STRANGE QUESTS

People develop very interesting 'quests' in life.  One may wonder why someone wants to risk life to climb the sheer face of a precipice,  ski down the 18 degree face of a mountain, or try to fly a balloon around the world.  However,The Huffington Post ran an article about Mr. Pee-Pee, a serial masturbater,  this particular feat seems more pointless than most others because any male (or female for that matter) could achieve it if they so chose.  I'm not sure the whole quest would really 'grab' a woman anyway.  I'm not even sure why a male chose to do it, for that matter. While a picture of a male's achievement might confirm each destination and proof of goal, the picture would probably not be effective for a woman.  So be it.

John Gray

John Gray and Will Self come to the RSA (Rhetoric Society of America) to discuss the great implication of Darwin's ideas - that natural selection makes humans into animals like any other. The Talk is:Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Listen to this YouTube talk. This is a full lecture and may be too long and heavy for some who prefer spending less time on a subject, however, it will be fascinating for those readers who want a challenge to their thinking.  This English author (not to be confused with the John Gray who wrote Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus.) deals with Darwinism, Huxley, Wells, and many philosophers and great thinkers. 

ARE MEN OR WOMEN HAPPIER?

Attempts to find out whether women are happier than men have been made. Men base their happiness more on what they have amassed materially. Women tend to value family more. Sharon Jayson of USA today, reporting on research results writes: "Researchers analyzed decades of national data on 47,000 men and women to create a statistical model that shows women's happiness decreases, while men's increases, exceeding women's by age 48."

In a short film clip, a couple of older women were interviewed. One pointed across the street at her husband and grown twin sons and said 'while they carried out only the luggage, I was left to do everything else and I am tired'.

"Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, instead of the usual factual responses requested, women were asked about the emotions felt. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed? " This was written by David Leonhard.

There seems to be a growing gap between men and women. Women like visiting their parents less than men. It is suggested that men will sit and watch ball games with Dad while the women prepare food, cater, clean up, and wait on the men. There are without doubt, exceptions to that finding. There seemed no distinction between men and women as widows and widowers which seemed to me to be holding rather different criteria than married older people.

I was having difficulty accepting many of the conclusions. Women, presumably spend less time dusting than they used to do so the researcher concluded that the houses were nowdustier. He did not factor in hepa filters, vacuuming dust up rather than just moving it around, or central air conditioning requiring fewer open windows and thus letting less dirty air into the house.

Another assumption was that women were happier a few decades ago because they compared themselves only to other women, whereas they, today, compare themselves to men. How they reached that presumption was as clear to me as how Freud got so much mileage out of penis envy until the feminists pointed out that it really is penis pity. This writer also claimed that women haven't come as far as they wished and he finished the article with: "This weekend, I think I may volunteer to do a little dusting." He is all too reminiscent of John Gray who wrote "Men Are from Mars; Women Are from Venus." I think he was from the planet Uranus.