Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

When I was in my late teens, just out of high school and fresh into the workforce, I remember getting this incredible feeling of possibility on Friday afternoons; I didn't know what the next 48 hours had in store for me and, if I was lucky, where I'd wake up the next morning.

Say what you want about promiscuity . . . but there's no denying you meet a lot of new people.

Aside from the women you congress with (or the blokes, if you're gay), there's their flat mates, best friends and the taxi-drivers who get you the hell out of there at dawn.

You also receive an intimate glimpse into a woman's personality when you first enter her house or, if she shares with others, her bedroom.

With many females, this might as well be the first hundred pages of their autobiography for the all information it contains about their temperament, taste and willingness to step-outside a Bayswiss fabricated universe . . .

-- SAM de BRITO

The two students in Southern California had just been introduced during an experiment to test their “interpersonal chemistry.” The man, a graduate student, dutifully asked the undergraduate woman what her major was.

"Spanish and sociology," she said.

"Interesting," he said. "‘I was a sociology major. What are you going to do with that?"

"You are just full of questions."

"It’s true."

"My passion has always been Spanish, the language, the culture. I love traveling and knowing new cultures and places."

Bogart and Bacall it was not. But Gian Gonzaga, a social psychologist, could see possibilities for this couple as he watched their recorded chat on a television screen.

-- JOHN TIERNEY

Longtime Scientologist Nancy Cartwright — best known as the voice of Bart Simpson — last year gave the church $10 million to help spread the word of founder L. Ron Hubbard into other galaxies.

It was all part of Scientology’s Global Salvage effort, which aims to "de-aberrate" Earth — meaning to rid mankind of psychology ills and other "aberrant" behavior.

Surprisingly, Nancy, 50, forked over twice as much as the Scientology's most prominent member, Tom Cruise, who only gave $5 million in an installment plan.

-- KERRY

There was a full moon last Wednesday, when Ischa was born. A month earlier, I was at a Christmas party in Belgium, and was warned to return home on time "because babies tend to be born when there’s a full moon." Why that would be so, no-one has yet told me. But it is a fact that last Wednesday, the delivery ward in the hospital was full, and two women had to be referred to another hospital. The nurse who served breakfast confidently told me she knew it would be busy when she came to work the night before – she had noticed that the moon was full.

I've also been told that children born under a full moon would somehow be special. Ischa is absolutely adorable (I know, I know, all parents suffer from this kind of prejudice); he’s been rather kind to his parents (so far!) by sleeping relatively well at night; he's a big supporter of the nappies industry; and he makes an interesting case study for international private law scholars, since, just as his older brother, he has two different official surnames thanks to the unwillingness of the Belgian state to recognise the surname that his parents have chosen for him. Yet whether any of that can be traced back to his being born under a full moon—I doubt it.

-- INGRID ROBEYNS

Is Technology Truly Addictive? John O'Neill, director of addictions services at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, seems to think so. "Technology overload", as he calls it, contains "some of the same components as people who become addicted to alcohol and drugs in that we start to see that someone cannot really put it down and cannot stop the use of it even when there are some consequences."

-- ARIC A.

If Muslims really did make innovations in aerodynamics, astronomy, and other fields long before Europeans did, what happened then? Why were the Europeans the ones who made use of these discoveries for technological advancement? Even if Copernicus (who came from a devout Catholic family and may have been a priest himself) was influenced by Ibn al-Shatir, which is not universally accepted, why didn’t Muslims make use of his insights the way Copernicus did?

-- ROBERT SPENCER