Hey!

There is no better way to attract reports of the paranormal than to write a story casting doubt on it, and attract them I did. Besides the usual ghost sightings, my favorite was from a nice man in Florida who told me about his wonderful typewriter (note: not a word processor): he would type a few letters of a word and the machine would fill in the rest, apparently having read his thoughts.

Ya know?

I think I'm going into a diet

A Web page labeled "Ana Boot Camp" recently offered its members a seemingly irresistible proposition: a 30-day regimen designed to help them drop some serious pounds, no exercise needed. The catch was that the group's members were to vary their daily caloric intake from 500 (less than half the daily minimum requirement for women recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine) to zero. They were supposed to track their progress, fast to make up for the days they accidentally "overate" and support each other as they worked toward their common goal of radical weight loss.

Ya know?

The true face of the Muslim

The attacks targeted the heart of India's financial district, but the shock waves were felt around the globe. On Wednesday, a group of heavily armed assailants carried out a series of coordinated strikes in Mumbai —killing at least 80, wounding hundreds more, and claiming an indeterminate number of hostages. A group calling themselves the Deccan Mujahedeen claimed responsibility for the mayhem, but their identity could not be immediately confirmed, and many terrorism  specialists said they were unfamiliar with the name. Whoever did it took aim at Western passport-holders and prominent targets; among the locations hit were two major hotels, a train station and a hospital. Several top Indian security officials were among the casualties.

Ya know?

There is a movie, right?

"The butterfly effect" is a phrase that came to Hollywood and our culture from chaos theory and the abstract mathematical models of Edward Lorenz. The idea is that even the smallest alteration of the first cause in a series can produce a vast change in the final result. So in theory the slight alteration of the tiny breeze caused by a butterfly's wing could eventually change the course of a great hurricane. That is the theory. It always sounded ridiculous to me, until now.

Ya know?

Now, this is interesting:

It's a question that Genevieve Hartman  has been rolling over in her mind for some time now. The 28-year-old vegetarian will be spending Thanksgiving at her boyfriend's professor's house in New York City. Thanksgiving used to be one of Hartman's favorite holidays , when she celebrated it with her vegetarian family in San Francisco. But ever since she moved to New York five years ago and began spending the holiday with relatives or friends, it's been a source of anxiety. Take the tofu dilemma: on the one hand, she doesn't want to get stranded at a turkey-heavy table without anything to eat, which might make her hosts feel bad. But she also doesn't want to bring attention to herself as needing "special foods," increasing the likelihood that she'll have to field questions about why she's skipping the turkey.

Ya know?

Would you apply to this job?

There's an e-mail making the rounds with a job description attached. If you apply, be warned: you will be burdened with "challenging" tasks "in an often chaotic environment" with "variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24-hour shifts on call." You must be "willing to be hated, at least temporarily." Oh, and you'd better love kids, because that's who you'll be working with all day. The job, of course, is "parent"—but it might as well be "pediatrician," which requires a lot of the same skills and then some. That's why lately I've been feeling sorry for pediatrics residents. They're often too busy wiping the noses and taking the temperatures of other people's kids to do likewise for their own.

Ya know?

The future of electricity

Batteries still won't evolve as quickly as computer-based technologies. The reason: a battery is based on a chemical reaction, which is limited by the laws of physics and the periodic table. Since Italy's Alessandro Volta first came up with the idea in 1800, batteries have generated electricity using the same basic principle.

Ya know?

Modern Pirates, can you believe in that?

It's a scene out of another century. On Tuesday night an Indian Navy vessel in the Gulf of Aden approached a ship thought to be manned by pirates operating from lawless Somalia . Although it was dark, Indian officers told news-agency reporters that they could see crew members on deck brandishing guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Volleys were fired, fire broke out on one of the pirate ships, and it sank. The crew escaped in a speed boat, the Navy ship in hot pursuit .

Ya know?

This gay marriage should be discussed a little more....

Fast-forward to Election Day 2008, and a flurry of state ballot propositions to outlaw gay marriage, all of which were successful. This is the latest wedge issue of the good-old-days crowd, supplanting abortion and immigration. They really put their backs into it this time around, galvanized by court decisions in three states ruling that it is discriminatory not to extend the right to marry to gay men and lesbians.

