When Sex Has Less Value Than Conversation:
Sounds like a house on the city limits of Las Vegas, but according to Charles Blow, writing in today's New York Times' Op-Ed pages, today's teens are more likely to "hook up" than to date.
In today's parlance, to "hook up" means to momentarily go bump in the night. Interestingly, when I was a young man the term meant "to leave." It was introduced in the military, co opted from airborne units who "hooked up" before jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
The evolution of the term is interesting and suggests something about the current concept. Today's teens don't "make love" or even "have sex," they simply "encounter" one another from time to time, reducing the matter to a simple bodily function, as it were.
In other news, there are now more female college students in America than male ones; and China is currently America's absentee landlord. I'm not sure any relationship exists between these facts, but the times are full of change, to coin a phrase.
On the sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Dude had this to say: "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 7, 2006. (Now that just proves he would be fun to have a beer with, provided you weren't one of the dead people he talks to.)
Yes, America, Friday the 13th did fall on Saturday this month. (Thank you, Pogo.)
World's Biggest Ponzi scheme collapses:
In the shadow of the Blagojevich scandal comes the news that Bernard Madoff has confessed to having stolen as much as $50 billion with a fake hedge fund, which he admitted to his sons was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme (an investment swindle in which high profits are promised from fictitious sources and early investors are paid off with funds raised from later ones [after Charles Ponzi (1882?-1949), Italian-born speculator who organized such a scheme (1919-1920)]).
The question now is how many more hedge funds are nothing more than Ponzi schemes. (See The Washington Post story.)
Sounds like a house on the city limits of Las Vegas, but according to Charles Blow, writing in today's New York Times' Op-Ed pages, today's teens are more likely to "hook up" than to date.
In today's parlance, to "hook up" means to momentarily go bump in the night. Interestingly, when I was a young man the term meant "to leave." It was introduced in the military, co opted from airborne units who "hooked up" before jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
The evolution of the term is interesting and suggests something about the current concept. Today's teens don't "make love" or even "have sex," they simply "encounter" one another from time to time, reducing the matter to a simple bodily function, as it were.
In other news, there are now more female college students in America than male ones; and China is currently America's absentee landlord. I'm not sure any relationship exists between these facts, but the times are full of change, to coin a phrase.
On the sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Dude had this to say: "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 7, 2006. (Now that just proves he would be fun to have a beer with, provided you weren't one of the dead people he talks to.)
Yes, America, Friday the 13th did fall on Saturday this month. (Thank you, Pogo.)
World's Biggest Ponzi scheme collapses:
In the shadow of the Blagojevich scandal comes the news that Bernard Madoff has confessed to having stolen as much as $50 billion with a fake hedge fund, which he admitted to his sons was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme (an investment swindle in which high profits are promised from fictitious sources and early investors are paid off with funds raised from later ones [after Charles Ponzi (1882?-1949), Italian-born speculator who organized such a scheme (1919-1920)]).
The question now is how many more hedge funds are nothing more than Ponzi schemes. (See The Washington Post story.)
Labels: Culture, The Economy
posted by Jim | 11:25 AM
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