For she loves you for all that you are not

Rare Tim Buckley Live LP With Unreleased Songs Due in August (RS)

I can remember the worst time

Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.

That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.

(...) Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/what-you-dont-know-makes-you-nervous/?em

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows

―¿Y le vas a dejar el traje?
―¡Ni aunque de ello dependiera su vida! Será mi mortaja. ―Elliott se sentó en la cama y se movió de un lado a otro, como una mujer agobiada―. ¡Es tan grande la maldad! ¡Los odio! ¡Los odio a todos! Todo les parecía poco para halagarme cuando podía yo convidarlos, pero ahora que estoy viejo y enfermo ya no les sirvo para nada. Ni diez personas han venido a preguntar por mí desde que caí en cama, y en lo que va de semana no he recibido más que un ruin ramo de flores. ¡Yo, que todo lo hice por ellos! Han comido a mi mesa y han bebido mis vinos. Les he hecho recados. Les he dado fiestas. Ningún sacrificio he regateado para complacerles. ¿Y qué he sacado de todo ello? ¡Nada, nada y nada! No hay ni uno de todos ellos a quien le importe que me muera o que viva. ¡Qué crueldad! ―comenzó a llorar. Las lágrimas, grandes y pesadas, empezaron a correr por sus arrugadas mejillas―. ¡Ojalá no hubiera salido nunca de América!

SOMERSET MAUGHAM: El filo de la navaja

I've seen your evil ways

The Jonas Brothers are a flagship weapon in the culture wars. They feign conservative social values while romping around the bizarre hyper-sexual Disney meta-verse where young kids dress like Madonna and Mick Jagger and live the rock n' roll lifestyle, promising to America's young, malleable minds a life of glamor and cool that can never be obtained, while diverting these child automatons from healthy creative engagement, imaginative play, and intelligent thought.

The ubiquity of the Jonas Brothers is so enormous that parents are left with little choice but to submit or ostracise their child. The Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana and The Cheetah Girls (The Pussycat Dolls for teens) are the only mainstream option for preteens to participate in rock culture and though I am focusing on the way this is damaging to young girls, let it be said that Disney's hyper-sexed musical offerings and the confusing sexual message they carry are no less dangerous to young boys.

Disney is selling sex to kids, pretending they're not, and making a fortune while forcing their audience into cultural bankruptcy.

http://classicalgeektheatre.blogspot.com/2009/03/regarding-jonas-brothers.html

Just how stupid and easily pleased do they presume we are?

1. Kutcher's win was a triumph for the little guy. Um, wrong. Kutcher ain't no little guy. To state the obvious, he's a genetically blessed professional performer (before he was an actor, he was a Calvin Klein model). He had a prime-time TV sitcom that ran for eight seasons on Fox and remains in syndication in dozens of countries around the world, was the creator and star of MTV's "Punk'd," and is a multimillionaire reality-TV mini mogul (e.g., "Beauty and the Geek"). As Dr. Michal Ann Strahilevitz, professor of marketing at Golden Gate University, put it in a comment on AdAge.com: "Ashton Kutcher is not famous for his Twittering, but for his TV shows. If he had never been on TV, he would not have a huge Twitter following. ... If Oprah and Ashton stopped all TV appearances and just moved to Twitter as their only method of communicating with their followers, I am pretty darn sure their Twitter followers would start to drop off."


2. In Kutcher's words (in his streaming video announcement of his win): "One man can have a voice that's as loud as an entire media company."
Um, wrong. As a CNN employee in New York wryly e-mailed me, "Last I checked, CNN is still on the air 24 hours a day around the globe." Yeah, turns out that's true. See, in addition to its assorted semi-useful Twitter streams, CNN is available on TVs in not only 93 million U.S. households, but in more than 200 countries. Just because Ashton Kutcher and CNN both use a free tool, Twitter, to promote themselves doesn't mean they have "voice" parity, for chrissakes. If access to cheap or free digital megaphones were all that mattered, Estonian spammers would be more powerful than God.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=136238