Beyond Rivalry

Deep Glamour's "What Your Jeans Say About You" (other than, "These are the only ones I could find that fit me ...") reports on a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Consumer Research that finds that our 'attachment' styles determine what jeans we wear:

"See, when you were but a wee babe in your mother's arms you honed one of two attachment styles, 'anxiety and avoidance,' the authors explain. Anxious people view themselves as positive or negative and avoidance people view others as positive or negative.

'Anxiously attached individuals are more influenced by "brand personalities," the idea that a brand possesses humanlike traits, such as sincerity or excitement. "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand," the authors write.'

The study seems to look only at people whose styles are attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. The study summary says nothing about the jeans preferences of people whose 'attachment style' isn't anxiety, i.e., those with a 'secure' style; how do they make these ultra-important decisions? I couldn't find a free version of the full-text article to learn more.

The reason I'm posting about it is that I take online surveys offered by several companies several times per week, and often these surveys ask me to describe a cereal, store, bank, insurance company, beauty product, or beverage in human terms, which stumps me every time. Can cereal be 'friendly,' 'angry,' or 'aloof'? How? I try to find the descriptors that could conceivably translate to a product, like 'reliable' or 'interesting,' and choose those just to tick one or two boxes from the 40 or so I'm presented with. (In most surveys, you have to tick at least one box per page or the survey gets stuck.) I've foten wondered what these human characteristics were doing in my survey. Now I see that the surveyors are apparently operating on the belief that people who like to take online surveys are 'anxiously attached individuals.' (Curious, I took an online attachment style quiz to see where I fall on this scale, which was squarely in the 'secure' quadrant. The other quadrants, defined by level of anxiety and avoidance, are called preoccupied, fearful-avoidant and dismissing.)

Paige Phelps at DG notes that the study seems seriously flawed in offering only two brands of jeans, Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap. Too true. And it's even more flawed because -- secure though I am, based on one self-administered online quiz -- I can become avoidant when anxious, and I wear only one flavour of Gap jeans, which I buy used on eBay or at Goodwill. I thought it was because they fit me best, having worn, over the years Lee, Levi, Style & Co., St. John's Bay, Covington (Sears), and lots of others whose names and humanlike qualities I can't recall. (They all seem 'blue' to me. :-)) But who knows. Maybe I think my jeans signal "secure, Christmas-loving, dog-empowered, tea-drinking, hopelessly pragmatic, mellow rationalist' to those who observe me.

Marginal Revolution points to two tinsel-tinted selling opps:

(1) Crapwrap: Have your package wrapped as badly as you would do it.  The service costs $9 and more than 500 people have signed up for it. "We're not given any instructions. I'm just asked to make a hash of it using lots of brown tape and making sure there are rips and untidy folds." (This wouldn't work for us; my spouse wraps with more care than I do.)

(2) Auctioning off the best seat at the family get-together.  Daughter-in-law Alexis won the eBay auction with a bid of £13.50, outbidding 17 other family rivals for the prime seat in front of the TV, with a conveniently placed side table for drinks. Otherwise, there would just have been another Boxing Day row over this 'perfect seat.'

My blog and I have parted ways on the Myers-Briggs personality analysis. I've tested as an INTP for many years now. This blog, on the other hand, is apparently an ISTP. You can test any blog here (their first language seems to be Swedish).

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like to seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

There's a lot going on here ...

At least, that's what Joan Didion seemed to say, per a NYT article, at a talk she gave a week after the U.S. election, when she "lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an 'irony-free zone,' a vast Kool-Aid tank where 'naïveté, translated into "hope," was now in' and where 'innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.'"

Columnist Roger Rosenblatt, after 9/11, "said that while irony had its place and time, this was not it." Some events, he says, "are so big that they almost imply an obligation not to diminish [them] by clever comparisons."

John H. McWhorter, "semiconservative black commentator," sees a reduction in irony as a natural and praiseworthy reaction among white people to having voted Obama into office and in doing so expiating "white America's sins" and "showing that you are past the nastiness."

