It's Complicated

I took my Mom with my friend and her Mom to see the latest Nancy Meyers homage to women over 50. Complicated, perhaps. Compelling, somewhat. Comical, definitely. I must admit that my favorite part was watching My Mom and my friends Mom giggle and slap their knees in unison. Warmed my heart actually.

Meryl Streep, in my opinion the most gifted actress of all time (or my time), never fails to disappoint. Alec Baldwin, stealing scenes once again, is very funny. Steve Martin is sweetness personified and is hilarious in the weed smoking scene. The supporting cast from the trio of BFF's, to the children and most prominently the oldest daughter's fiance played by John Krasinski, are all solid. The weak link here was Alec Baldwin's trophy wife, Lake Bell but I suspect this was on purpose.

Here's a review from Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/29190864/review/31461042/its_complicated

Remmi gives this film two thumbs up but it doesn't take much more than an adequate film with coke and popcorn to keep this film buff happy :)

HO HO HO

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my RP pals. I hope 2010 is filled with peace, happiness, love and good health for you all.

Remmi xo

Surprising mention from the Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/the-10-most-irritating-people-of-2009/article1403090/

From today's Globe and Mail on line. I must say I'm a little surprised....

Bachelorettes for Jake

Happy Holidays to all. I just took a look at the bachelorettes for Jake. All I can say is this group may prove interesting. Too may Barbie dolls. That being said I have picked on looks and occupation alone my top 4. I will wait to see personalities to see if things change. In no particular order they are as follows.
1. Elizabeth from NE
2. Gia (she seems like someone who cause some turmoil)
3. Rozlyn
4. Sheila
I am sure that by the time the show airs someone at FORT will have the F1. I am looking forward to a well scripted season. That being said feel free to weigh in with your opinions. Let the games begin.

Golden Globes

http://www.goldenglobes.org/nominations/

The nominations were announced today. Looks like I have a few movies to see before awards season! I like to see all of the best movie contenders prior to the Golden Globes and the Oscars.

I saw "Brothers" on the weekend. Heart wrenching but well acted. I recommend it and suggest you bring a secret stash of tissues if you decide to see it.

ABC's description of Jake's season and my take on it

Description:

In this season's premiere, "Episode 1401," Jake returns to the Malibu mansion where he first met Jillian.

M says:

Great. A house full of memories of his intense love for Jillian. Was there not another among the surfeit of Malibu Mansions that Fleiss could have rented?
Tonight his life will start to change forever Whaaat? "His life will start to change forever"?? Sounds like a painfully slow and boring process...

Description: as 25 gorgeous bachelorettes have traveled across the U.S. to meet him

M: I wonder how many are from Texas...

Description: and they will do anything to become his wife and share a life with him.

M: And some of them will even do anything just to be on tv.

D: The party takes off quickly as the women swoon when Jake makes the rounds and greets each bachelorette.

M: Nothing like swooning women to make a party take off quickly...

D: One charming woman confesses her fear of flying,

M: She should be more afraid of what Fleiss is going to do with her editing...

D: and an alluring teacher causes a stir when she dons a revealing flight attendant's uniform and steals Jake away from an unsuspecting single mom.

M: Alluring and revealing: One. Unsuspecting single mom: Zero.

D: After an athletic hottie grabs Jake...

M: Wonder where she grab him...

D: to play touch football, it's blondes vs. brunettes in the first sexy, barefoot-in-eveningwear football scrimmage in "Bachelor" history!

M: As opposed to all those other less sexy barefoot-in-eveningwear scrimmages in Bachelor history?

D: The competition intensifies when Chris Harrison introduces the "first impression" rose, and announces a twist: the ladies not only must impress Jake, but also last's season's happy couple - Jillian and Ed.

M: Why? Are they all going to move together to a polygamous commune??

D: The former Bachelorette and her fiance join Jake to help him with his tough decision,

M: That's because Jake can't decide between the women -- he's desperately in love with them all.

D: and they will also share a special announcement with him.

M: Wonder what that will be? That they don't wear underwear?

D: Finally, Jake must eliminate ten of the 25 women the first night, leaving 15 to compete for his affections, and in the end, his heart.

M: That's right. Don't compete for his heart until the end. Keep your options open and just go for his affections for now. (Do they actually pay someone to write this drivel?)

D: Romantic and adventurous dates will reach new heights this season,

M: New heights? Compared to the drama and scandal of the past two seasons? What can top Jason's dumping Melissa for Molly, or Ed's departure and return? How about Wes' supposed girlfriend and Ed's real ones? New heights? Jake? Naah...

D: Secrets are revealed, emotions run deep and one bachelorette crosses a line that should never be crossed, with devastating results.

M: Other lines that should never be crossed: stripping down to bare buttocks and diving in a pool, crying and blowing your snot into a kleenex and then immediately offering your mouth up for a kiss, being on the show while sexting other women.


D: Will Jake finally find the special woman who is right for him or will this nice guy's dream of love end in heartbreak?

M: Didn't it already once? How many more weeping over balcony scenes can viewers take?

Oh, I can't wait for this season....

Reid Gossip!

http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2009/12/06/exclusive-new-couple-alert-reid-rosenthal-kristen-dalton-are-a-twosome/

I think they would make a stunning couple if the news is true :)

Best movies of the decade

Best of the Decade
by Richard Brody, New Yorker magazine

It’s been an unusual decade; I spent much of it hunched over spiral notebooks and laptop computers in libraries and cafés and at kitchen tables here and in France while writing a book (remind me to mention the bathroom, in a house in Normandy, that I rigged out as a nocturnal study), and didn’t maintain my usual diet of cinephilic delights. Which is why, though few who issue their best-of-decade lists can claim to have seen all releases, many have likely seen more than I have this time around, so I’ll put an asterisk to the adjective above and note: the twenty-six best movies I’ve seen (and will resist the temptation to issue a separate list of the best films I haven’t seen). The top ten are in order; the remaining sixteen are grouped according to incidental connections.


