Flat 13

rām rām!!

Off to India for a few weeks….

photo via Katie Hayes

Octopus Snatches Diver’s Camera For Home Movie

The whole time I’m watching this, I’m thinking, “what if the octopus did that to my face instead of the camera or spear gun? he’s way too strong for me! I’d suffocate and die with an octopus on my face!!”

Now I’m scared of the ocean. Again.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

(not sure I agree with this one…)

For decades, the World Database of Happiness has tracked down how happy people are—not at all happy, not very happy, quite happy, or very happy. As it turns out, most of us are mostly happy, even when things aren’t going so well. Here is a look at how happy people said they were (on average) over the last 30 years.

FYI

Eyjafjallajokull is pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl or AYA-feeyapla-yurkul

“…..it was as if they were taunting hipster collectors into buying the worst possible art to prove their hideous, herd-following taste.”…..

“Look, if you’re playing a joke on the art market, it’s a pretty fun joke.
Playing a joke on the art market? But the art market, is it a joke? When you think of white on a white canvas and sell it for millions of dollars, is it a joke? Is it a joke that some people are going to spend millions on this?

So if anyone deserves to be pranked, it’s the art world …
No. I don’t believe that the art market is a joke or there is not a joke. I’m not here to judge. Is it a joke, like putting [an artist’s] name onto something by someone else, so the whole world become a joke? It’s how well you play your game. Jeff Koons making millions of dollars: People have said it’s not good what he does; it’s crazy. I respect him to play well his game.”

Putting Things In Perspective of the Day: Eyjafjallajökull is doing its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Are you?

[iib.]

In his collected writings, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words. 14,376 words appeared only once and 846 were used more than 100 times. Using statistical techniques, it’s possible to estimate how many words he knew but didn’t use.

This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.

According to one estimate, the average speaker of English knows between 10,000-20,000 words.

via

Lovely list from theFrisky

1. Families are weird.
2. Just say no to college loans.
3. Your experiences are the only thing you will remember with any clarity.
4. What doesn’t kill you scares the crap out of you.
5. If you are trying to get somewhere, you never will.
6. Girlfriends last longer than boyfriends.
7. Stop watching so much TV.
8. Sexually, try and stay in the single to double digits.
9. Regret is baggage that doesn’t belong to you.
10. If you smile, your brain will think you are happy.
11. Get the whole education thing over with early.
12. The longer you can go without being arrested the better.
13. If you can’t fart in front of him, you can’t possibly marry him.
14. What matters today will be totally forgotten 24 hours from now.
15. Boredom is death.
16. You can’t outrun your childhood.
17. Debt is like herpes: do not want.
18. Marriage asks you to sacrifice yourself for the common good.
19. Laughter is the best medicine, but gin is nice, too.
20. Men are mysterious.
21. It’s never too early or too late to reinvent yourself.
22. Sex is totally important and not important at all.
23. Divorce is survivable.
24. Children know more than you do.
25. There is nothing better than being in love, not even money.

According to Harvard Medical School researchers, 11 large companies that offer life, disability, or health insurance owned about $1.9 billion in stock in the five largest fast-food companies as of June 2009.

 ”Last year, a study found they invested $4.5 billion in tobacco. Why don’t they just pay cabbies to run people over, too?” (via)

In January that year, I was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, teaching part-time but living mainly on benefits, in a rented flat. Eleven months later, I was a published author who had secured a lucrative publishing deal in the US, and bought my first ever property: a three-bedroom house with a garden.

…..

I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government.

……

Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.

An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.

……

Yesterday’s Conservative manifesto makes it clear that the Tories aim for less governmental support for the needy, and more input from the “third sector”: charity. It also reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.

I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that he is offering nothing more than a token gesture when he tells us “it’s not the money, it’s the message”.

…….

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money.

……

Suggestions that Mr Cameron seems oblivious to how poor people actually live, think and behave seem to provoke accusations of class warfare. Let me therefore state, for the record, that I do not think it any more his fault that he spent his adolescence in the white tie and tails of Eton than that I spent the almost identical period in the ghastly brown-and-yellow stylings of Wyedean Comprehensive. I simply want to know that aspiring prime ministers have taken the trouble to educate themselves about the lives of all kinds of Britons, not only the sort that send messages with banknotes.

……

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

nice alternative to “cup-o-noodles”!

via

pelf \PELF\ , noun

Money; riches; gain; — generally conveying the idea of something ill-gotten.

Example:

…a master manipulator who will twist and dodge around the clock to keep the privileges of power and pelf. — Nick Cohen, “Without prejudice”, The Observer, February 20, 2000
Origin: Pelf comes from Old French pelfre, “booty, stolen goods.” It is related to pilfer.

Going to India on Sunday (providing I get my passport back in time) and a friend recommended the BEST site for traveling ladies!! Thanks, D!!!

The Plaid Suitcase: Bad packing is never in style