I gotta go with Joan. Irony (particularly phase III irony) is all about puncturing propaganda, "stating the lie in order to expose the lie," pointing out the discrepancy between what is expected and what actually results, and in doing so examining the nature of human folly and vanity. So particularly when we're feeling good about ourselves and what we've accomplished, and when much is expected and hoped, when so much faith and trust is put in one event, in one person (as New York magazine put it, a couple of weeks ago, "Obamaism: It’s a kind of religion. But one rooted in a deep faith in rationality."), and when results are so sorely needed, we benefit from that "distanced perspective" of irony more than ever.

Like P.J. O'Rourke's; he's writing a column for The Weekly Standard with the working title, 'Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn't President Yet?'

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

***

Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."

"In Try to Remember, Dr. McHugh hints at the cultural context in which preposterous and vicious accusations against parents and others could be so easily believed by seemingly intelligent people, including courtroom judges. ... Freudianism alone could not have produced the necessary atmosphere; there must have been other forces at work as well. The sanctification of victims and victimhood comes to mind."

***

Japan's Latest Fashion Has Women Playing Princess for a Day

Japanese women in their 20s and 30s are dressing up as doe-eyed princesses, aiming "to look like sugarcoated, 21st-century versions of old-style European royalty. They idolize Marie Antoinette and Paris Hilton, for her baby-doll looks and princess lifestyle." They buy $1000-outfits (frilly dress, parasol, handbag, shoes) and work their straight hair so that it's curly with 'super-volume" to assuage a "longing for a happy-ending fairy tale," if you accept that bit of sociological analysis.

The women (aka 'girls') particularly idolise 24-yr-old Keiko Mizoe, sales clerk at one of the stores that sells the gowns, who calls those who sport the look "perfect, gorgeous and feminine."

A 16-yr-old who's buying the clothes online because the store seems too intimidating says:

"Their cuteness is beyond human. I'd like to be like them."

A 36-yr-old housewife felt "shy about her plump figure" so she lost 33 pounds and can now wear the tight-waisted dresses, on which she spends $2,000 or $3,000 a month. Her parents "send the couple food so they have more money for Ms. Yamamoto's shopping sprees.

'I figure it's OK as long as what I'm buying is pretty,' she says."

***

How a Drug Maker Tries to Outwit Generics describes how pharmaceutical company Cephalon, Inc. maximises profits on its drugs, in particular, its narcolepsy drugs Provigil and Nuvigil, and entices customers away from cheaper generics. The company, using an apparently common tactic of pharmaceutical companies, has been recently increasing the price of Provigil -- now $8.71 per tablet, 24% more than 8 months ago and 74% more than 4 years ago -- so that patients will have an economic incentive to switch over to Cephalon's new and longer-lasting narcolepsy drug, Nuvigil, which will be available next year at a lower cost -- and, critically, which won't be off patent until 11 years after Provigil will be:

"It works like this: Knowing that Provigil will face generic competition in 2012 as its patent nears expiration, Cephalon is planning to launch a longer-acting version of the drug called Nuvigil next year. To convert patients from Provigil or Nuvigil, Cephalon has suggested in investor presentations that it will price Nuvigil lower than the sharply increased price of Provigil. By the time the copycat versions of Provigil hit the market the company is banking that most Provigil users will have switched to the less-expensive Nuvigil, which is patent-protected until 2023."

One woman who takes Provigil off-label for Parkinson's stopped taking the drug when her cost went to $565 per month. Her insurer, like most, won't cover payment of an off-label use (a use not approved by the FDA).

The article later notes that "fully preventing tactics like Cephalon's would be difficult short of outright regulation of drug prices. Most other countries in the world control drug prices, but most U.S. regulators and legislators have opposed such moves."

***

In further drug-related news: Power of Suggestion: When Drug Labels Make You Sick by Melinda Beck looks at the effect of nocebos, which are the opposite of placebos: the power of suggestion that brings on illness:

"Research deliberately causing nocebos has been limited (after all, it's kind of cruel). But in one 1960s test, when hospital patients were given sugar water and told it would make them vomit, 80% of them did.  Studies have also shown that patients forewarned about possible side effects are more likely to encounter them."

Interestingly,

"the rare, serious side effects listed on drug package inserts -- say, toxic epidermal necrolysis, in which one's skin falls off in large sheets -- are less subject to nocebo effects."