1. “Eloge de l’amour” (“In Praise of Love”) (2001, Jean-Luc Godard): Lives up to the promise of its title: one of the most unusual, tremulous, and understated of love stories, as well as the story of love itself; a depiction of history in the present tense, as well as a virtual thesis on the filming of history; a work of art, as well as the story of the work at the origin of art; Godard’s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema.


2. “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007, Wes Anderson): As ever with the films of Wes Anderson—the best new American director of the last twenty years—love and death, comedy and tragedy, comfort and adventure, understanding and opacity, style and substance fuse in a modernism of personal and reflexive cinema and a classicism of grand and subtle literary emotion.


3. “The World” (2005, Jia Zhangke): The best new non-American director of the last twenty years, here revealing, at great risk, China’s, and his own, painfully ambiguous place in the world.


4. “A Talking Picture” (2003, Manoel de Oliveira): The great September 11th movie, from a spry ninety-five-year-old who sees not only the century’s long view but seemingly encompasses Homer’s.


5. “Regular Lovers” (2005, Philippe Garrel): Or, Nixon in China: The events of 1968, depicted by one of its cinematic heroes as an intimate epic—and, with a self-deprecating fury, as a lovely but unsustainable burst of youthful lyricism.


6. “Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M.” (2001, Claude Lanzmann): This discussion with Yehuda Lerner, who took part in the uprising against the extermination camp’s guards, is as profound a dialogue on the morality of violence as the cinema has seen.


7. “Fengming: A Chinese Memoir” (2009, Wang Bing): From one of the decade’s two best new directors, as well as its best new nonfiction filmmaker. If I had seen Wang’s “West of the Tracks” in its entirety, I’d have put it here instead; I saw only about a third of its nine hours, but this feature, converging recent Chinese history with the sufferings endured, at the hands of the regime, by one free-thinking couple, does quite as well.


8. “Knocked Up” (2008, Judd Apatow): Suddenly, all contemporary comedy seemed old-fashioned. From Lubitsch through the Farrelly brothers, the funniest guys in the room were behind the camera; Judd Apatow discovered, or rediscovered, the trick of the great silent clowns—to put funny people on screen—and to make it personal. (If Eddie Murphy had, say, directed “Norbit” in addition to starring in it, it would likely find a place on this list too.)


9. “Moolaadé” (2005, Ousmane Sembene): Women, resistance, and centuries of oppressive tradition, seen with the fiercely clarifying wisdom of age. The subject is genital mutilation; the phalanx of respected women eager to do the dirty work is truly frightening.


10. “The Other Half” (2007, Ying Liang): The other of the decade’s two best new filmmakers, the one who does dramas, bringing a laser-like analytical eye to the crossroads of private life and oppressive authority. His anger builds to an apocalyptic outpouring with few parallels in the history of cinema.

After the jump, sixteen more.

“Saraband” (2003, Ingmar Bergman): Emotions of shattering power; family, memory, death, and the black sun of a creative force that not only won’t die but consumes anyone it can attract.

“Woman on the Beach” (2006, Hong Sang-soo): A filmmaker dramatizes, with a scathing and comic self-deprecation, the egocentric romantic turbulence on which his art is nourished.

“Colossal Youth” (2006, Pedro Costa): Modernization and bureaucracy confront poverty without pity. Loamy popular tradition and timeless legends have their pathologies too, and Costa unearths the ironies and contradictions of progress and its simulacra through his careful, loving work with the residents of one poor Lisbon neighborhood in ferment.

“Le Monde Vivant” (“The Living World”) (2003, Eugène Green): Green, an American in Paris whose work seems like the dream of a virtual love child of Robert Bresson and Elaine May, dresses a faux-medieval legend in baroque language, classic romanticism, modern clothing, and prophetic virtue.

“L’Enfant (“The Child”)” (2005, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) The ostensible street realism of the Belgian brothers’ story of betrayal and crime doesn’t merely rise to a Bressonian pitch of redemption—it poses Bressonian questions throughout and offers sharply modern, secular answers.

“Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep” (2002, Miklós Jancsó): At age eighty, the most controlled choreographer of the nineteen-sixties and seventies cuts loose with a contemporary historical fantasy that includes himself and his screenwriter, Hitler and Stalin, and a moment with Beethoven’s universalist dream that is one of the most touching scenes of the decade.

“Cassandra’s Dream” (2008, Woody Allen): Few aging directors so cogently and relentlessly depict the grimly destructive machinery of life, and every time the word “family” is uttered, the screws tighten just a little more.

“Gran Torino” (2008, Clint Eastwood): Few actors have taken themselves out with such a rueful bang.

“Frownland” (2008, Ronald Bronstein): A punk-like ferocious rage contained in a chamber-music-like precision; film stock run rugged like cold stone, light turned cruel; humiliation and degradation portrayed with tenderness and, ultimately, surprisingly, hope. Dore Mann’s agonized performance is one for the ages.

“Hamilton” (2005, Matthew Porterfield): Beside “Eloge de l’amour,” this is the movie I’ve watched the most times this decade. The twenty-six-year-old director has a preternaturally precise and poetic camera eye as well as tenderness for and understanding of the complexities of everyday lives.

