Paranoia & Superstition”When people feel they have lost control of a situation they are often inclined to use paranoia or superstition as an explanation to establish some control, according to a study published in the journal Science.”The less cont…
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October 5th, 2008 — , Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Broaden & Build
October 4th, 2008 — , Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“The broaden-and-build theory describes the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment and love. A key proposition is that these positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire…
Related StoresLeap of Faith
September 13th, 2008 — , Alternative, Oddities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Dear Folks,For now I am going to focus on other projects, and foresee only irregular uploads, if at all. I want to sincerely thank the few visitors who frequented the blog. I’ve much appreciated your interest and the blog has continued for this long du…
Related StoresManorexia
September 12th, 2008 — , Health, Men, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“One of Britain’s leading eating disorder experts says as many as one in five young men are deeply unhappy with their body image. Dr John Morgan said that for every man with an eating disorder there were 10 more who desperately wanted to change the wa…
Related StoresChange Envy
September 12th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“[P]erhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away fr…
Related StoresThe Body Toxic
September 12th, 2008 — , Books, Health from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“(..) balanced in its approach is journalist Nena Baker’s The Body Toxic. “When it comes to toxic exposures, the personal is political,” Baker writes. Fittingly, as a point of departure, the author pays $2,000 for a laboratory in Britain to conduct a s…
Related StoresThe Marilyn Files
September 11th, 2008 — , Film, Life, Oddities, Style from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“At Frank Sinatra’s suggestion, Marilyn Monroe kept her life inside two filing cabinets—letters, invoices, financial records, and the mementos that meant the most to her. After her tragic death, in 1962, at the age of 36, the cabinets, together wit…
Related StoresConnection: Punk & Do It Yourself
September 9th, 2008 — , Alternative, Art, Style from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Back in 2002, however, Ms. [Faythe] Levine was a sometime artist who made punk rock zines. That year, she organized an art show of sock monkeys in her home, sock monkeys being universally appealing objects requiring not much medium, she explained, mos…
Related StoresEndangered Species: The Celeb Centerfold
September 9th, 2008 — , Film, Isms, Style, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Broadway, it seems, has eclipsed Playboy as the place to make Hollywood pay attention. There was a time when female movie stars who felt they were being ignored by the industry took off their clothes for Hugh Hefner’s magazine. Now they brush up the…
Related StoresGuyland
September 7th, 2008 — , Books, Isms, Men, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Young middle-class white men feel the relative decline in their status particularly acutely, Kimmel argues. Their privileges are under siege. Women compete with them in the work force. Formerly deferential minorities demand respect. The values of cons…
Related StoresMeat Change
September 7th, 2008 — , Alternative, Health, Isms, science from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist. Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday …
Related StoresFrugal Is the New Black
September 6th, 2008 — , Alternative, Life, Style from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Anyone finding it hard to cope with the credit crunch will find little sympathy from teacher Kath Kelly.The cash-strapped teacher had an alcohol-induced wager with friends that she could beat the credit crunch by living on just £1 a day for a whole y…
Related StoresTrue & False Monkey King
September 5th, 2008 — , Art, Books, Commentary, Literature from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Think about the way that people are obsessed with memoir writers and whether they’re telling the truth. I mean, what a displacement. I’m just like, “Wow!” You don’t understand–or maybe you do–ho…
Related StoresGhostly Invisibles
September 4th, 2008 — , Commentary, Literature from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“[H]ow might a young would-be writer aspire to join the company of the passionately ghostly invisibles? Or, to put it another way, though all writers are now and again unavoidably compelled to become visible, how to maintain a coveted clandestine authe…
Related StoresThe G-Spot Myth
September 3rd, 2008 — , Alternative, Commentary, Isms from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“[S]ex can evolve beyond orgasms. Sex can be transformed to become an individual vocabulary of erotic gestures, combining bodies to reach high states of arousal and desire, beyond a quest for orgasms by either woman or man. Sex can become something new…
Related StoresStairs For Life
September 2nd, 2008 — , Health from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Taking the stairs instead of the lift at work could save your life, claim Swiss researchers. Banning the use of lifts and escalators led to better fitness, less body fat, trimmer waistlines and a drop in blood pressure, a study of 69 people found. …
Related StoresUrban Planning Overlooks Women
September 1st, 2008 — , Isms, Society, Urbanities, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“If a town was designed solely for women, how would it look? If you think it would have more nail bars, shoe shops and coffee shops selling skinny lattes, then think again. A study by Cambridge University says planning projects and urban regeneration s…
Related StoresCholitas & Lucha Libre
August 31st, 2008 — , Alternative, Style, Urbanities, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Welcome to lucha libre, freestyle wrestling with a Bolivian twist. This macho sport in this macho country, South America’s most impoverished and conservative, has been flipped into an unlikely feminist phenomenon.Indigenous women known as cholitas, ph…
Related StoresThe Myth of Meritocracy
August 31st, 2008 — , Isms, Psychology, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“The pay disparity speaks to a larger issue that women, coming directly out of the colleges that nurtured and rewarded them and gave them every advantage, may have trouble grasping. For me, it was crystallized in a comment made to me by Myra Hart, a re…
Related StoresModern Enchantments
August 19th, 2008 — , Commentary, Dreamscape, Philosophy, science from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Fictions become one importance source, and mass culture, as the dominant purveyor of fictions, has become a locus of enchantment equal to that of modern science. (The emergence of “science fiction” as a distinct genre in the twentieth century is emble…
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August 19th, 2008 — , Art, science from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Dr. Joel Katz and Dr. Shah Khoshbin started a program of elective art classes for medical students at the Boston-based school in 2005. They released research last week that shows studying art can help students make up to 38 per cent more accurate obse…
Related StoresAccessorize the Spirit
August 17th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Oprah came along just a large segment as North American society was overthrowing all its religious restrictions, says Lofton. “People are still passionate about God and their soul and their spirit but they want to be tied by nothing. They want to be a…
Related StoresWho Is to Blame?
