those weighty collections of reference books are making way for fast online version Give us the facts
• · · · · A book a day keeps the doctor away" is the theme of this week's Nonfiction Chart, with You: The Owner's Manual, by Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D., at No. 1; When Mehmet Oz was on Oprah on May 3 of this year, he made quite an impression with frank talk of a...personal nature: the ideal bowel movement. "It should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco hits the water," he said on the show. "It should be an S shape." An Insiders Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger ; In defence of advertising
• · · · · · Regents ask, 'What's in a name?' ; An elementary look at what may have happened if pioneer pop stars had ditched sex, drugs & rock ’n’ roll Rock vs. School: Because a waste is a terrible thing to mind ; The Sound of Music is a seriously religious film, its plot a fairytale version of modern Christian history Hegel with songs