“Funny Ha Ha” (2003, Andrew Bujalski): Mumblecore is real (neither more nor less so than, say, Italian Neo-Realism or the French New Wave—the fact that the term raises questions doesn’t mean that those questions have no reasonable answers) and Bujalski started it. He raises personal cinema to a new height, by way of an aesthetic that blends control and improvisation in delicate, tenuous balance. A remarkably analytical sensibility.

“Hannah Takes the Stairs” (2007, Joe Swanberg): Love and money among the young and bright; Bujalski co-stars as the one artist in a production-office bullpen who is on the verge of a breakout, which doesn’t make things go easier with Hannah (Greta Gerwig, in a performance of astounding inventiveness), who may even be smarter and wiser but is still seeking her place in the world. No less than Bujalski’s own film, a picture of a generation.

“Sex Is Comedy” (2002, Catherine Breillat): The most frightening, disturbing, and seemingly plausible view of the emotional cost of artistic realism in an age of erotic freedom.

“La Captive” (2000, Chantal Akerman): One of the heights of modernist melodrama; it’s as if, thanks to Proust, Akerman, a master of the tableau, discovered a third dimension. The joy of discovery is palpable, shot by shot, and she had young actors, notably Sylvie Testud and Stanislas Merhar, who seem to be savoring it equally.

“Where is My Romeo?” (2008, Abbas Kiarostami): I haven’t seen “Shirin,” and if this short film is any indication, it would be here; but this short film, constructed on what is said to be the same principle, deserves it, too.

“14th Arrondissement” (2006, Alexander Payne) (in “Paris, Je t’aime”): “Sideways” is terrific, but Payne’s short film offers both emotional poignancy and profound cinematic smarts in an amazingly clever and original sketch.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2009/11/best-films-of-the-decade.html#ixzz0YUfVw2Ui

Guess what the top word of 2009 is.

It’s official: Twitter is top word of 2009

by Steven E.F. Brown
San Francisco Business Times



Twitter squeezed out Obama, H1N1 and stimulus to be crowned “Top Word of 2009” by the Global Language Monitor.

The Austin, Texas-based GLM, which tracks language trends around the world, declared Twitter the No. 1 word on Sunday. “King of Pop” was named the top phrase of the year.


Rounding out the top 10 on the GLM’s list were vampire, 2.0, deficit, hadron, healthcare and transparency.

Obama scored again in the list of top phrases with the No. 2 “Obama-mania.” Other top phrases were “climate change,” “swine flu,” “too large to fail” and “cloud computing.”

GLM also listed top names for the year, with Barack Obama in the top spot, followed by Michael Jackson and then by “Mobama,” a nickname for First Lady Michelle Obama.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was No. 6 on the list of top names, edging out Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Be certain that while I feast on stuffing ( I. LOVE. IT.), gratitude will stand at my shoulder reminding me to remember

the love I've been given
the friends who hold onto me
the words to speak for justice
the laughs that lighten hearts
the connections made through a TV show, a bad TV show at that
the gift of a new day, a new perspective, a new way

I'll remember that hunger doesn't pull at my stomach
that a bed waits for my head
that education is the only thing that lets me read again of Bella and Edward's love
that belief made me strong enough to shatter gender stereotypes
that children need their parents. always.
that love is an action, not a word

Today may only familiar faces surround you reminding you of grace and gift and gratitude. Oh, and football :)

Thanks for being a part of my world,
Leen

Critics Slam New Moon

Critics Slam New Moon

US magazine, November 19, 2009

New Moon pales in comparison to Twilight, according to the critics.

Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert says "the characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start. Granted some of them are more than 100 years old, but still: their charisma is by Madame Tussaud."


Ty Burr of The Boston Globe remarks: "Sorry, girls: The thrill is gone." He says that "where the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, plugged into [author Stephenie] Meyer’s vision of supernatural teenage lust with abandon, Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest."


Burr also says that the film favors werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) than vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson).

"When he's onscreen, Pattinson’s Edward is all emo posturing under a trembling bouffant - the actor suddenly seems to be embarrassed to be here," says Burr. "Lautner's performance, by contrast, has the warmth of an actual human."


But Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times says Lautner and Kristen Stewart (who plays Bella) have no heat: "The connection between these two is so self-evidently non-romantic that it turns out not to be much of a diversion."


USA Today's Claudia Puig agrees, saying the the Bella-Edward romance is a bore and that "the pace picks up" once Jacob and his pals turn into werewolves. She gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars.


Variety writes that ladies hoping to gaze at Pattinson the big screen " may be disappointed by Pattinson's reduced presence" in the sequel, "as his Edward appears predominantly in mumbling visions until a cliffhanger that brazenly sets up the next episode."


Despite some harsh reviews, the film is still expected to earn more than $85 million during its first weekend (it has run up the biggest advance sales of any film in history). It opens in 4,024 locations, beginning with 3,500 performances at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

Romance and abstinence attract teen girls to Twilight

Romance and abstinence attract teen girls to Twilight series

By Laura Stone , Canwest News Service

Vampires aside, it's really just a simple love story.


The reason teenage girls have fallen hard for the Twilight book and film series has to do with its portrayal of a traditional, romantic relationship, new research from the University of Missouri shows.


In the series, vampire Edward Cullen doesn't want to harm or bite his teen love interest Bella Swan, which means they can't have sex.


"With teens, we actually found that they appreciated the messages of abstinence," said Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communication who surveyed 4,000 Twilight fans, aged 11 to 70.


Click and her co-authors' research primarily addresses the reasons behind the teenage-madness for Twilight, a four-book series with two films so far.


The newest movie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens Friday, and has already busted Cineplex Theatres' records by selling $1.5 million in advance tickets across Canada. The first film, Twilight, grossed more than $190 million in North American revenues.


