What cannot be cured must be endured. Endure cheerfully!
Do not multiply your wants and then feel like a beggar. Reduce your wants and feel like a king.
- via Vanessa @ Bris Vegas ;-)
From Budapest to Mumbai to Stockholm, writers are jumping on the "Bridget Jones" bandwagon, with revealing results. The Chick-Lit Pandemic
Database of descriptions of hundreds of products. How Products are Made
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: This Passion Called Love: History of Single Life
Booze is as old as civilization. In fact, it might be the reason we have civilization at all: The first known cookbook is a Sumerian formula for making beer, and growing grain or grapes for alcohol production was a mainstay of economies from ancient Greece to the American frontier.
Even back in the good ol' days of ziggurats and temple prostitution, though, there was always a certain tension between alcohol's ability to raise spirits and its tendency to loosen morals. Hammurabi's Babylonian law said that if a woman dedicated to a god were to even enter a drinking establishment, she should be burned to death. Novels such as Rona Jaffee's The Best of Everything made urban watering holes seem like the natural environment of the men and women, great of ambition but loose of morals, who moved to the big city to make their way in exciting careers in advertising, fashion and publishing.
• Go into any restaurant, club or corner dive bar in Sydney, New York, London, San Francisco, Edinburgh or Los Angeles on any given night of the week, and you'll see the truth of what worried Hammurabi back in the day: Mixed Drinks - the torrent of joy juice that flows at apartment-house parties [Two Good Eggs - People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus Wanted: A Few Good Sperm ; Good article from Cyberskeptic's Guide via The Virtual Chase. Here's a good one: The Art of Public Records Research]
• · Temperance is primarily about desires for the greatest pleasures, and the greatest pleasures result from the most natural operations, which are those that have as their purpose the preservation of the individual and the preservation of the species. Pleasures of meat and drink and sexual pleasures ; People are just so on-edge about this kind of stuff now Publishing's Pendulum Swing
• · · Lobbyists in Love: With power couples, conflict of interest is what makes them interesting. No one here wants to be "the wife."; Older women like sex. That less-than-earthshaking claim has raised eyebrows and ire The sexual revelation
• · · · So we all know how to act. Be nice & don’t do crime, kick puppies, or start forest fires. But those are easy Mr. Manners ; Series coming up: Blog Role Models
• · · · · Three Good Reasons to Start Your Own Company ;
• · · · · · Conversation may be one of the most fundamental political and social acts Are We Having a Conversation Yet? An Art Form Evolves; There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. Love and Literature
