(Being hasty and reckless was definitely worth all the breathless moments.)

we are all a little weird and life’s a little weird and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

I am hopelessly enamored with Beats Antique, The Hood Internet, and NastyNasty to name a few. As Shakey remarked “If music be the food of love, play on.”

20 tracks of “and for just a moment, I swear we were endless” – 150 mb

if you can’t buy happiness, you may just have to steal it.
//TD

ps it is one thing to be a hopeless romantic, but entirely another to be a relentless fool.

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This was mailed out a few days ago and of course, notable awesome journalist and author, Anya Kamenetz has skewered my pithy remarks on love.

1) Ninjas aren’t typically known for their strength, but their cunning, is ‘world’s strongest ninja’ really damning with faint praise?
2) How does love defeat the ninja? Is this a battle between the personified force of Love and the ninja? Or are we talking about a rival ninja, perhaps a sexy lady ninja in red, seducing the “strongest” ninja such that the strongest ninja loses all will to fight, and all his murderous training is superseded by waves of oxytocin, dopamine and testosterone?
3) What about a puppy?
4)Suppose Love is disassociated into the twin forces of Friendship and Lust. Can either of them vanquish the ninja alone?

1) strong here is not used in the literal sense but means instead most dominant. Hence, the best ninja.
2) by constantly dominating the ninja’s thoughts so that it can’t focus on work (assassinating the shogun), other friends or leisure activities (sharpening shirukens). In the scenario in which there is a sexy lady ninja, she would thus assume the world’s strongest ninja mantle.
3) Any ninja could easily defeat a puppy. People who are in love with puppies may be displaying signs of stunted or traumatic emotional relationships with other people.
4) Friendship could not defeat any ninja, the mission comes before all else. Lust is too busy chasing tail to do anything productive.
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Additionally, this via Scientific American

A new study demonstrates that thinking about love–but not about sex–causes us to think more “globally,” making it easier to come up with new ideas…

The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the “here and now”. Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex…

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Via National Geographic

The big news from the journal Science today is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton—a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed “Ardi.” She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous Lucy fossil, found in the same region 35 years ago.

Buried among the slew of papers about the new find is one about the creature’s sex life. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you like learning why human females don’t know when they are ovulating, and men lack the clacker-sized testicles and bristly penises sported by chimpanzees.

So why did her species become bipedal while it was still living partly in the trees, especially since walking on two legs is a much less efficient way of getting about?

According to Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, it all comes down to food, and sex.

In apes—both modern apes and, presumably, the ancient ancestors of Ardipithecus—males find mates the good old-fashioned apish way: by fighting with other males for access to fertile females. Success, measured in number of offspring, goes to macho males with big sharp canine teeth who try to mate with as many ovulating females as possible. Sex is best done quickly—hence those penis bristles, which accelerate ejaculation—with the advantage to the male with big testicles carrying a heavy load of sperm. Among females, the winners are those who flaunt their fertility with swollen genitals or some other prominent display of ovulation, so those big alpha dudes will take notice and give them a tumble, providing a baby with his big alpha genes.

Let’s suppose that some lesser male, with poor little stubby canines, figures out that he can entice a fertile female into mating by bringing her some food. That sometimes happens among living chimpanzees, for instance when a female rewards a male for presenting her with a tasty gift of colobus monkey.

Among Ardipithecus’s ancestors, such a strategy could catch on if searching for food required a lot of time and exposure to predators. Males would be far more successful food-providers if they had their hands free to carry home loads of fruits and tubers—which would favor walking on two legs. Females would come to prefer good, steady providers with smaller canines over the big fierce-toothed ones who left as soon as they spot another fertile female. The results, says Lovejoy, are visible in Ardipithecus, which had small canines even in males and walked upright.

Lovejoy’s explanation for the origin of bipedalism thus comes down to the monogamous pair bond. Far from being a recent evolutionary innovation, as many people assume, he believes the behavior goes back all the way to near the beginning of our lineage some six million years ago.

But there is one other, essential piece to this puzzle that leaves no trace in the fossil record. If the female knew when she was fertile, she could basically cheat the system by taking all the food offered by her milquetoast of a provider, then cuckold him with a dominant male when she was ovulating, scoring the best of both worlds. The food-for-sex contract thus depends on what Lovejoy calls “the most unique human character”—ovulation that not only goes unannounced to the males of the group, but is concealed even from the female herself.

Regular meals, monogamy, and discretion—who would have thought our origins were so sedate?

:: Ardi’s Secret via Kimpossible via Google Reader ::

Let me also state that the title of this playlist is not a comment on my life. Nor is it an indicator of anything happening to me personally, merely an interesting name for a playlist that is both slightly poignant and a little bit silly. The observations contained in the mailing are drawn from my own life experience but do not apply to anyone in particular. If there were a playlist that was some sort of exposition on my current experience it would be only that I am slightly annoyed by the slow internet speeds on the lost coast.

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