Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

For a country that is as breast obsessed as America, we sure have a funny way of dealing with them. While America drools over the frontal fat appendages of Pamela Sue Anderson and the late Anna Nicole Smith, once those breasts aren't perfect all bets are off. Get breast cancer, have your health insurance canceled, as if $9 million (like they 're going to pay it!) will every make up for the pain, suffering and absolute terror that woman went through. Or, if you have the money and are willing to take the chance, you can try using a drug that has very little proven efficacy in doing anything but slowing the growth of a tumor but powerful backers within the FDA probably think that's okay since it keeps the boobs looking normal.

-- DEB

Once partnership has beckoned and fatherhood headlocks a man to the floor of responsibility, a bloke is forced to confront one of life's more complex joys - the children's birthday party.

They're an occasion where the screaming of one's own kiddie-winks seems subsonic compared to the thunder clap of two dozen little people pinging on soft-drink, when the kinder sturmtruppen that besieges your fridge after-school appears as polite as a Neville Chamberlain handshake when measured against the midget hoard eviscerating party pies and sausage sandwiches in your backyard.

It's also a time for you to rub manboobs with a dozen or so parents whom you have absolutely nothing in common save a primary school or soccer team - men and women you'd run off the road with single digit enthusiasm if you encountered their beetle-brows on a holiday congested freeway.

For the single, childless man, however, these occasions serve both as aphrodisiac and prophylactic, for while there will undoubtedly be a couple of yummy mummies on hand to make things frisky, their bleating progeny flash like lights at a death-trap level crossing.

It seems an eon ago when a dunking bucket of apples and a drunkenly sketched donkey looking for its' tail was enough to occupy a group of seven-year-old children.

Nowadays, kid's birthday parties demand a theme, a gimmick, or at least a squeaky-voiced uni student doing magic tricks.

-- SAM de BRITO

It wasn’t the New York Giants’ upset victory over the undefeated New England Patriots that caught our attention at Super Bowl XLII—it was a shot of Tom Brady’s girlfriend, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, drinking red wine in her sky box. As reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, an image of Bündchen with a glass in her hand drew ire from fans and sports commentators, who recoiled at the fact that the quarterback’s lady wouldn’t deign to drink beer at the game. Some even insinuated that it was Bündchen and her wine that caused New England’s loss.

-- WINE SPECATOR ONLINE

A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences. After the dust settled from the 1720 crash of the South Sea Bubble, for instance, British Parliament passed the Bubble Act to forbid “raising or pretending to raise a transferable stock.” For a century this law did much to prevent the formation of new speculative swellings.

Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitization, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

-- ERIC JANSZEN

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions," said Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stagflation hadn't been invented back in the Bard's day, but, as with much of the man's insights, his description of Ophelia's desperate condition might well serve as a useful piece of modern economic analysis.

The ailing US economy is confronted not by a single threat but by a whole battalion of sorrows on the march that comprises deepening recession and accelerating inflation.

-- GERARD BAKER

Some linguists speak of the uselessness of not splitting infinitives. They offer as a counter example the famous "to Boldly Go". And they claim that the rule is a mindless mimicry of infinitives in earlier languages, which are expressed with one word.

I am not so sure that the mimicry is either mindless or useless. And I do not pretend to know why the rule developed.

But at any rate, it seems to me that the rule is rational: I think that in most cases it's wise not to separate an infinitive's components. An adverb or adverbial phrase is notionally dependent on its object. Without the object, an adverb has no concrete meaning in so far as the context of the housing grammatical element (the phrase or clause).

So with a split infinitive and the reader arriving at the adverbial element before its object, the mind does not have anything notionally concrete to hold onto. When the reader, then, moves on to the object, the mind uses the non-concrete data contained in it's memory to define the notionally concrete object, thereby arriving at a more complex concrete idea.

-- NAFTALI

My wife and I sat at the dinner table last evening trolling trough memories of our 50 years together. We were astonished at some of the trivial stuff we remembered, but aware too of whole epochs of experience that have evaporated into forgetfulness.

"Too much life, not enough disk," said my wife. She suggested that the human brain evolved when an average lifetime was a only few decades. Now that we live two or three times longer, we just don't have the gigabytes to store it all.

There may be something to that, since remembering past experiences -- crocodiles in the river -- can clearly have survival value. But it's hard to see how natural selection would work to keep every little thing in the archives. Just before my mother died at age 92 she could still recite long poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Riley, Lowell, and the rest. Not much Darwinian advantage there, but it gave her considerable pleasure. Amazing that all those musty poems were somehow squirreled away in a tangle of her neuronal synapses.

-- CHET RAYMO