An interesting illness.  I have some friends who have varying degrees of this, but nothing like the lady in the story.

I have to admit that when I heard the name of the "disease," which is misophonia, I assumed Rick Santorum had it.  There is no one more phony than ol' Rick.

And it's different from what the bar ladies have in Bangkok, which is mesohorny-ah.  As 2 Live Crew made famous.

Women Drivers: A Political Test

Women drivers make me nuts.  They are (as a central tendency, obviously with variance) timid and unwilling to drive effectively.  I have spent far too much of my life waiting behind a woman waiting to turn left.  As long as there is a car VISIBLE coming the other way, the lady waits.  If I blow my horn, nothing happens except she totally freezes up.  She may flip me off.  But she won't ever pull out.  (This is safer, in a sense, but it causes accidents all around this island of timid female tranquility)

The LMM agrees that all driving, from taxis to bus driving to personal driving, should be done by men.  We'd all be safer, and less frustrated.

PROVIDED that in exchange we agree that all political offices above, say, state Senate are held by only women.  And in particular those offices where decisions about going to war would be held by women.  Again, we'd all be safer.  The same impulse that makes men better drivers makes them worse decision makers on the whole war thing.

And Condi Rice and Maggie Thatcher don't count.  Give them a driving test.  Unless they DRIVE like women, they don't get to make war decisions.  

(And, yes, of course we jest.  When one controls for other factors, especially for whether the aggressive act is "prosocial," as in the case of war, women are experimentally indistinguishable from men.  And they are better drivers.  Still it was fun.)

GIVE! ME! THAT! REMOTE!

As part of our continuing series of women attacking their husbands... He wouldn't give up the remote. So she stabbed him seven times. Yes, she did.

(Nod to @Jeanne23)

I wonder if alcohol was involved in some way....

What the heck? Christmas carols?

Woman bites off husbands tongue, and then other things happened.

(Nod to the Blonde)

She's Beating Them Off With a Stick

Ms. O'Donnell is having to face up to her past. This may have been tongue in cheek (I'm trying to be careful, here), but ... nice video.



I watched, I watched it again, I still don't believe it. The ending... wow.

Man Pulled Over Driving Barbie Car

And, yes, alcohol was involved.

(Nod to Anonyman, who still has some Barbies in his closet, I hear)

Unbelievable! Yale has App State Envy

People if you enjoyed this, then you gotta watch the video below (I know it's long but at least give it 'til the singing starts):

Hat tip to Ken Tremendous.

  

Markets in everything: Stepford Wife edition

Mrs. Angus and I had been debating whether Tiger's wife would leave him or stand by her man. Turns out she is planning to lease herself to him:

Elin and Tiger Woods had a prenuptial agreement, as expected. The couple is undergoing marital counseling, as you'd also expect. And now The Daily Beast is reporting that Elin Woods is renegotiating that prenup to get an immediate $5 million payout from her husband and as much as $55 million more to stay with him for two more years.

The initial prenup was worth $20 million after 10 years of marriage. However, the Chicago Sun-Times' Bill Zwecker has reported that Elin Woods will receive an immediate payment "into an account she alone controls," and that the 10-year timeframe -- which began when they married in 2004 -- has been shortened and the value increased "substantially."

The Daily Beast quotes "a lawyer familiar with the couple's negotiations" in reporting that the term of the prenup has been shortened to seven years, and that a series of staggered payments could increase the total value to $75 million.

But apparently there's also a behavioral component to all this: Elin Woods must "be a dutiful wife in showing up with him at social events and in public as if they were still the perfect couple, and sign a nondisclosure form that will prevent her from ever telling her story."

YIKES!

This pretty much negates any of the sympathy I had for Mrs. Woods, but I am surprised (guess I am naive) that Tiger's reaction to this situation is to just try to buy his way out of it.

Hell is too far to go

Freaky video from Beck!

Um, Could you move that paper a bit more to your right please?

TYVM!