August 17th, 2008 — , Books, Psychology, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Of course, lawyers, like the rest of us, use stories in order to apportion credit and blame. And that makes sense, because we respond to just about any sequence of events by evaluating the actors who seem to have brought it about. If we hear a story a…
Related StoresSerendipity & Scratches
August 16th, 2008 — , Commentary, Music from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Once upon a time, before the panicked society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life, existence was organized, or left sufficiently unorganized, for the refreshments of serendipity. The domination of the days and the years by logistics h…
Related StoresEveryday Heroism: Integrity
August 16th, 2008 — , Isms, Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“The study of students at one Ohio university found that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty were less likely than others to report their cheating in the past – or intending to cheat in the future.Moreover, those stud…
Related StoresOut of Body Image
August 15th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification — viewing one’s body…
Related StoresAirport Dwellers
August 14th, 2008 — , Alternative, Life, Urbanities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
With no job, home or money, she began living in the airport, where she gets by on the kindness of friends or strangers. “One friend brings me something to eat twice a week. Sometimes people give me a bit of money as well, but I don’t ask anyone for any…
Related StoresAuthenticity
August 13th, 2008 — , Alternative, Books, Isms, Style from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
The New Republic: Was there a particular message you wanted to get across with Stuff White People Like? Christian Lander: Yeah, the message is that this generation isn’t impressed by wealth anymore. It’s not about a bigger house or a more expensive car…
Related StoresCognitive Acrobat
August 13th, 2008 — , Alternative, Books, Urbanities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, ha…
Related StoresFun For Life
August 12th, 2008 — , Film, Laughs, Life from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“I once thought there was a good argument between whether it’s worth it to make a film where you confront the human condition, or an escape film,” [Woody Allen] says. “You could argue that the Fred Astaire film is performing a greater service than the …
Related StoresThe Georgia Crisis
August 12th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
CORE ISSUES — South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The regions are predominantly ethnically Ossetian and Abhkazian, respectively, although Abkhazia’s largest ethnic group was Georgian until thousands fled the fighting in the early 1990s. Ceasefires with Georgi…
Related StoresTree Magic
August 12th, 2008 — , Alternative, Life, science from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“The tree is a chemical factory, [Diana Beresford-Kroeger] explained, and its products are part of a sophisticated survival strategy. The flowers contain terpene oils, which repel mammals that might feed on them. But the ash needs to attract pollinator…
Related StoresRun For Life
August 12th, 2008 — , Health from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Running on a regular basis can slow the effects of ageing, a study by US researchers shows. Elderly joggers were half as likely to die prematurely from conditions like cancer than non-runners. They also enjoyed a healthier life with fewer disabiliti…
Related StoresSympathy Generator
August 11th, 2008 — , Dreamscape, Oddities, Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“At police headquarters, he admitted that he was Frédéric Bourdin, and that in the past decade and a half he had invented scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages. His aliases included Benjamin Kent, Jimmy Morins, Alex …
Related StoresSleep Walker
August 10th, 2008 — , Health, Oddities, Perfume from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Dear Folks,Sorry I’ve been so distracted these last couple of days. Messing up my entries to the point of ridiculous. ‘Make war, not peace’, thank you very much! (in: An Epoch of Clemency, Please).Anyhow, Friday I was diagnosed with M.E. (Myalgic Encep…
Related StoresAn Epoch of Clemency, Please
August 9th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
I’m very distraught by the situation in Georgia; the pictures of blood-covered, panicked elderly citizens literally blown out of their apartment complexes are just beyond anything anyone can bear. I am at a loss for words. In my head sing only trite an…
Related StoresThe Long Distance Writer
August 8th, 2008 — , Literature, Quotes from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“[Haruki Murakami] explains that he began running to ward off the ill effects of writing, which only became apparent after he sold the jazz club and spent several sedentary years working on his fiction. Quitting smoking, he gained weight; he had to do…
