Boy, there's nothing like an ill-chosen slogan to make the thought of giving a (presumptively) beautiful object to a (presumptively) loved one all grody.

Actually, of course, I don't find either of these rings terribly attractive or interesting, but it's not as if that helps.

DNA from your older siblings can get in you while you're in the womb, and DNA from your offspring can also get in you and lodge in your brains. And possibly affect your health.

Presumably these effects aren't limited to male DNA in female brains, and that just reflects the available methodology.

Via LizSpigot on FB

I found out that my dear friend - who is liberal, etc - falls asleep at night by listening to conservative talk radio. This is the nuttiest thing I've ever heard of. It would give me nosebleeds in my sleep, I think.

I just got an email from an acquaintance titled Prank the Babysitter!

Pretend to be going out for the evening and hire a babysitter (a local teenage girl, etc). Tell her that your child is asleep upstairs and do not disturb him or her. Call about an hour after you left and ask babysitter to check on your child. When the babysitter goes upstairs, and there is [...]

The ellipses are in the original. That's the entire email. Isn't that, uh, hysterical? I leave it to the mineshaft to determine what should go in the child's bed.

If my facebook feed is any indication of the pulse of the country, people are really taking the NFL ref situation as a referendum on union-busting and the value of well-trained and compensated workers.

They have a little documentary about drug cartels and Mormons in Chihuahua.

Sometimes you re-watch a movie from your childhood, expecting it to have lost, with the passage of time, the allure it once had.

As it turns out: Flight of the Navigator? Still totally awesome.

I read an editorial yesterday* which lumped Romney's 47% comment together with Kate Middleton's topless photos to jointly illustrate how celebrities today ought to have no expectation of privacy. That's super stupid - she was on a private estate and someone used a telephoto lens, standing so far away that they couldn't be seen, in order to splash topless photos of her to the public. He made a comment to a room presumably full of rich donors, while running for the president of the United States. The idea that his privacy was violated in some way irritates me beyond belief.

More on creepshots and camera pics of women caught unaware. Particularly creepy:

In recent years a genre of websites dedicated to sharing humiliating pictures of women - and occasionally men - has cropped up, known as "revenge porn" sites. The idea is that vengeful people can post humiliating, sexual pictures of former partners, photos often clearly intended for personal use only, if they were taken with consent at all.

Charlotte Laws first encountered these sites in January this year, after her daughter Kayla, who is in her mid-20s, had her computer hacked. In Kayla's email account was one topless photo she had taken of herself - it hadn't been shared with anyone - which was then posted on a notorious revenge porn site, Is Anyone Up. She was distraught, and Charlotte, an author and former private investigator, spent 11 days, non-stop, working to get the picture taken down. One of the nastiest aspects of the site, which has since closed, was that humiliating photographs would be posted alongside details of the person's social media accounts, so they were immediately identifiable.

In contrast to the above, there's also stuff that's more high school grade - sexual harassment forms of bullying, basically. It's really hard for me to get a handle on how widespread these sorts of predatory photos are, in say a typical high school. Several incidents per year in a typical high school? More common? Less?

*hard copy of The Week**, now I can't find the editorial online.

**I know, me and your grandma read The Week. I don't know why I like it so much.

I've been feeling slightly vain, lately. Or the opposite: mild dissatisfaction with my looks, due to vanity. If I were willing to increase my morning beauty regimen from 0 to 5 minutes, what would be the single ritual I could do with the most vanity payoff? Mascara?

Back in '06, I noted that "in liberal NY, we were also firmly taught that it was hopelessly naive to think that the Civil War had much to do with slavery". Thirty years later, Sally tells me the same is still true: as a matter of standardized test prep, her class has been specifically told that "slavery" is never going to be the right answer to a question about why the Civil War started. The right answers are that the South was fighting for "states rights" and because of tariffs, while the North was preserving the Union. (Some random webpage with Regents' study questions on the Civil War suggests that her teacher is right in terms of getting good grades on the Regents.)

Weird, anyway.