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Showing posts from July, 2012

Gender Objectification

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As long as I can remember, women have objected to being objectified. And conversely men usually say that they'd not mind that sort of treatment. It's quite easy to understand why women would object to being viewed as sex objects by others. And I think we can dismiss the apparent male attitude as just wishful thinking: Men want to be sexual objects because they don't feel that women view them that way now. Well, a study that just came out from Sarah J. Gervais at University of Nebraska-Lincoln adjusts those assumptions a bit. Apparently both men and women tend to view females in terms of body parts yet neither gender views men that way. That's a bit surprising. The study is published in the June issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology if you want to check it out. Here's a link to it . Through an interesting group of interactive exercises with a group of 83 undergrads (45 females and 38 males), it was determined that these participants viewed images

Princess Tree

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I know, I know. What is the world is that nasty weed doing next to the house? I can't stand this plant but for some odd reason my girlfriend didn't want me to kill it. Sure, back when it was a foot or two tall it was one thing: just a weird looking weed. But after 6 months time the damn weed was taller than the house---seriously!---and she finally agree to let me cut it down. So out came my machete and fun ensued. Whacking things with a big knife is really fun, y'know? The picture below shows the cross section of the cut plant. It looks amazingly like a tree. This nasty weed has just been growing this year---it's amazing that it got so big so fast. I hate to imagine what would have happened had we let it go a lot longer. Does anyone know what kind of weed it is? I've never seen anything grow that fast before that could get so big. Weeds usually only get yay-big, not tree-like. Notice the white Shepherd on the right of the first picture and the white

How to Eat a Small Country

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I got a free copy of How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley via a Goodreads contest. Entering the contests on there is a great way to increase your books-to-read pile for free. The only problem is long odds---often there's over 300 entrants per book to be won. Y'know, this is a difficult book to review. It's so fragmented. Part sob story memoir and part open hearted travelogue. The author, Amy Finley, had a brief fling with fame when she sorta won the third season of The Next Food Network Star. Finley's troubled marriage led to her resigning from her new show The Gourmet Next Door . Interesting stuff, no? Well none of that is in here but on the other hand the first 100 pages, more or less, are filled with annoying whining about her marriage and indirectly there's plenty of evidence here of why her insecurity led to those problems. So why the 4-star review? When Finley isn't whining, she's a very talented writer. There's a scene in the last th

Three months later

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We picked up these 4 light Brahma chickens back in mid-April when they were around a month old. They were so cute back then. Now they're almost old enough to reproduce. We bought them straight run (gender unknown) so there was no telling what we'd end up with. In this case we got lucky 'cause there's one male and 3 females. Perfect for breeding a few more Brahmas as well as having eggs to eat. The first picture is the Brahmas in the back of the truck when we got them back here from the guy we bought them from over in Burlington. The second picture was taken yesterday afternoon in a new enclosure we made for the chickens. The rooster is the one keeping an eye on me and my camera. He's a good bit larger than the females and more direct. Once they start laying eggs we might have to keep them penned up part of the time. Right now they roam as free as they please.