"Everyone rises to their level of incompetence." - Laurence J. Peter

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How to meet a man at 40 - "One of the reasons you are single (and this is the only one that is strictly your fault) is that you have written off every kind of man who might conceivably cross your path. You have built a fortress out of your preconditions and you are glowering down from the battlements. Men do approach from time to time, but then they see the vats of boiling oil teetering on the ramparts and think better of it... I was set up with the One at a lunch three years before the party at which we officially met. The reason the lunch doesn’t count as the first meeting is because we barely spoke, and the reason we didn’t speak is because I ran his details through the List database and, in 0.2 seconds, it came up with a You Cannot Be Serious rating. Of course it did! The One was very recently divorced (not for me, thanks). He had three children in tow (uh-oh). I think he’d had a savage £5 haircut, and I’m almost certain he was wearing the brown shirt. So, at that first meeting, I summoned the List and the List gave me permission to do nothing."
I find it ironic that she then lists as a "non-negotiable" "Must be smarter than you, or at least as smart". As I told a friend, it's lucky guys are smarter than girls, or the human race would die out.
One comment: "Funny how, as a middle-aged single batchelor, I have difficulty dating women - until they find I have a seven-figure sum in my bank account."

The politics of ME, ME, ME - "Few of the comments really engage with the piece they are supposedly commenting on. Instead, most commentators just engage with each other, often with a viciousness that takes your breath away. There is a kind of circularity to the threads, with similar arguments repeated time and time again and rebutted as often... At root, these struggles can involve vital issues, but in the hothouse of the internet, they so often disintegrate into thousands of fragments - from the interpretation of an ambiguous phrase to the reliability of a single news item. The result of an internet war of attrition that produces an impenetrable fog of confusion - and must reinforce the indifference and alienation of the non-involved... In this sense such internet politics is not just self-defeating but also profoundly exclusionary. Only those who are similarly versed in the minutiae of the conflict can participate fully."
Sounds like Wikipedia.

When Your Credit Card Signature Fun Backfires - "You drew a penis on my credit card machine."

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' | The Onion - "Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."... During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years."
Prescient

a distrusting government, suspicious of its employees and its customers - "its time the government stop treating Singaporeans as foreign enemies who are out to get them. Civil servants are well-positioned, especially talented ones, to offer their views on public policy thereby lending credibility and insight to policies. Shutting these people down only serves to highlight the immense distrust the government has on its own employees and its own people, along with its own policies that it implements."

Born, Study, Work, Die. Average, Typical SGean Life - "My View of a Life of a Typical Average Singaporean.
- Born to the cradle in the care of your parents
- Start slogging it out starting from Kindergarden, Primary, Secondary, Tiertary, Universarity
- Start slogging it out in the work force
- All this while caring for your parents
- Get Married
- Buy a House
- Continue to Slog it out to pay for House, Kid, Car, Parents
- Retirement Age but can't retire, may wish to travel but can't travel
- Die"

Clueless Guys Can't Read Women - "More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless. More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students... This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on... More surprising, the researchers found guys were also confused by sexual cues. When images of gals meant to show allure flashed onto the screen, male students mistook the allure as amicable signals."

Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It? - "When we met up, it seemed like we were closer than I had thought. I knew about Jenny's son's part in the school play, her sledding expedition and what she'd cooked for that big birthday dinner — information we would have shared if we still lived in the same neighborhood and talked regularly, the inane and intimate details that add up to life. The constant stream of data is a digital form of closeness. "A beautiful blossoming garden of information about your friends," as Neill puts it, adding, "I don't see how that can be a bad thing.""

A right-on guide to imprisoning children - "In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers in the United States, whose slogan was 'Love Is Not Enough', claimed that 'transracial placements are a way of perpetuating racist ideology'. Such sentiments gained prominence in both the US and Britain and transracial placements became rare... Waiting for a suitable 'cultural match' will leave many children growing up in the care system rather than as part of a family... Portsmouth City Council recently deciding to ban all smokers from adopting children under the age of five. The adoption assessment process also inquires about applicants' views on multiculturalism, diversity and social equality. It goes without saying that your answers will need to sit favourably with current mainstream political views on those topics, at least if you want your application to proceed satisfactorily... Today, the question 'Where are you from?' is seen as more significant than 'Where are you going?' Contemporary society gives greater credence to the past than it does to the present or the future. In debates and policies around adoption, this involves purporting a culturally deterministic view of human beings... parents can be overweight, smoke, hold racist, sexist or homophobic views and still raise children successfully... As society changes, different issues will be considered social anathema. In the future, being sceptical of climate change or being in favour of air travel may be viewed as indicating a lack of the appropriate values necessary for raising children."

The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past - "Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren't full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn't worry about high cholesterol... we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called "paleofantasies." She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance... The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we've now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works... We have never been a seamless match with the environment. Instead, our adaptation is more like a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart... Hiccups, hernias and hemorrhoids are all caused by an imperfect transfer of anatomical technology from our fish ancestors."

'Polite' Britons died on Titanic - "A behavioural economist says data suggests Britons in that era were more inclined to be "gentlemanly" while Americans were more "individualist". Women with children had a 70% better chance of survival than men in such an environment, he told the BBC."