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Saturday, July 15, 2017

Saturday Musings: Beyond Kinky

Why clever people live the longest Financial Times. Correlation is not causation….and this seems to rely largely on IQ, which to a fair degree measure acculturation

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Meet The Woman Who Has Sex With Married Men In Return For Free Trips. Well, that’s not new, but now there’s a website to facilitate it ~ SES of Frequent flyer points 
ANOTHER COFFEE UPDATE: Caffeinated or decaffeinated, it doesn’t matter. Coffee is associated with lower mortality rates. Two or three cups a day reduces your chance of death 18 percent.
The science is far from settled, but why take chances?
About Last Night adopted to Sydneyscapes ... The other day I assured a twentysomething friend of mine that once upon a time, art museums sought to raise the public to their level, rather than lowering themselves to the public’s level. She looked latitudionaly and pityingly at me and said, “How can you be so naïve? Everything’s all about money and power.”

We Media Dragons  are never so funny to others as when we are least funny to ourselves. This seeming paradox is the piston that drives the engine of comedy. Most people die before they  realise that their are the paradox of the "I am much clever than you vanity". In the greatest of all comedies–the Shakespearean tales of romantic reconciliation and their operatic counterparts, Verdi’s Falstaff and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte–a pompous man’s thick carapace of earnestness is penetrated by humiliation. All at once, the unwitting butt of the joke realizes that he, too, partakes of the human condition, and is thereby made whole. It is in these transformative moments that the moral force of comedy is most evident,     for it reminds us that we are not gods, merely men.
That’s one way to be funny. Another is to show us serious people who not only don’t realize how funny they are but never acquire any insight into their condition, wrapped as they are in their own bulletproof dignity. This sheer obliviousness is what makes them funny to us, but it also tempts us to feel superior to them, and that is a dangerous business, an invitation to vanity. 
It is also the reason why women as a group tend to squirm at pure farce, which is a peculiarly hopeless kind of comedy, one in which the dignified boob learns nothing from his elaborately prepared Calvary of embarrassment. Instead, he is utterly vanquished by the other characters–and by the audience. Most men naturally think in such triumphalist terms, but my impression is that most women don’t. They want the victim (if he is a man) to learn from his misfortune, and be the better for it.

Terrifying 'ransomware' can send your private photos to all your friends


Sri Lankan navy saves elephant from the sea The Star


IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT ITALIAN HAM: Keeping The Proles Down.
Related: Teach the language of power, privilege. “Progressive educators are reluctant to do this, writes Pondiscio. They validate the home culture and language, refusing to teach students the ‘codes’ that allow success in the larger society.”

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