It's harder to "suggest" one's skin to slough off than to evoke headache and fatigue by suggestion, and anyway, as is noted in the article, large percentages of the general population experience these vague symptoms regularly; in a 1968 study of healthy subjects not on medications, only 19% said they had no symptoms (such as headache, fatigue, dizziness) in the past 3 days. Also noted, that anxiety about illness can bring about common side-effect symptoms like nausea, diarrhea, dry mouth and rapid heart beat.

** Hours after I read this, I learned that the dear friend of a friend of mine is suffering from exactly this "rare, serious side effect" of toxic epidermal necrolysis, likely from anti-inflammatories she had been taking for a while.

I. love. it.  Travellers welcomed home at the airport by 20 total strangers carrying signs, banners, balloons, and flowers.

Woman killed by husband's coffin (11 Nov.)

God's Facebook Wall (12 Nov.)

Apparent 6th severed foot found in British Columbia (12 Nov)

Two Dead in Argument Over 'Bama-LSU Game (10 Nov.)

The Essential 007: A Recap of all 22 Bond Movies (13 Nov.)

Unregulated Credit Default Swaps Led to Weakness (31 Oct.)

Exxon Mobil: Biggest profit in history (30 Oct.)

The age when children begin attempting to appear racially colour-blind (27 Oct)

The Quest for the Perfect Morning Routine: The first in a series on lifehacking, at Slate (12 Nov): "The advice here is not my own, but I have clicked on it."

When Alzheimer's Hits at 40 in the WSJ (14 Nov.)

and

"I don't remember a whole lot about that period; I appear to have bought a couple of truly depressing sweaters, the kind you only wear when all you really want is to curl up under the bed for several years..." (The Likeness, p. 47, Tana French)

(Photo: Recent Drinking: Ironstone Cabernet Franc 2004)

I've watched most of season 5 via Hulu on my laptop. "Lucky Thirteen" (5x05) -- genius show. "Joy" -- again the realisation that House says what most people are really thinking but automatically censor because it's cruel and would cause conflict to say aloud (particularly, in this episode, about Cuddy becoming a mom; what he says is truly cringe-worthy -- and yet it's part of what was in my thoughts, too).

A few bits:

Wilson to House: "I'm leaving."
House: "What? Are you going to take another two months. Boy, you're really milking this bereavement thing, aren't you? [Pause] I mean good for you. Take all the time you need."

(Dying Changes Everything, 5x01)

House to Cuddy: "You have to stop Wilson from committing career malpractice."
Cuddy: "Talk to him."
House: "I already talked to him. Twice."
Cuddy: "Mocking him and insulting him --- let's see --- yes, technically those are categories of conversation.... Talk to him. Deal with his grief. Talk to him about what he's going through."
House: "That's a brilliant idea. I'll take him out for a beer. That'll make up for the fact that Amber's in a pine box and that there's randomness and chaos in the universe."

(Dying Changes Everything, 5x01)

Cuddy: Why do you think Wilson's leaving?
House: How many times do I have to use the word "idiot"?

(Dying Changes Everything, 5x01)

Cameron to Wilson: "You think you're making a rational choice. You think the worst is over. And then six months later you look back and you realize you didn't know what you were doing."
Wilson: "Are you saying the pain doesn't go away?"
Cameron: "It gets easier. Not in two months. Not in two years. But no. It never really goes away."
Wilson: Being here -- this building -- I was just in the lounge. I kept staring at Amber's locker."
Cameron: "I saw a guy wearing a scarf this morning. The color reminded me of his eyes. We lived 500 miles from here."
Wilson: "I have to do something."
Cameron: "Then do it. But don't think it's the right choice. Because there isn't one."

(Dying Changes Everything, 5x01)

Lucas (House's' PI, speaking about Wilson): "You want to find out he's pining. You want to find out if there is something about him that will tell you he's going to come back. Or something you can use to make him come back."
House: "Is there?"
Lucas: "No. No, there's nothing. Sorry."

(Not Cancer, 5x02)

Lucas (PI) to Cuddy as she walks away: "Hey, I like the shoes by the way."
Cuddy (tentatively): "Thank you."
House to Lucas, "You don't like her shoes, you like her legs."
Lucas: "It sounds less creepy if you say shoes."
House: "Less creepy, more gay."
Lucas: "That's my firm's motto."

