Beyond Rivalry - pop_culture

Mimesis, Psych 201 and Jeans

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:27:01 -0500

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…

Markets in Everything, Xmas Edition

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:30:45 -0500

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.'

Intuitive or Sensory or Both?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:33:00 -0500

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.

The page shows which parts of the brain are dominant during the writing of the blog. For the ST, it's logic, mathematics, order, habit, details -- in short, practicality and concreteness.

This seems accurate to me. I don't tend to write here about my feelings or from my imagination, instead focusing on theories, analysis, synthesis, quantifiables, current events, and so on. I think one can probably surmise my feelings and my…

Plan to Take Over World, in 11 Easy Steps

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:26:00 -0500

There's a lot going on here ...

Comments interesting, too ...

Irony - Now, More Than Ever

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:17:49 -0500

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…

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

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."…

Welcome Home, Stranger!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:24:00 -0500

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

Recent Reading

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:55:00 -0500

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)

You Can't Be Judgmental (And Yet)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:40:00 -0500

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…

1918

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:16:00 -0500

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'…