The following may or may not, as in my case, having been disillusioned with the concept a few relationships ago, come as huge shock to you: love isn’t the only key to a healthy, lasting marriage or relationship. It seems a team of Australian researchers from the Australian National University might have actually discovered the key ingredients to keeping those romance fires burning, or at least what outright extinguishes them.
As reported by Reuters, the research team found that age, previous relationships and whether or not a partner smokes are all factors that influence the length of a relationship.
Aptly named, “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the study followed almost 2,500 couples, married or living together, from 2001 to 2007, and identified, analyzed and tracked the factors that surrounded those who remained together and those who divorced or separated.
(more…)
|
|
|
Though I didn’t know it when I first picked up the book from my local library, one of the most interesting facts to me about The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America, initially, came with discovering the author’s background.
This is my second Coulter book, and, not surprisingly, I find myself again both entertained and amused by what I’ve read. The titles alone for her chapters, such as “The Passion of the Liberal: Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp,” “The Creation Myth: On the Sixth Day, God Created Fruit Flies,” and “The Scientific Method of Stoning and Burning,” are interesting and witty. (No wonder the woman’s a lawyer.) Essentially, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is one giant argument against the concept of “American liberalism,” something Coulter considers without any scientific or factual basis whatsoever, and even goes so far as to call it a “primitive religion.” She bases this idea on how she sees liberalism in America possessing many characteristics that define religions around the world. She says that it has “its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints…” and so on. Basically, Coulter sees this “faith” as something like nature being god and men being apes, or monkeys. In my opinion, a lot of what she has to say, what she uses to back up her argument here, makes sense.
No, you don’t have to go back and read the headline a second time because, yes, you read it correctly the first time. According to two new studies, drinking moderate amounts of alcohol will not, I repeat, will not give you that infamous beer belly or equate you to middle to lower class, all-American man Hank Hill sitting in your front yard, admiring your latest mow job with a cold beer cracked and gripped in your hand. In fact, it might mean just the opposite. The first of the two studies took place over the course of eight years, taking more than 20,000 beer drinkers and their beer-boasting habits into review. The results: although heavy drinkers were shown to put on some weight, it wasn’t necessarily on, around, or even near the belly.
I love how AOL News reported the latest on Debbie Rowe – M.J.’s ex-wife (1996-1999) and ex-nurse (he met her in a dermatologist office where she was a nurse) – as being “back in the spotlight.” My question: when did the ex-Mrs. King of Pop, and more importantly, the mother of two of Jackson’s children, ever leave the spotlight? With M.J. dead, questions regarding custody of Jackson’s three children are flying high. I think that makes Ms. Rowe pretty spotlight worthy, at least at the moment.
Private contractors have been relied on by the armed forces since the end of the Vietnam war when the United States decided on an all-volunteer military. With an estimated 160,000 private contractors working in Iraq now, some 50,000 of them operatives, or fighters, it is impossible to question the necessity of their numbers if we are to sustain the “war on terror.” However, it appears as if Blackwater USA is doing more to inhibit success in Iraq than to aid it…or at least it was back in 2007. While escorting a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles to Baghdad, Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation, according to U.S. military reports, killing 17 Iraqis. Iraqi authorities, at the time, demanded that all contracts with Blackwater be severed by the U.S. government within six months, and that $8 million in compensation be paid to each of the 17 people killed in this apparent slaughter.
Though the world saw very little of the little Jackson crew – Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., 12, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, 11, and Prince Michael Jackson II, 7 – the world seems to be just a bit worried and is certainly wondering about what’s going to happen to Jackson babes now that King Michael is gone. In an article published by USA Today, it was confirmed (at least until the family’s hearing scheduled for Aug. 3) that M.J.’s mother, Katherine, will care for the kids, since it appears that Jackson departed without a valid will. What I’m wondering, and I’m sure you all are too, is where in the world is Ms. Debbie Rowe, Jackson’s strange (rather than estranged) ex-wife in all this? She is, in fact, the mother of the oldest of Jackson’s children. |
|
