Category: People & Human Interest

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire?

When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover. The mob kingpin gives the kiss of death, Catholics give the “kiss of peace,” Jews kiss the Torah, nervous flyers kiss the ground, and the enraged sometimes demand that a kiss be applied to their hindquarters. Judas kissed Jesus, Madonna kissed Britney, a gambler kisses the dice for luck. Someone once even kissed a car for 54 hours straight.

From the beginning of an op-ed article about the kiss in The New York Times

Key quote: “The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss ‘making up for kisses that have been omitted.'”

Give Me the Booger tells a great story about her night out with the Buick. Wonderful stuff. She begins:

In 1979, two weeks before my 16th birthday, I hit a house with a Buick.

It wasn’t my house or even the house next to mine. It was several blocks away from my house, even though, yes, it was still in the same suburban neighborhood. And I didn’t just hit a house. I hit shrubbery, lots of shrubberies… and even a small foundling pear tree someone was trying to grow. Oh, I was driving the car when all of these things–plant life, inanimate objects–were struck, so it wasn’t like a freak accident involving a tow truck and some black ice or anything.

Nora, official good friend of NewMexiKen, is participating in this year’s Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Nora tells us:

To do this, I need your help and the help of many others, and I’m hoping that I can count on you to be part of my support team.

Any donation you make will go to the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Crusade and support its mission of providing access to care and finding a cure. And if you’re ever in the Denver area, it’s worth touring the Anschutz Cancer Pavilion — you can see where your donations are going.

Visit Nora’s Page to learn more — to see a great photo of Nora — and to contribute what you can to this important cause.

And, other bloggers, please considering linking your blog to Nora’s page.

From a report at news @ nature.com on humor in male-female relationships.

If love is blind, then maybe humour is the attention-grabber.

That’s the conclusion of two recent studies that confirm a long-standing stereotype of flirting: that women like joky men, while men like women who laugh at their jokes.
…

Women generally preferred men who were funny, while men favoured a woman who thought he was funny, the team report in a second paper accepted for publication.

Bressler believes that the findings might hint at why humans have evolved a sense of humour at all.

According to one theory, proposed by psychologist Geoffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, women prefer funny men because their wit reveals an active and healthy brain – and a fine set of underlying genes. “It’s a very powerful and reliable way to show creativity and intelligence,” Miller says.

Too bad NewMexiKen is only half a wit (see masthead above).

… I would say I am definitiely not superstitious.

But the previous post was the 13th of the day. Whenever I publish the 13th post I immediately look around for something else so there won’t be just “13.”

That’s just a quirk, right, not superstitious?

I’ve collected thousands of inspirational quotes. It seems that nearly everything that can be said, has been said, simply and eloquently, in a way that can seldom be improved. Winston Churchill wrote, “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.” So, I collected “The world’s best quotes in one to ten words.”

Click to read the ten quotations with brief commentary. Good stuff.

From an article in today’s New York Times:

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, would like to outfit this metaphor with a side-view mirror, one reading: “Objects in future appear much larger than they are.” A pioneer in the research of affective forecasting, Dr. Gilbert has illuminated a startling and fundamental mistake that both men and women make: they overestimate how future successes and failures will affect their happiness, for the better or worse.

Not that people are easily disappointed by a promotion or apathetic about being fired. Rather, as Dr. Gilbert has found in charting his subjects’ lives and reactions, “the good isn’t as good, and the bad isn’t as bad as we think it’s going to be.”

A corollary finding is that a single big payoff – a fat raise, an Hermès Kelly bag, a hot cha cha date – affects people’s essential happiness much less than a routine of small delights. And Dr. Gilbert, for one, is sold. He has found, for example, that one of the best things about being at Harvard is not the prestige of his position but that he can walk to work from his house in Cambridge.

And yet another corollary: NewMexiKen, a blog of small delights, will make you happier than the big flashy hot cha cha blogs.

“More than one in five Americans believe the best way to get rich is to win the lottery, while 11 percent say inheriting money is the way to go, a survey showed on Monday.”

Reuters Yahoo! News

From A Closet Full of Rattling Bones. Go, read, be amused.

The comments are fun, too.

… and stupid.

Three 20-something motorcyclists rode alongside NewMexiKen as I drove home from the store this afternoon. As his two companions kept watch for police cruisers, three times in fewer miles one of the cyclists gunned his bike to about 75 mph and rode vertically (on the rear wheel) for a quarter-mile or so. This on a major street in traffic in daylight.

No harm done I suppose. Halfway fun to watch. But really!?!

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Police aren’t sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor. The cat’s owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

MSNBC.com

The cat probably wanted to be fed.

An essay on Good and Bad Procrastination from Paul Graham:

So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.

Key quote: “What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?”

NewMexiKen is planning to read the rest of this article myself a little later.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

… Several years later, Keltner went to England on sabbatical and noticed that the English had a peculiar deferential smile that reminded him of those he had seen among the junior American frat members. Like the frat brothers’, the English smile telegraphed an acknowledgment of hierarchy rather than just expressing pleasure.

New York Times Magazine

Another superb piece, fitting for the season from Functional Ambivalent. Tom attends his son’s high school music program and is almost moved to tears. You should read it all, but here’s some of it.

There are people who rave against multiculturalism, but in my kid’s school multiculturalism isn’t a theory, it’s a fact. The names in the program read like a U.N. phone book. Well, maybe the book for the phones in the hillbilly wing of the U.N. Caleb, Ali, Phoenix, Kamisha, Abukar, Emilio, Kyaw, Roniesha and even a Mary took the stage together. It wasn’t threatening; it was joyful. These were American kids in an American high school singing, and in the audience were parents beaming with pride. And, it’s true, occaisionally smiling at the miscues.

