Monday, November 20, 2006

Other music matters Saturday, me and Maze are going to see Colin Hay: Man at Work, a cabaret thing at Village Theater. Tix are like 20 bucks. I actually like when this guy plays acoustic guitar -- he's done acoustic stuff on the Larry Sanders show, a couple other places. He has a gig at Largo in LA that's tres VIP. Regardless, I thought it would be fun. Wanna go?

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Blogger is driving me crazy!!! I would love to be writing more, now that I have temporarily shelved my quest for a job in a place that does not melt asphalt in July. However, blogger is being a more-than-typical bastard this week. I find it interesting that blogger's spell check does not even recognize the word "blog" and many other not-so-technical and commonly-used bloggy words. If you were unfortunate enough to be reading around 4pm on Tuesday, you would have notice that I posted the same article 6 times. Why? Because blogger kept giving me error reports during publishing. Only after I finally got it to "publish successfully" did I look at the site itself and discover the multiple postings. It took me an hour to get all the copies off.
So I just bought femmefetal.com and am setting up the website there. At least I can maybe manage to post pics and maybe even link to other websites, which I have been unsuccessful at doing here. Don't hold your breaths, everybody--I'm still waiting for the software I ordered a month ago for my other website. I think I may have to make a couple phone calls.
Anyway--assuming this actually publishes--please enjoy the following:
Study Shows Women are not Frigid:From this Yahoo! News article:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Having sex is the high point of most women's' days, while commuting is the low point. And most women like being with their kids less than they will admit, according to a study published on Thursday.
While the results may not appear startling,
Unless you are a dim-witted anti-feminist
the method used to assess mood represents a new and more accurate way of figuring out how happy people are, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
They propose that their tool could be used to plan social policy.
Unless your society is governed by dim-witted anti-feminists.
"Current measures of well-being and quality of life need to be significantly improved," said Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, which helped fund the study.
"In the future I predict that this approach will become an essential part of national surveys seeking to assess the quality of life."
Sure they will. Accurate assessments don't seem to stop those who don't want to hear the message to ignore it for some non-reality based reason.
For the study, David Schkade of the University of California San Diego and colleagues at Princeton University, University of Michigan and elsewhere studied more than 900 women.Usually, people are asked about their feelings in general for questionnaires on mood.The new method, called the Day Reconstruction Method, involves breaking the day into a sequence of episodes and rating each activity or moment as a kind of snapshot.
"'Think of your day as a continuous series of scenes or episodes in a film. Give each episode a brief name that will help you remember it (for example, commuting to work, or at lunch with B'," the women were told.
The women rated each activity for positive and negative associations, with 6 being the strongest and 0 the weakest.Then the researchers analyzed the numbers."Grocery shopping and cleaning the house were rated lowest among 28 activities," the researchers wrote.
I have to agree with the grocery shopping rating. I keep out of the grocery as much as possible. Thank you, Del Taco and Chinese delivery!
On average, the 900 women gave "Intimate relations" a positive score of 5.10, compared to 4.59 for socializing. Housework scored 3.73, which was better at least than working at 3.62 and commuting with a lowly score of 3.45.
So, according to this, women generally like sex more than hanging out with friends. That's not shocking to me.
As for who the women preferred to be with, friends clearly won out with a positive score of 4.36. Children landed in the middle, after relatives and spouses.
Even though women would apparently rather be with their friends when they are just hanging out. So, we keep the men at home so we can be sexually satisfied when we want to be and we go find our friends to hang out with after the lovin'.
The boss scored just 3.52.
Boss's suck. Not much new there.
"When people are asked how much they enjoy spending time with their kids they think of all the nice things -- reading them a story, going to the zoo," said University of Michigan psychologist Norbert Schwarz, who worked on the study."But they don't take the other times into account, the times when they are trying to do something else and find the kids distracting."
To keep this tragedy from happening to you, go here.
This new method creates a more accurate picture than asking people to generally report how much they like various activities, Schwarz said in a statement."Saying that you generally don't enjoy spending time with your kids is terrible, but admitting that they were a pain last night is quite acceptable," he said.
And saying that your parents are booger-heads is still totally acceptable, too.
Sleep quality had a large effect on the enjoyment of life, the researchers found. Women who slept poorly, on average, enjoyed their day as little as a typical person enjoys commuting. Women who said they slept well enjoyed their day as much as most people enjoy watching television.
But what if you watch TV while you're commuting?
And women who earned more were not necessarily happier, the survey found."Measures of wealth or health do not tell the whole story of how society as a whole or particular populations within it are doing," said Princeton's Daniel Kahneman, who led the study.
Yes, money doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy a better mattress and some childcare.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

habeas bluh bluh bluh What a wasted day. Or a wasted weekend, at any rate.
I didn't make it out of bed until 3:30 yesterday afternoon. All I did last night was paint. A friend from high school called-- he's in town, and was something of a super-star here when he was in undergrad-- but I just didn't have it in me to go out.
Today was more painting and even more loafing around. All the while, I have this Respondent's Return to basically rewrite. It also appears as if the agency attorney who first wrote it might have, um, gotten the law wrong. So I'm supposed to figure out what the law is, rewrite the return, and have it ready by, oh, tomorrow, when it's due with the court.
Guess I'll get on that.