Smile and be profound
Is a happy life filled with trivial chatter or reflective and profound conversations? Researchers from the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis "investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations they tend to engage in. Volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device … [that]sampled 30 seconds of sounds every 12.5 minutes" for four days. "… As reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, analysis of the recordings revealed some very interesting findings. Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others. … The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. These findings suggest that the happy life is social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial."
Source: ScienceDaily
We have to talk
A British wedding website's survey of 4,000 married adults shows their happiness levels at different stages of marriage, United Press International reports. The research by Confetti.co.uk showed that British married couples are happiest two years, 11 months and eight days after their wedding. Married adults enjoy their best sex, romantic meals and nights out after two years and four months. Successful couples spend 24 minutes a day having a "heart-to-heart each evening" and never go to bed after an unresolved argument, the website said.
A-mammothing we go
"The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ," Megan Stack reports in the Los Angeles Times. "Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet. … Now entire villages are surviving on the trade in mammoth bones. And a new verb has entered the vernacular: mamontit or 'to mammoth' - meaning, to go out in search of bones. … Many of the populated areas have been picked clean, driving scavengers deeper and deeper into the wilderness in the hunt for bones."
But they look so cute
"Hunger drove a wild panda to break into a Chinese farmer's pig pen and eat their food, which was meat and bone rather than bamboo," Reuters reports. "State-run China Central Television said the giant panda had apparently descended from the mountains in a region of southwest China's Sichuan province and was spotted in a field before the animal was found inside the pig pen, chewing on bones and spitting out the meat. After eating its fill, the panda quietly left." Giant pandas are classified as carnivores, although their diet is mainly bamboo.
A baby walks into a bar
"From time to time, Sasha Raven Gross can be seen teetering around a neighbourhood drinking hole. She flirts with strangers, talks gibberish and sometimes spins in circles for no apparent reason until she falls down. In one hand is her liquid of choice - watered-down orange juice in a sippy cup," Jessica Ravitz writes for CNN.com. "The 14-month-old toddler [in Brooklyn, N.Y.]is the sort of barfly who's at the centre of a recurring and heated debate: Should parents be allowed to bring their babies and children to bars? … Single hipsters and others without (and sometimes with) kids complain about being asked to watch their language, to not smoke outdoors near strollers and to keep their drunk friends under control so as not to scare the little ones. They don't want to feel pressure to play peek-a-boo. They want to cry over their beers, they say, without having an infant drown them out. If anyone is spitting up, they want it to be them."
Half-baked idea?
At the recent CeBIT technology trade fair in Germany - the biggest in the world, according to The Daily Telegraph - inventor Karl Friedrich Lenser showed off a necklace made of dog feces from his Jack Russell, Charlie. "I saw when it was in the microwave that it becomes hard," he said. "It becomes beautiful and it is like a jewel. People always have a tendency to be individual. If they see it they want to have it. I am sure it will become a fashion."
But how is she on fuel?
The Oasis of the Seas, the world's largest cruise ship, offers amenities including these:
- 26 kitchens for 24 restaurants and the staff cafeteria.
- A scaled-down imitation of New York's Central Park, surrounded by some of the ship's restaurants.
- 80,000 bottles of beer for a seven-day cruise.
- A jail where alleged lawbreakers can be kept until the ship reaches port.
- An evening serenade. "Every day at 5 p.m.," The Wall Street Journal reports, "Larry Lindsay from Worcester, England, walks through the main public areas playing his bagpipe."
Thought du jour
"Repeated polls over the years have found people's biggest lifetime regret is not getting enough education or not taking it seriously enough."
- Malcolm Ritter, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 25, 1993