The Missouri research found that many teen girls — who make up the core of Twilight's audience, along with a few moms — are drawn to the story about love beyond the physical.


"The media environment is saturated with teens in sexual relationships," said Click, who plans to publish the findings next spring in a collaborative book Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media and the vampire franchise.


"(Twilight) does provide something different for girls. I've had girls say to me, 'I'm going to wait for my Edward.' And they think that's really cool."


Her colleague, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, called the series a "backlash to the 'hooking-up' culture."


Edward represents an anomaly in the minds of many teenage girls. He's romantic, protective, and most important, cares deeply for who Bella is, and not just what she looks like.


And for 18-year-old Twilight fan France-Renee Miron, that's a good thing.


"Most boys now around our age, all they want is to get you in bed. They don't care about the romance part," said Miron, who is from Green Valley, Ont.


"In the book and in the film, (Edward) doesn't want to have sex. It's really different."


Miron's friend, Valerie Lefebvre, 18, said she found solace in the book's messages about abstinence.


"By reading the book we find out we're not the only ones who could have a good relationship without being sexually active," said Lefebvre.


Click said that many girls interviewed felt a sense of relief that Bella and Edward couldn't yet have sex.


"They liked that it was the man putting the brakes on sexual activity. For them it probably highlighted the development of the relationship — the romantic relationship — between the two, instead of the sexual relationship," said Click.


The study is comprised of online surveys and in-person focus groups. Researchers found 70 teens for the focus groups at a fan convention held in Dallas last summer. About one-third of those surveyed were teens.


Despite an increasingly sexualized youth culture, the desire for romance among teenage girls has remained, said Mike Farrell, a partner at Toronto youth research firm Youthography.


"There are some fundamental things that haven't changed that much. And one of those, especially with girls, is the focus on a search for meaningful love that is hopeful, passionate, real," he said.


According to Youthography research, only a quarter of young teenage girls were interested in sex, while more than half said they thought about marriage and having children.


In a 2008 Canada-wide study, Youthography surveyed around 500 teen girls ages 14 to 18 about 50 different "values" affecting them, from current events to sex. They've been tracking values for research for the past nine years as part of Youthography's quarterly study called, Ping.


But there can be a danger to Twilight's traditional romance story too, say experts.


University of Victoria political science professor Janni Aragon said that the books, while she enjoys them, enforce "good old gender stereotypes," such as Bella being clumsy and Edward acting condescending and all-knowing.


There's also the message that Edward doesn't trust himself around Bella.


"Woven within these pages is also that boys get to a certain point in which you can't tell them 'no,' or they can't control themselves. And I'm not sure an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old, maybe even a 15- to 18-year-old, understands that."


Xania Khan, editor-in-chief of Toronto's Vervegirl teen magazine, said that the hysteria surrounding Twilight may blind teens to real-world relationships.


"Some girls have a hard time distinguishing fact and fiction," said Khan. "They might look for something that's not real."


That won't be a problem for Miron and Lefebvre's friend, Embrun, Ont.'s Marjolaine Bourdeau, also 18. While she said she's a fan of the books, Bourdeau won't be waiting on a perfect vampire boyfriend anytime soon.


"I know that's not possible," she said. "Girls who haven't been in a real relationship. They don't know what relationships are like."

The Tudors

Anyone else watch this show? I highly recommend it if you aren't. It's a co-production with the CBC in Canada and Showtime in the US. Last night was the Season 3 finale which I have not watched yet but can't wait to. If you appreciate costume and set design elements, they rival some of the best made for television productions I have ever seen. It is highly provocative sexually, extremely controversial religiously and for the most part, historically accurate.

Remmi gives it two thumbs way up!

Happiness Paradox: Why Are Americans So Cheery?

Happiness Paradox: Why Are Americans So Cheery?
By NANCY GIBBS Time magazine, Monday, Nov. 23, 2009


Happiness is a sappy word and a flimsy concept — more fleeting than contentment, several octaves lower than joy. But happiness is what pollsters test and economists track, however clumsily, so we're stuck with it as the medium for measuring our mood. Not surprisingly, that mood has bounced around over the years, with the general sense of well-being hitting its lowest points in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years. So why is it that at least some aspects of the Great Recession of 2009 appear to have made people feel better?

In January 2008, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was launched. It was designed to work like a Dow Jones average of attitude. At least 1,000 people are surveyed daily, 350 days a year. (You can see how happy people are broken down by congressional district; Utah turns out to be the merriest state, West Virginia the glummest.)

When the markets tanked last fall, happiness did too, and anyone who has lost his or her job, house or health care is probably still in a world of pain. But here's the funny thing: by this past summer, overall well-being was higher than it was in the summer of 2008, before the Apocalypse.

In fact, the latest report finds America's cheeriness at an all-time high. An August report from the Pepsi Optimism Project (POP) positively fizzed: Americans are more optimistic now than a year ago about their well-being (88% vs. 84%); health, finances, relationships and odds of finding love (70% vs. 61%).

Don't trust soda-company polls? Consumer Reports confirms that we don't plan to spend much money this Christmas, but the vast majority of us — 87% — expect this holiday season will be as happy as or even happier than last year's. Meanwhile, the Secret Society of Happy People (which "encourages the expression of happiness and discourages parade-raining") reports traffic to its not-so-secret website has increased since the downturn.

Everyone — or at least everyone who claims to be happy — has some reason for finding the upside to the downturn. Mine has to do with the end of Expectation Inflation, a phenomenon that can be as corrosive to our spirits as price inflation is to our savings. Expectations are a mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream?

