Current Affairs

This is one of the most useful articles I've seen lately -- "10 things you should never buy new." Some, such as books, are obvious. Some, such as cars, take some thinking; it was once accepted wisdom that to buy a used car was to buy somebody else's problems. A useful corollary for saving money is "Don't think you need something right now." Today's hardback is tomorrow's paperback.

According to this rather dismissive critique, regular network news is "like the New York Times," and cable news is more like the tabloids:

With 6,000 teens killed on the highways each year and more than 300,000 injured, this seems obvious:

Driver's education has long been an afterthought on the academic agenda. As the school year begins, federal and state leaders are rethinking how much sense that really makes.

I've been commenting on so many of these lame research efforts lately that I probably ought to come up with a regular "grants I should have applied for" feature:

Exercise may be especially helpful in reducing the size of fat cells around the waistline -- more so than diet alone, a study suggests. That's important, because fat specifically in the abdomen has been linked to the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

When I worked at the newspaper in Michigan City, I was once sent to interview the city controller, a well-known local political figure, who had just resigned to fight an ultimately losing battle with cancer. After 10 or 15 minutes of awkward questions and answers, the man cleared his throat, looked me in the eye and said, "This is for my obituary, isn't it?" I admitted that it was, and the interview went very well after that. We actually printed the story before he died, then used some of the information again when he succumbed a few months later.

I'm getting so sick and tired of stories like this one. It isn't especially any worse than the thousands like it we've seen in the last couple of decades, but even the headline ticked me off: "Explosion of diversity sweeps U.S., census shows." The story explains:

Gosh, here's a shock:

A woman's sex drive begins to plummet once she is in a secure relationship, according to research.

Researchers from Germany found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.

Conversely, the team found a man's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship.

Well, this is depressing. A version of Jay Walking from "The Tonight Show," but the whole country can play:

Three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices, according to a poll on pop culture released Monday.

Women, beware. There are men willing to pay $1,600 for a crash course on how to do better at picking you up in bars, learning how to give up on the "canned lines" and "think on their feet" instead, picking up on your "subtle cues."

Ben had a rough Friday night picking up women on the Hotel Gansevoort's balcony after being coldly rejected by two attractive blonds.

The Jill Carroll story is going to run in 10 installments, and I'll probably read it all. I heard her interiewed on Good Morning America yesterday, and it was one of the scariest, most harrowing things I've heard in some time. She spent every waking second trying not to make her captors angry, knowing that if she said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing, she could be killed on the spot.