Manuela's Musings: Monday appointments

ROBERT BERÉNY

The period is "way over-romanticized," says Linda Gordon, and a researcher poses the question: Is Menstruation Obsolete?"
I sure hope so. Finally a true revolution!
Dr. Leslie Miller's site: Dr. Leslie Miller's site: http://www.noperiod.com
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals: http://www.arhp.org/

THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS
A Talk with Daniel Gilbert DANIEL GILBERT, the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Hedonic Psychology Laboratory.
"Even in a technologically sophisticated society, some people retain the romantic notion that human unhappiness results from the loss of our primal innocence. I think that's nonsense. Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past, but the fact is that things are easier and better today than at any time in human history.
Our primal innocence is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and it is not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or design a space shuttle. It gives rise to obesity and global warming, not Miles Davis or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to an ancient Eden that never really was."
Jabari Asim in the Wash Post on the sexism and violence of hip-hop. To me the question seems to be whether hip -hop promotes that culture of mysogenystic violence or does it act as a magnifying glass of the culture at large? Without the fine veneer of "politeness" and propriety.
Berkeley's summer reading list.
"The Bible is like a Rorschach inkblot test: you can see just about anything you want in it. That is why Christians themselves cannot agree on such things as masturbation, premarital sex, contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, stem cell research, euthanasia and the death penalty. The Bible or religion as a moral guide? With all this disagreement, how is that possible?" sez August Berkshire in Minnesota. Well said!
The Swallowtail is a new Tokyo cafe in which subservient men dressed like butlers wait on the clientele of women in their 20s and 30s.
GarbageScout is a Gmaps mashup for craphounds: when you're out and about in New York, San Francisco or Philadelphia, you send phonecam pics of any nice garbage you see on the curb, along with the location. GarbageScout puts your pictures on an interactive map of choice crap, and scroungers can grab a wheelbarrow and head on out. For when Denver????(Both above items from Boing boing)