Some parts of raised expectations are plainly good. We expect to live well into our 80s because medicine keeps getting better. Many more high school students expect to go to college. In 1973, 47% of recent high school graduates attended college; last year 69% of new graduates enrolled. We expect our gadgets to get smaller and smarter, cooler and cheaper, because technology evolves exponentially, and at light speed.

But the Great Recession has also exposed our magical thinking about what constitutes a middle-class lifestyle. Flash back a generation to the house with the white picket fence. It had a black-and-white TV with an antenna, a car in the garage, a chicken in every pot and two kinds of lettuce (light green and dark green). Now the average house is more than 50% bigger, the car is twice as powerful (and there's often more than one), the TV is flat and gets 900 channels, and we expect the grocery store to have strawberries year-round and about 50 flavors of mustard. Small wonder we started charging our life-insurance premiums on our credit cards; we only expected to pay when we died.

So while optimism is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money — charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 — but about a million more people volunteered their time to a cause. Which makes me wonder: Is it a coincidence that eight of the 10 happiest states in the country also rank in the top 10 for volunteering?

Whatever you make of the psychology of happiness, we know something of its physics. It rises as it ricochets off other people, returning to us stronger by virtue of being released. It gets bigger when we don't care if it gets smaller; we stopped buying all the stuff we didn't need that was supposed to make us happier, and we seem to be happier for it. And who would have expected that?

Why We Shouldn't Give Christmas Gifts

Why We Shouldn't Give Christmas Gifts

By Andrea Sachs Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009

Starting to think about holiday gifts? Stop! Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton), is convinced that giving Christmas and Hanukkah presents is bad economic policy. And as the chair of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he's no economic novice.

TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs, who is still hoping to get a few gifts this season (hint, hint), spoke with Waldfogel about his new book.


What's your objection to Christmas and holiday spending?

My objection is that the holiday spending doesn't result in very much satisfaction. Normally if I spend $50 on myself, I'll only buy something if it's worth at least $50 to me. But if you buy something for me, and you spend $50, since you don't know what I like, and you don't know what I have, you may buy something I wouldn't pay anything for. And so you could turn the real resources required to make things into something of no value to me. And that would destroy value.

How much is actually spent?

In the U.S., about $65 billion a year is spent on holiday gifts. There's been this giant [holiday season] bump in retail sales in the U.S. going as far back as statistics are available, back to the 1920s and '30s. In fact, as a share of the size of the economy, the spending has gotten smaller over time. Our fathers' and grandfathers' Christmases were a bigger deal than ours.

That's interesting, because it's often thought we've reached the pinnacle of commercialization.

Yes. Every generation thinks that it invented sex and thinks that it invented the vulgar commercialization of Christmas. But actually, our holiday spending has moderated relative to the size of the economy in the last two generations.

Isn't that degree of spending good for the economy, especially in a recession?

Well, yes and no. Let me talk about that in a couple of different ways. First of all, the economy consists of buyers and sellers. You think about why we spend in the first place. We spend in order to produce satisfaction for buyers. We don't spend in order to help sellers. It's fine if we do help sellers, but we're trying to produce satisfaction. If the spending we engage in doesn't produce any satisfaction, then it's hardly a measure of well-being. I'm not against the spending. But whatever amount of spending we do, we should get as much satisfaction out of it as we possibly can.

Have you thought about why do we do it? Why is there this huge splurge at the end of the year?

Well, it's a bit of a puzzle. We don't do it with cash. Giving cash is very socially awkward. The exceptions are for parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, aunts and uncles to nieces and nephews. It's O.K. for cash to flow from those of higher social status to those of lower social status, but [otherwise] it's just considered a tacky thing to do. Which makes the growth of gift certificates remarkable, because they're not tacky at all. I mean, recipients rate them as their most desired gift. In some sense, it's a way for givers to give a gift that has the flexibility of cash, without the tackiness of cash.

Do you have kids?

I do.

What if you don't give them holiday gifts?

Well, I do give them holiday gifts, because they are people whose preferences I know a lot about. The problem arises in the situations where we have to give a gift, but we have no idea what the recipient wants. I'm not against giving gifts in the situations where we have a good idea what people want.

What about the person who says, "My in-laws would go insane if I didn't get them gifts"?

Yes, that's the problem. So what do you do? There are a few possible answers. One answer is gift certificates or gift cards. Another solution that we see increasingly and that I advocate is giving gifts to charity. If you look at data, as people get richer, they give a higher fraction of their income to charity. So if you think that luxuries in that sense are things people would like to do, if only they had more money, then holiday giving — giving someone the ability to give to charity — is a way to allow them to experience a luxury.

Do you expect to have an influence, or is this a totally uphill fight?

I hope to have a small influence. I think people are ready. I'm not the only person who sees some madness in our behavior. And so I think people are looking for opportunities to do good for the world. I think people enjoy giving; there's something joyful about giving. And I'm not against that. I'm happy to see the same amount of spending, but if we could just eliminate the really sloppy stuff, and maybe shunt some of [the gift-giving] to good causes, that seems consistent with people's religious goals, and it might even be good for the world.

He's Just Not That Into You

Do you, both ladies and gentleman, agree with the tenets of this blockbuster book and movie?

I assume that most of us have great familiarity with it. For those who don't, basically the book addresses men's behavior in relationship from the 3-day wait rule after a date to the proposal. Most of the scenarios focus on what the guy doesn't do, like doesn't call, doesn't ask you to marry him if you live with him. The final conclusion made by the male author is that guys will take as much as you give them without too much investment until they decide to commit. When a guy commits, you'll see him do all the work from consistent communication through mature behavior.