(Adverse Events, 5x03)

Wilson: That's how we met: I was in jail.
Sheriff Costello: This guy was a total stranger to you and you bailed him out?
House: It was a boring convention. I had to have somebody to drink with.

[after Wilson breaks a stained glass window by throwing a bottle]
House: Still not boring.

(Birthmarks, 5x04)

House to Wilson [after pressing down the accelerator while Wilson's driving and being pulled over by a cop]: You "lost track of your speed"? I think that was Hitler's excuse. Lost track of the Jews. No one held him responsible.

(Birthmarks, 5x04)

House: [giving his father's eulogy] There's a lot of people here today. Including some from the Corps. And I noticed that every one of them, is either my father's rank, or higher. And that doesn't surprise me. Because if the test of a man is how he treats those he has power over... it was a test my father failed. This man you're eager to pay homage to, he was incapable of admitting any point of view but his own. He punished failure, he did not accept anything less than... He loved doing what he did, he saw his work as some kind of sacred calling, more important than any personal relationship. Maybe if he'd been a better father, I'd be a better son. But I am what I am because of him, for better or for worse.

(Birthmarks, 5x04)

Foreman to House: "There are ways of getting to know people without committing felonies."
House: "People interest me, conversations don't."
Foreman: "'Cause conversations go both ways."

(Lucky Thirteen, 5x05)

Wilson: House, you are a drug addict. You go to prostitutes. You can't be judgmental.
House: And yet...

(Lucky Thirteen, 5x05)

Cuddy: Why do you have to negate everything?
House: I don't know.

(Joy, 5x06)

House to Cuddy: There's a reason that we've evolved the feeling of awkwardness -- it tells us not to talk about things.

(The Itch, 5x07)

Cuddy: House, you OK? ... Your hand --

House: That's weird. I usually don't get the stigmata until Easter.

(The Itch, 5x07)

House: You want to change your life -- do something. Don't believe your own rationalisations.

(The Itch, 5x07)

(Image credit: Triny's World)

It was 90 years ago today that the fighting of World War I between the Allies and Germany ceased, on 11 a.m. on 11 Nov. 1918 -- now variously commemorated as Veteran's Day (U.S. only), Armistice Day, Poppy Day, and Remembrance Day. The Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war (and some would say laid the ground for the next one) when it was signed the next year in June.

I started thinking about what else was going on in 1918.

NOTABLE EVENTS

The Spanish Flu epidemic, coming in waves from 4 March 1918 to June 1920, infecting from 500 to 950 million people worldwide and killing 20 to 100 million people,  likely quite a bit more than the number of people killed in World War I (8.5-10 million combatants plus about 10 million civilians, mainly of famine and illness other than the flu). The Spanish Flu was unusual in that it killed healthy adults (average age: 33) and spread even to the Arctic. It seems to have started in the U.S. state of Kansas.

The Sedition Act was passed in the U.S. at the behest of Pres. Woodrow Wilson and "forbade Americans to use 'disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language' about the United States government, flag, or armed forces during war." Under the act, members of the Industrial Workers of the World union (U.S. citizens) were imprisoned during World War I. Wikipedia says that in his book The Great Influenza, John Barry claims "that the reason there is so little information available today about the 1918 influenza pandemic is that the newspapers supported the act. The information might have lowered the morale of the civilians supporting the war effort and the morale of the troops fighting the war." The Sedition Act was repealed by Congress in 1920.

The UK allowed women over age 30 to vote and widened suffrage generally in Feb. 1918 "by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men [over 21] and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications." The tripled the electorate from 7.7 million people to over 21 million. In December, Constance Markiewicz was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons. Women under 30 were not allowed to vote until 1928. (U.S. women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment, ratified in Aug. 1920.)

The Russian royal Romanov family was shot to death on 16 July at Yekaterinburg by order of the Bolsheviks. This included Nicholas II and Aleksandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia, and their son Alexis.

Lynching of black Americans continued in the U.S. South. In May, 8-months-pregnant Mary Turner was horrifically killed for opposing her husband's lynching: "She was taken from her home by a mob of several hundred, had her ankles tied, was hung upside down from a tree, doused in gasoline and motor oil and set on fire.  Whilst still alive, a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife, and the unborn child fell to ground, where it was repeatedly stomped on and crushed. Finally, Turner's body was riddled with bullets. After the incident, the Associated Press wrote that Mary Turner had made unwise remarks about the execution of her husband."