Breaking news! Bernanke to be re-appointed

Story here

Mr. Calderon, tear down that wall!!

Funny Audi ad

Not sure where they are really going with this.

1. Security guards are wimps?
2. Woman can't park?
3. The security guard loaned the woman his Audi?
4. The guy is FRENCH, for heaven's sake. The gun probably isn't even loaded, because the government is arguing about standards for bullets.

I have to admit: Audi commercials are cute. Here is another, for dog lovers.

The Trains, and the Riots, Run on Time

Walpurgisnacht goes off on schedule. I can imagine the scene in a bar, in Berlin.

"One more beer?"

"Sounds good. Oh, wait, I can't. I'll be late for the riot. I've already missed the bonfire. If I don't hurry, I'll miss the scripted spontaneous outrage of the masses, the inevitable accidental confrontation of left and right wing extremist groups, and the beating of the police with random pieces of lumber. Dude, I gotta fly!"

Still, it could have been worse. Predictions were that it might be.

(Note: the photo at top is actually a bonfire from Chapel Hill, after UNC won the national NCAA championship. My older son is one of those people jumping. Another example of a scripted riot. Interesting. We all need to satisfy our atavistic urges to dance around a big-ass fire, I guess.)

UPDATE: Anonyman writes about the paradox of rioting against war. He also notes that 273 German policemen were injured, some of them fairly seriously. Why?

Excerpt from the news story:

Rainer Wendt, chairman of one of Germany's national police unions, criticized Berlin interior minister Erhart Koerting's handling of the operation, saying protesters were allowed too much time to get out of hand and urging that a "no tolerance" policy be adopted in the future.

"Whoever throws a stone or wears a mask must be immediately taken out of play," he told the Neuen Osnabruecker Zeitung newspaper.

Koerting condemned the violence, but said overall the police response could be considered a success.

"The deployment concept saw many different measures of violence prevention available, which the police quickly and effectively were able to use when it came to criminal acts," he said.

Konrad Freiberg, the head of Germany's other major police union, said forces had been cut back by 10,000 officers across the country since 2000, making it difficult to muster enough police for major confrontations.

"On days like May 1 we are on the fringes of our capacity," he told Bild newspaper.

Birds, Bees: Choices, Costly Signals, and Genetic Adjustments

Intelligence and mate choice: Intelligent men are always appealing

Mark Prokosch, Richard Coss, Joanna Scheib & Shelley A. Blozis
Evolution and Human Behavior, January 2009, Pages 11-20

Abstract:
What role does a man's intelligence play in women's mate preferences? Selecting a more intelligent mate often provides women with better access to resources and parental investment for offspring. But this preference may also provide indirect genetic benefits in the form of having offspring who are in better physical condition, regardless of parental provisioning. Intelligence then may serve as both a cue of a mate's provisioning abilities and his overall heritable phenotypic quality. In the current study, we examined the role of a man's intelligence in women's long- and short-term mate preferences. We used a rigorous psychometric measure (men's WAIS scores) to assess intelligence (the first study to our knowledge), in addition to women's subjective ratings to predict mate appeal. We also examined the related trait of creativity, using women's ratings as a first step, to assess whether creativity could predict mate appeal, above and beyond intelligence. Finally, we examined whether preferences for intelligent and creative short-term mates shifted according to a woman's conception risk. Multilevel modeling was used to identify predictors of mate appeal. Study participants (204 women) assessed the long- and short-term
mate appeal of videos of 15 men with known measures of intelligence performing verbal and physical tasks. Findings indicate that both intelligence and creativity independently predicted mate appeal across mating contexts, but no conception-risk effects were detected. We discuss implications of these findings for the role of intelligence and creativity in women's mate choices.