Ya know?

don't ya think so?

We can view our choices in diet and lifestyle as austere sacrifice and deprivation—I can't eat this food or enjoy this indulgence—but it is so much more effective and sustainable to reframe our choices as good examples for our kids that are acts of love. For example, I'm not one of those people who love to exercise, even though I often write about its benefits. It takes effort for me to motivate myself to work out on a regular basis.

Ya know?

The seek for knowledge

Why does someone spent all of his life reading books, taking part in conferences, debating with plenty of scholars, and at its end, the undergraduation studies seemed so lame. What for?

what is the point in having all the knowledge in the world and still a secure job is so distant?

Ya know?

Michelle Obama says:

We'll be using every second of the transition time to work out timetables and timelines and all that good stuff. But the hope is that everybody settles in at the same time. So that we won't be transitioning portions of the family at different periods of time. But how, when and where—we don't know enough. At this stage, it's difficult to really have good conversations about schools and all that stuff because you don't want to measure the drapes.

What do you think about it, ya know?

Who do we are talking about?

Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbroglio last spring.

interesting, isn't?

The theory is almost too perfect to be true. Barack Obama , the son of politically progressive parents, was born Aug. 4, 1961—almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. Is it possible Obama was conceived on that historic night?

Ya know?

Renegade, do you know what does it mean?

How would you feel if a frowning man in dark sunglasses and wires in his ears grabbed the back of your pants every time you walked into a crowd? That's just one of many less-than-enjoyable aspects of presidential life that the Obama family have been living with, ever since they were christened with their recently-released official Secret Service code names: Renegade (Barack), Renaissance (Michelle), Radiance (Malia), and Rosebud (Sasha).

Strange, ya know?

Why don't we pay them a visit?

"For a lot of people, they're not going to have credit and they don't have a lot of money right now, but they want to have a good Christmas," said a manager of a Kmart store in Orlando.

Ya know?

Of course not!

the religious vote for Obama did not reflect a massive shift in ideology and priorities among evangelicals but rather muscle-flexing by a coalition of others of faith—including and especially African-American churchgoers and Latinos who tend to be both more religious and more socially conservative than the population at large.

Ya know?

heuaehuahuaehaeuhauehau

Since its publication in 1945, "Animal Farm" has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and become a standard text for schoolchildren, along with Orwell's other dystopian vision of the future, "1984." But it is the writer's essays on the importance of clear language and independent thought that make him relevant. Consider this, from "Politics and the English Language": "The word Fascismhas now no meaning except insofar as it signifies 'something not desirable.' The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another … Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.

Ya know?

Is this the gospel of political power?

Just as "race" has a whole new meaning in America this week, so, too, does "faith." For at least four decades, white evangelicals have been the religion-and-politics story in this country. Their power, their rhetoric, their numbers, their theology—all have been so dominant that many of us in the media had forgotten that religious faith could be expressed any other way. 

Ya know?

Obama!

Obama is the kind of serious, ambitious young man who attracts veterans to his side. And party labels seem to matter little to him. Sen. Richard Lugar, the Republicans' leading light on foreign policy, was an early Obama ally, and remains one. Put Paul Volcker, Warren Buffett and Gen. Colin Powell in this category, too.

Ya know?

Can he make it?

Basically, the McCain camp has been forced in the final days of this race to argue that everything we think we know--thanks, for the most part, to the incessant flood of polls--is wrong. 

Ya know?

Be careful with your money

It starts with those buckets of Halloween candy. Then it's on to Thanksgiving (stuffing, sweet potatoes with gooey marshmallows, pumpkin pie). After that pigout, there are holiday parties with calorie-laden snacks and drinks, Christmas and finally the big bash on New Year's Eve. It's the season of temptation and for many of us, it coincides with colder weather – which means we are less likely to get outside and work off our indulgences. No wonder diet- and exercise-related resolutions are at the top of our list on January 1!

Ya know?

One vote do makes difference

The last big bump among young voters came in 1972, the first presidential election after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Despite revisionist history that suggests that all young people then were antiwar and counterculture, the youth vote split pretty evenly between George McGovern and Richard Nixon. Roughly half of those casting their first vote chose a man who was trounced on election night, and the other half chose a man who had to resign the presidency in disgrace less than two years later.