I don’t get the complaining. I don’t get why some people think we ought to fix American culture at what it was fifty years ago and never let it move. I don’t get why inviting a bit of other cultures into ours is something worthy of debate, because those bits of other cultures are becoming ours whether we like it or not. No culture has ever frozen in time, and our[s] can’t either. I don’t get why that causes anger and fear.

Me either.

NewMexiKen took the day off Tuesday for some routine medical procedures — routine for the doctor and nurses, not so routine for me. (They do 90 a day at this hospital I was told.)

The procedures were a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. In case you haven’t had these pleasures, in each they insert a camera on a flexible tube and take a look around. The colonoscopy is a look at your lower intestine; the endoscopy views your esophagus, stomach and duodenum (a body part I hadn’t considered since high school biology).

Not to put too fine a point on it — and give you “more information than you need” — but to prepare for this double-header I had to go without eating for 36 hours; not even water for the last 12. Furthermore, I had to drink some nasty stuff that proved to be liquid roto-rooter. Prep and anxiety is by far the worst part.

During the procedure they gave me some sedative through an IV (so it sneaks up on you). To my surprise I fell asleep and missed the whole show. I remember coming to for a small amount of pain and some gagging on swallowing the endoscopy tube, but other than that I was gone. The worse part of the whole thing was the IV insertion.

(I did wonder later though if they put me out so they could use the same instrument for both tests without me being any the wiser.)

If you are supposed to get these tests (the colonoscopy is routine after age 50), don’t be like me and put them off indefinitely (10 years) because of fear or anxiety. Do it. Enjoy the nap (and the nap you get after you’re driven home as the sedative sweetly rolls on). Enjoy the encouraging good results if you are fortunate (as most are, and as were mine).

I have photos if you’re interested.

NewMexiKen was awake much too early this morning. As I lay there watching the ambient light from the moon give way to the ambient light of dawn I started thinking. And for some reason I started thinking about when I was in school.

In the sixth grade, I was in the school choir for Christmas midnight mass. It was a parochial school, St. John’s in Fenton, Michigan. I can remember being taken into the hall for an audition, certain I couldn’t sing. Surprise, I made the team. I sang in the seventh and eighth and ninth grades, too. In junior high I was not only in the chorus, but sang in a double-quartet and a quartet. I remember the four of us — Bill Smith, Jerry Hart, Joe Mosier and I — singing “Night and Day” and “My Buddy,” the latter surely more mournfully than even the writer of that World War I song would have liked. In the ninth grade, in Tucson, I was again in the chorus. Then, for some reason — my voice changing? — I stopped. And I haven’t sung in public again since.

Singing wasn’t my only artistic endeavor, though. I liked telling jokes, a skill I learned from my mother and her step-father (grandpa to me). Even as a kid Mom would tell me “dirty” jokes and I’d re-tell them, sometimes at school. I was paddled by the principal in the eighth grade for telling dirty jokes in class. I learned from the paddling never again to tell dirty jokes where they could be overheard by someone who might tattle.

That same principal — her name was Bertha Neal — has a school in that town, Durand, Michigan, named after her now. Lord knows, she earned it. When I was there they had all 12 grades and kindergarten in one building. And she was the principal of it all. My joke-telling was probably the least of her worries.

I remember an awards ceremony at the end of that same school year. Some graduating senior boy won the attendance award. He’d been there every day of high school. In fact, this kid had only missed one day in all 12 years of school. I remember thinking that was impressive — and pathetic.

I missed a lot of school as a kid. I had appendicitis, and pneumonia, and strep more often than I can remember. And Mom let us take the occasional mental health day, too. But when I got to senior year in high school for some reason I modeled myself after that award winner back in Durand. First eight months of the school year I didn’t miss a class.

We had an English term paper due May 1, and a friend and I pulled an all-nighter to get ours done. This meant we went to the library late on the afternoon of April 30 and started writing later that evening. Sometime around dawn I finished and was ready to get to school on time. Bill was still finishing up though and, as he was my ride that day, I waited. We got there about 11.

It seemed that every kid and every teacher in the school knew why we were late. We were guilty of what had to be the most heinous crime committed since the Lindbergh baby was snatched. Bill and I got detention for being late without an excusable excuse and — even though we weren’t late to her class — the nun in English refused to accept our term papers for credit. She took them and read them, but didn’t grade them. After all that work they would have no affect on our course grade. A bitter incident and one I still think was unfair. (She later told the class mine was the best of all the papers — a rare moment for me.)

I took several mental health days in the three weeks remaining before graduation. So much for perfect attendance. Ferris Bueller was right.

The year before in high school we’d gotten a new gymnasium — a million dollar gift from a benefactor. It was confusing those first few weeks what with boys locker rooms and girls locker rooms and all. I was drying after a shower one day — Ted Barrasso was next to me. We were, obviously, naked. The door opens and Mary Anne comes in, looks around, shrieks and barrels out. Poor Mary Anne. Within an hour the entire school had heard of her mistake and every girl was giving her sympathy and comfort, in person or to anyone else who would listen. Poor Mary Anne. I don’t remember anyone ever asking Ted or me if we were embarrassed or if we were OK. I came to understand then that in stripper-bars and topless joints the patrons who “barge in” are always more uncomfortable than the naked people who belong there.