I have plenty to add to this discussion but want to know your viewpoints. Though I have several friends happily married, I still have single friends juggling the dating scene. Obviously this book has become my bible during our consults; this phrase, my hate-to-break-it-to-you mantra. That is, until one day at work when a male colleague debated with me that many guys don't fit into its categorizations.

And here I thought I finally had it down :)

An Education

Saw a lovely film last night. If you get the chance, check it out!

Here's a review from Rolling Stone:

Schoolgirl Jenny is 16 and a virgin. Sophisticated David is twice her age and ready to pounce. The time is 1961. The place is England just before it learned to swing. So begins An Education; a quiet miracle of a movie that quickly disabuses you of the idea that you've seen it all before.

Prepare to be wowed by Carey Mulligan, whose sensational, starmaking performance as Jenny ignited film festivals from Sundance to Toronto. The incandescent Mulligan, 24, is a major find who makes Jenny's journey from gawky duckling to sad, graceful swan an unmissable event. As David, Peter Sarsgaard is shockingly good at walking the line between charming opportunist and sexual predator. What's the truth? Pay attention as Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) works wonders with the coming-of-age memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber. This story about a girl is brilliantly adapted by About a Boy author Nick Hornby, who finds a timeless resonance in the battle between rigid, formal education and messy, carnal life.

We first meet A-student Jenny struggling to balance a book on her head. It's an apt metaphor for her life. Jenny sneak-smokes, swoons over Juliette Gréco's singing of tristesse and dreams of living in Paris with people "who know lots about lots." It's hell on her suburban-London parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), who just want her to go to Oxford and find a husband. Molina is a comic force of nature, making Jack's warmth a counterweight to his boisterous conservatism.

One rainy day, flirty David pulls up in a sports car, offering to rescue Jenny's cello from the downpour, letting her get soaked walking alongside. The scene is bracingly funny. Jenny is won over, and so eventually is dear old bigoted Dad, who allows the "Jew" to take Jenny on an Oxford weekend to introduce her to his pal Clive — that'd be C.S. Lewis. With the parents seduced, David is ready to move on to Jenny.

An Education is remarkable for the traps it doesn't fall into. Jenny, for all her naive impulses, isn't a victim. She thrills to the concerts, jazz clubs and chic restaurants on David's merry-go-round. She doesn't see anything devious in David or his pals, dashing Danny (Dominic Cooper) and blond goddess Helen (Rosamund Pike). They are everything glamorous that's been out of her reach. At school, Jenny scandalizes the headmistress (an acid-tongued Emma Thompson) and presents David as a viable alternative to Oxford. It's a teacher (Olivia Williams) who pulls her up short: "You can do anything, Jenny, you're clever and pretty. Is your boyfriend interested in the clever Jenny?"

When David sweeps Jenny off to Paris — and bed — for her 17th birthday, there is a rude awakening. Sex is the least of it. As Jenny says, "All that poetry about something that lasts no time at all." In seeing David clearly, she sees herself as well. Mulligan and Sarsgaard craft a mesmerizing acting duet. On Broadway last year in The Seagull, Sarsgaard's worldly-wise novelist, Trigorin, enticed Mulligan's aspiring actress, Nina, then left her for dead. Here the odds are evened out. The movie arranges an unsentimental education for both mismatched lovers, and there's no denying the collateral damage. You won't forget Mulligan's haunted eyes. It's a shame about the tidiness of the film's wrap-up, but otherwise An Education earns its place at the head of the class.

Mad Men

Anyone feel like talking about the season now that the finale has aired?

Men's and Women's Friendships

A girl's best friend? Someone just like her


By SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette


Women, more than men, seem to hold on to old friends.

"Time passes," it begins. "Life happens. Distance separates. Children grow up. Jobs come and go. Love waxes and wanes. Men don't do what they're supposed to do. Hearts break. Parents die. Colleagues forget favours. Careers end.

"But ... a girlfriend is never farther away than needing her can reach. When you have to walk that lonesome valley and you have to walk it by yourself, the women in your life will be on the valley's rim, cheering you on, praying for you, pulling for you, intervening on your behalf, and waiting with open arms at the valley's end."

Which is not to say that family and partners aren't incredibly important. But when I think of what life would be like without the girlfriends who have been in it for the better part of my time here, the women who know how to finish my sentences, who get me, who know what's upsetting me even when I can't figure it out, there's a huge hole.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a column some years ago on why women, more than men, seem to hold on to old friends.

He spoke to women whose friendships with other women had endured for decades - and they told him that they believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others, he observes in his introduction to a lovely new book that grew out of that column.

The women said that they had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from their girlfriends - but not constant attention.

"If a friend didn't return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn't mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from the day," Zaslow writes in The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship (Gotham Books, 2009, $32.50).

Bingo, I thought. I feel guilty sometimes, more often cheated, that there isn't more time for my girlfriends, for our wonderful, meandering conversations in which we talk about everything and nothing. But I know I am blessed to have them.

There are strong bonds in friendships that have lasted for decades - and there is power in those bonds. Studies have shown how having close friends helps people in all kinds of ways: to sleep better, improve their immune systems, keep dementia at bay and even to live longer.

I know little of men's friendships - but Zaslow writes that they are different from women's. He illustrates: he has been playing poker every Thursday night for years with a group of friends, he writes - and fully 80 per cent of their conversations are about the cards. Most of the rest is about sports. Or work.

"For weeks on end, our personal lives - or our feelings about anything - never even come up."

Among the hundreds of emails Zaslow received when his column ran, from women telling him their stories about enduring friendships, there was one from a woman who had grown up in Ames, Iowa, with 10 close friends. They are in their 40s now - one died in her early 20s - and they live all over the United States. Two have faced breast cancer. Three are divorced. One has lost a child to leukemia. Some have buried parents. They have made friends since, but none to whom they are as close as to each other.