At the time of Finland's independence from Russian in late 1917, that country passed its Mosaic Confessors act, which went into effect in Jan. 1918 and which for the first time allowed Jews living in Finland to become Finnish nationals with full rights of citizens, and Jews who weren't Finns were to be treated like any other foreigner. Finland was engaged in civil war for the first part of 1918, between the socialists Reds (supported by Bolshevist Russia) and the non-socialist whites (supported by Germany); and when the Finnish Air Force was founded in March, the "blue swastika is adopted as its symbol as a tribute to the Swedish explorer and aviator Eric von Rosen, who donated the first plane. Von Rosen had painted the Buddhist symbol on the plane as his personal lucky insignia."

In Feb. 1918, Russia switched from the Julian calendar (which had essentially been in force since 45 B.C.) to the Gregorian calendar, and 1 Feb suddenly became 14 Feb.  Even stranger than daylight savings time, though only a one-time event. Speaking of DST, it first went into effect in the U.S. in March 1918, as did U.S. time zones!

Max Planck of Germany won the Nobel Prize for physics for his quantum theory of light.

Regular U.S. airmail service started in May 1918, among New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Forbes magazine produced its first Richest Americans list. The combined wealth of the 30 richest Americans was $3.7 billion. In 2007, the top 30 of the Forbes 400 were worth about $541 billlion.

The Raggedy Ann doll was introduced for sale in the U.S., based on a prototype produced to promote sales of the first book of Raggedy Ann stories, written by Johnny Gruelle.

Rinso, the world's first granulated laundry soap, was introduced by Lever Brothers.

On 11 Sept 1918, the Boston Red Sox defeated the Chicago Cubs for the World Series championship, their last World Series win until 2004.

U.S. Disasters:

• 9 July: The great train wreck of 1918 (two trains collided) in Nashville, Tennessee kills 101. (Other reports say 99 killed and 171 injured)
  
• 12 Oct.: The Cloquet Fire killed 453 people in the city of Cloquet, Minnesota and nearby.
  
• 25 Oct.: The Princess Sophia sank on a reef near Juneau, Alaska and 353 people died in the "greatest maritime disaster in the Pacific Northwest."
• 1 Nov.: The Malbone Street Wreck, which was "the worst rapid transit accident in world history," occured in Brooklyn approaching the new Prospect Park subway station, killing 97 and injuring 100 people.

BIRTHS

Jan: Gamal Abdel Nasser, pres. of Egypt 1956-1970; Oral Roberts, evangelist; Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romanian dictator

Feb: Muriel Spark, Scottish novelist (Prime of Miss Jean Brodie); Joey Bishop, American entertainer; Don Pardo (SNL announcer); Bobby Riggs, tennis player

March: Mickey Spillane, American writer; Howard Cosell, sports journalist; Pearl Bailey, singer and actress; Sam Walton of Wal-Mart

April: Betty Ford, first lady; William Holden, actor.

May: Jack Paar, American TV host; Mike Wallace (60 Minutes); Julius Rosenberg, American-born Soviet spy

June:

July: Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, advice columnists; Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director; Nelson Mandela, pres. South Africa

August: Leonard Bernstein, American composer and conductor; Ted Williams, American baseball player

Sept.: Paul Harvey, American radio broadcaster

Oct.: Rita Hayworth, American actress

Nov.: Art Carney, American actor (The Honeymooners); Billy Graham, American evangelist; Spiro Agnew, American VP

Dec.: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer; Kurt Waldheim, Austrian president and Secretary-General of the UN; Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt; Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of Germany 1974-1982

DEATHS

Gustav Klimt, Austrian painter (b. 1862); Claude Debussy, French composer (b. 1862); Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron), German World War I pilot (b. 1892); Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (b. 1868) and his family, in the Russian Revolution; Stanley Steamer co-inventor Francis E. Stanley (in an auto accident) (b.1849); Joyce Kilmer poet (Trees) (b. 1886); tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds (b.1850); Wilfred Owen, English poet (killed in action) (b. 1893); Edmond Rostand, playwright (Cyrano de Bergerac) (b.1868);  Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet (b. 1880)