Related StoresDazed Behind the Dashboard
August 8th, 2008 — , Oddities, Perfume from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
My lack of concentration the last couple of days due to periodic insomnia is really nothing new. New however is writing FEW in the entry below instead of VIEW. I didn’t notice it for almost a fuel day! (Kidding…).Since I pen a personal note, I’ll me…
Related StoresThe Night Bookmobile
August 7th, 2008 — , Art, Books from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Please click on picture for full view (not FEW as I wrote previously. How daft!)Guardian: The Night Bookmobile, a graphic novel by Audrey NiffeneggerWikipedia: Audrey NiffeneggerAudrey Niffenegger’s own site with biography, writing, visual books and ga…
Related StoresYou May Cry Now
August 6th, 2008 — , Isms, Men, Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
Real men don’t cry? Tell that to Michael Vaughan, Gazza, Jeremy Paxman or Mike “The Streets” Skinner. What makes the male tear duct well up?BBCNewsMagazine: 10 things that make blokes cry, August 4, 2008More about ‘Blokedom’ in the Age, by way of actor…
Related StoresDo You Skype?
August 5th, 2008 — , Commentary, Dreamscape, Urbanities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“For the past year and a half, I’ve depended on Skype to stay in touch with my girlfriend, a writer and translator who has been based in Vilnius, Lithuania, while I move around from Canada to Europe to the Middle East to, most recently, the Caucasus,…
Related StoresBoredom As Spam Filter
August 5th, 2008 — , Dreamscape, Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“[B]oredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. …
Related StoresPhysical Theories As Girlfriends
August 5th, 2008 — , Literature, Oddities, science from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
5. Quantum field theory is from overseas, but she doesn’t really have an accent. You fall deeply in love, but she treats you horribly. You are pretty sure she’s fooling around with half of your friends, but you don’t care. You know it will end badly.Mc…
Related StoresWine Feminists
August 5th, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Oddities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Fabienne has plans for a ‘wine-feminist’ project. ‘I’m thinking about buying uncultivated land that can be worked exclusively by women,’ she says, confident that her idea would be more than worthwhile. ‘I’ve often had the impression that t…
Related StoresSkirt Tales
August 5th, 2008 — , Isms, Men, Style from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“We’re fighting against prejudice and cliches,” says Moreau, a 39-year-old civil servant who quotes Virginia Woolf as a gender-bending inspiration. “Women fought for trousers; we’re doing the same with the skirt.”Guardian: The Frenchmen fighting for th…
Related StoresFiction’s Powers and Possibilities
August 4th, 2008 — , Dreamscape, Literature from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“In nonfiction, Lessing’s famous ferocity also returns: “I hated my mother,” she says, the words not so much shocking as jarring, after the lengths she has gone to make the fictional Emily a moral heroine. The miracle is the transformation that fiction…
Related StoresNote to Self
August 3rd, 2008 — , Art, Life, Oddities from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Sasha Cagen, a San Franciscan and also the creator of cult singles’ “manifesto” Quirkyalone, a book and online community, began her voyeuristic voyage in 1999, when she was 26 and sick of her first job. “I decided to start a magazine about tormented t…
Related StoresNowhere to Go
August 3rd, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Society from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“As a talented poet, my wife relied on a state in which her soul was merged with the world, and now the source of this blissful happiness – her trusting way, her openness, friendliness, her unique form of naivety – had run dry, disappeared, drowned…
Related StoresHypnopompia
August 2nd, 2008 — , Dreamscape, Language, Psychology from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“Hypnopompia is the compensation at the other end of sleep. The brutality of waking, if you don’t have to catch a flying alarm clock, is soothed by the equal and opposite blurring of consciousness. Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep,…
Related StoresWomen Are Liked Better When They Lose
August 2nd, 2008 — , Commentary, Isms, Women from Lou @ Moving and Shaking
“While I’m a feminist and Steinem is one of my heroes, I didn’t share her enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy, partly because getting to the White House by having been married to a president seemed rather more an affirmation of traditional women??…
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