--------------------

Duration of courtship effort as a costly signal

Robert Seymour & Peter Sozou
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7 January 2009, Pages 1-13

Abstract:
We consider a male and a female in a courtship encounter over continuous time. Both parties pay participation costs per unit time. The game ends when either one or other of the parties quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. We assume that there is a binary variable which determines whether the male is a “good” or “bad” type from the female's point of view, according to either his condition or his willingness to care for the young after mating. This variable is not directly observable by the female, but has fitness consequences for her: she gets a positive fitness payoff from mating with a “good” male but a negative fitness payoff from mating with a “bad” male. We assume also that a “good” male has a higher ratio of fitness benefit from mating to fitness cost per unit time of courtship than a “bad” male. We show that, under suitable assumptions, there are evolutionarily stable equilibrium behaviours in which time-extended courtship takes place. A “good” male is willing to court for longer than a “bad” male; in this way the duration of a male's courtship signals his type, and acts as a costly handicap. By not being willing to mate immediately the female achieves a degree of screening because the posterior probability that the male is “good”, conditional on his not having quit the game, increases with the duration of courtship.

--------------------

"A UK researcher has a new explanation for how the human race manages to keep a fairly even balance of males and females, despite massive deaths of young males in war and selective abortion of female fetuses in certain parts of the world. Corry Gellatly, a research scientist at Newcastle University, proposes that there's a gene that determines whether a man will father more sons, more daughters, or equal numbers of each. When females are in short supply, they have a better chance of snagging a mate, and are thus more likely to pass the gene for fathering daughters on to their offspring. And when men are scarce, they have a better chance of mating and passing along the gene for having sons...The ratio of male to female births jumped significantly at the end of each of the world wars in countries involved in the fighting. A number of hypotheses have been floated to explain why. One idea is that returning soldiers have extra-frequent sex with their partners, which could lead to fertilization earlier in the menstrual cycle, possibly making male births more likely. Another hypothesis holds that larger males are more likely to survive wars and more likely to father boys. After sorting through 927 family trees from North America and Europe, including 556,387 people in all, Gellatly proposes another explanation. In an article published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology, the researcher suggests that men carry a gene that controls their ratio of X to Y sperm, and thus the likelihood of their fathering sons or daughters. Women carry the gene as well and pass it along, but do not express it." [Source: Reuters]

Questions: How in the world did I ever get married? Fraud, perhaps? Is it really true that "good" men will court longer? Why? And having a gene that "controls" the ratio of X to Y....how? In response to what stimulus?

(Nod to KL)

Holy Cow! Angus Chilipunk'd by Munger Minions

One of the great mysteries of life is how Germany managed to convince people that Hitler was an Austrian and Beethoven a German.

Now Mungowitz has worked a similar magic with his journalistic minions in Raleigh:

Duke profs on Hillary

Mike Munger, chair of the Duke political science department and Libertarian candidate for governor, weighs in on Hillary Rodham Clinton's future, along with his colleague David Rohde.

Found on Munger's personal blog , which often is a pretty fun read.

Ouch?

What really scares the Iranian Mullahs?

Is it McCain gettin' elected and us stayin' for a hundred years?

Is it the Israelis bombing out their nuclear facilities just before they can make a bomb?

Is it seeing a Sunni Government come back to power in Iraq and starting up another war with them?

Nice tries, but No, No and No.

It's Barbie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



I am not making this up!

In the latest salvo in a more than decade-old government campaign against Barbie, Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi said in an official letter to Vice President Parviz Davoudi that the doll and other Western toys are a "danger" that need to be stopped.

"The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger...The displays of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter ... as well as the irregular importation of unsanctioned computer games and movies are all warning bells to the officials in the cultural arena,"

Najafabadi said Iran is the world's third biggest importer of toys and warned that smuggled imports pose a threat to the "identity" of the new generation. "Undoubtedly, the personality and identity of the new generation and our children, as a result of unrestricted importation of toys, has been put at risk and caused irreparable damages."

I would like to make three observations in closing:

(1) what the heck is that guy gonna do with that doll?

(2) I'm pretty sure Iran is NOT the world's third largest toy importer

(3) These are the guys screwing us up in Iraq? Shame on us.