"They feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see each other through thousands of shared memories," Zaslow wrote of them. And shared memories are powerful glue: sleepovers and parties, proms and weddings.

Think about it. How many people knew you when you were an awkward 12-year-old or through dating disasters? When you were trying to find your place in your craft or profession?

The girls from Ames agreed to let him into their lives, and he spent two years getting to know them and even, as they came to know and trust him, reading the diaries they had kept.

As the father of three teenage girls, Zaslow described himself as feeling "an almost urgent need" to understand women and their friendships.

He has observed his mother, sister and wife build close and loving friendships over the years, he says: he knows he wants the same for his daughters.

Facebook Dumbing Friendships down?

Facebook Dumbing Friendships Down?


By Neil Seeman, National

Is Facebook undermining friendships?With the emergence of the mega-social networking site Facebook, it seems everyone's "friends" with everyone else these days. A fascinating paper by Dr. Sachin H. Jain in the New England Journal of Medicine asks: Is it professionally acceptable for a physician to accept a "friend request" from his or her patient?

There is no consensus answer. In a Medscape discussion prompted by a blog post by Dr. Alok Khorana, one contributor says: "We have a practice page on Facebook that we use to communicate directly with our patients ... don't be scared to be a 'normal' person and talk to your patients."

A dermatologist takes a different view: "I strongly resent befriending patients or their relatives on Facebook or any other social network. Recently I curtly told one person to avoid this as it is unethical and against the norms of the oath."

Similar debates about the limits of friendships, and whether professional-client relationships should extend online, have surfaced in law and business and academe. Should a senior executive "friend" a 25-year-old new employee? Is it rude to deny "friend requests" from casual acquaintances? And if I accept these people as my friends, must I be continually exposed to their beer-swilling college frat photos? And why do my supposedly mature friends send me juvenile "alerts" about their mundane musings (e. g. "Got a craving for pop tarts ... yummy!")? Or post mushy love-notes to their spouses on Facebook's public walls?

Putting aside the question of whether our online friendships are ruining our real-life ones, it's worth asking, "What is a friend?" This matters considerably in health care, where showing empathy toward one's patient can improve care; and where bonding with a burned-out co-worker, online or off, can improve workplace health.

DEFINING FRIENDSHIP DOWN

When introducing a real friend to a new acquaintance, I often feel the need to call my friend "a dear friend" or a "close friend." "Friend" requires an adjective these days, since otherwise it feels empty. We've dumbed adult friendships down.

In my three-year-old daughter's pre-school, everyone calls everyone in their class a "friend." This is blessed behaviour when seen in children: "Daddy, I need to say bye to all my friends before we go home." For adults, friendships enjoy special status. If you are very lucky, you will make one meaningful friendship for every year you live, and you may have only one or two or three who stay with you for a lifetime.

When we dumb friendship down, on Facebook or in everyday life, we risk confusing people who may misconstrue what is signified by that relationship. This, in my view, is the best reason not to friend your patient or your client. When in a trust relationship (what lawyers fancily call a "fiduciary duty"), your client or your patient may be vulnerable. He or she may consider a curt note from you on Facebook to be threatening. "What have I done to offend him?" they might be thinking. "Will he delay my appointment? Treat me rudely? Refuse to refill my prescription?"

All patients, all clients, are not the same. My mother (Mary Seeman), a physician, suggests that "a good rule to follow is for the doctor always to be 'abstinent' -- in other words, she should not be 'getting something' out of her relationship with her patient other than the satisfaction of doing as good a job as possible. Patients should not be sources of entertainment, information, news, stock market tips, romance, actual friendship or warm feelings."

My view is that professional codes for self-regulated professions forbidding romance with patients (or clients) aim to protect the most vulnerable among us. And vulnerability in affairs of the heart is not always self-evident. Hulking football linemen -- I knew at least two in university -- can cry over a woman who politely denies them a date. "Let's be friends" can be the cruelest of lines.

FREDDY'S FRIENDS

We first learn about the complexities of managing friendships as children. In Who Will Be My Friends?, a children's story by author-artist Syd Hoff (most famous for the 1958 classic, Danny and the Dinosaur), young Freddy arrives in a new neighbourbood and looks for friends. "Who will be my friends?" he wonders. He asks the policeman, the mailman and the street cleaner. But they are too busy working. Unfazed, Freddy saunters over to the playground and asks the boys playing ball if they will be his friend. They ignore him and keep playing.

Only when Freddy starts playing cheerfully by himself -- throwing the ball high and catching it --do the other boys notice him and invite him to be their friend. There are many popular children's books today with a similar plot. In Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, a beautiful fish is shunned until he begins to give away his glittering scales to other fish. I recommend Little Smudge by Lionel Le Neouanic, where a lonely black "little smudge" sulks when colourful squares and circles reject his friendship; yet when he dazzles everyone with his shape-shifting talents, he makes friends. The message: You have to work at starting, and nurturing, a friendship.

THE RULES DON'T CHANGE

The same rules of friendship should apply online and off. A friendship is not the same as a series of client meetings in a downtown office. The spirit, if not the letter, of most professional ethical codes would suggest that "friending" a patient or client on Facebook is inappropriate. I consider it inappropriate since it can invite miscommunication, disappointment and expectations of favouritism.

One never knows whether one of your patients or clients might harbour resentment or disappointment or fear or vulnerability if the online friendship crumbles. This may happen innocently: It takes time, which few professionals have much of, to stay on top of email and social networking correspondence. And to your client or patient, that fragile online friendship may mean much more than it does to you.


Neil Seeman is a writer, and director and primary investigator of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell at Massey College at the University of Toronto. Originally published by Longwoods Publishing.

How Do You Rank Your Friends?

How do you rank your friends?


By Asmaa Malik, The Gazette

The idea of ranking friends becomes suddenly less shocking and revolutionary when you consider just how many meaningful people fill our livesYou can't put a price on friendship, but apparently you can give it a ranking.

My friend Farha, who has quite the circle of influence in her small university town, has devised a system for dealing with her friendships not just online, but in the real world.

Here's her hierarchy from the bottom up:

Tier 5: A new acquaintance introduced by mutual friends at a party.

Tier 4: Her younger sister's best friend.

Tier 3: A work colleague with whom she has a regular lunch date.

Tier 2: The girlfriend she goes shopping with every week.

Tier 1: Her most intimate confidante - oh, and her own husband.

For her, it's a way to organize her life and her free time.

Now, we all do that kind of prioritizing on some level. Reserving Saturday nights for intimate dinner parties, perhaps; meeting co-workers for drinks on Tuesdays; saving Sundays for family time. Or maybe we just draw the line between colleagues and outside-of-work friends.

It's one thing to live by these unspoken rules, but Farha actually tells people where they stand. It's gotten to the point where everyone in her social circle uses the same shorthand to describe the people in their lives. Some even use the rankings to label their privacy settings on Facebook.

But which came first, Facebook or friend management?

When the social networking site first exploded onto the scene, there was much consternation about how it stretched the meaning of the word "friend." Now, it's given us a mechanism to quantify how our so-called friends stack up.

Like many people with shrinking amounts of free time, I've developed a triage system over the years to manage how I communicate with my family and close friends. I call my parents in Baltimore every weekend, Skype with my brothers in Atlanta and D.C. about once a month, G-Talk with friends in Sydney and Toronto a couple of times a week and email a close friend in Tampa a few times a month.

Every medium I use says something about the significance of each relationship in my life. The frequency of interaction also speaks volumes.

The essential need for human interaction has not radically changed, but technology and the Internet have revolutionized the way we communicate.

On Facebook, you can give people as much or as little access as you want to your personal information - where you're going, what you're interested in, what you did on your summer vacation. And just by calling up your profile and putting together the pieces of what they can see, your friends and acquaintances instantly know how close you think they are. But, of course, you never talk about it - not to their faces, anyway.

When Farha first told me about the tier system and how openly her friends discuss it, I was appalled. How gauche and cruel, I thought. But after talking to her about it in detail, I was relieved to learn she wasn't revealing some kind of mean-girl streak for stating What Must Not Be Spoken.

Farha is a sociologist who studies gender and friendship. Our personal relationships, she explained to me, are an important part of our identities and are not to be taken lightly. She has a theoretical framework for understanding social tier systems and how they apply to her own friendships.

The theory, she says, has been useful in practice, as she and her friends have been able to bypass much of the drama that comes from messy relationships. When people are upfront about their rankings, it seems, there is less ambiguity.

In the early 1990s, in a time before social media as we now know them, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar devised a theory about the maximum number of friends a person could maintain stable relationships with. Dunbar's number is meant to represent the number of people who actually know how they are related to one person. That number is 150.

Dunbar's research was based not on human interactions, but on an extrapolation of a study of primate behaviour, and the limit he presented has little to do with the complexities of friendships. He theorized that 150 relationships are all that our brains can handle.

In this heyday of social media, most younger Facebook users have upwards of 200 friends, with various levels of privacy settings. To take Dunbar's number rather literally, if we have the capacity as humans to maintain only 150 friendships, who are all of these extra people?

They're consequential strangers. First coined by psychologist Karen Fingerman, the phrase refers to all of the people on the periphery of your life: your yoga teacher, your pet sitter, your favourite barista.

In their 2004 book, Fingerman and journalist Melinda Blau define them as "people who are so much a part of our everyday life that we take them for granted."

One way to determine who falls into this category is to draw up a list of people to whom you send holiday cards. Once you take away those the book calls "the intimates," who's left? People you don't stay in touch with regularly but who still mean something to you.

"Consequential strangers anchor us in the world and give us a sense of being plugged into something larger," Fingerman and Blau say. "They offer us opportunities for novel experiences and information that is beyond the purview of our inner circles."

Social media offer us a way to define these relationships and integrate them into our digital lives. Many of these consequential strangers are also your "Tiers 4 & 5" Facebook friends.

The idea of ranking friends becomes suddenly less shocking and revolutionary when you consider just how many meaningful people fill our lives - and that there are only 52 weekends a year to fit in those closest to us.

Of course, my other friends tell me the only reason I've come around to accepting the tier system is because I just found out where I stand. Apparently, I'm in Tier 0.5.

Relationships Are Messy

Relationships are messy, but also chances to learn about ourselves

By Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette


Relationships are tough, but they let us learn about ourselves. You can't offer your heart to another without at least some dim awareness that it might be broken, can you?

And if it does end, chances are the relationship will end badly -- in a muddle of ambivalence or of mistakes and missed chances, of bad behaviour, of one person trying too hard or both not at all, of one loving too much and the other not enough.

Nearly everyone who has ventured into a relationship has a messy breakup story. Depending at which end of the barrel we're standing, we are sad and bitter and full of recrimination or else we are hugely relieved. And even if what we feel is relief, still we are plagued by guilt and by disappointment -- in ourselves, in the other, in what happened.

Disappointment is the thread that unites a fine and affecting new collection of true stories about love gone wrong.

"We're disappointed at ourselves for having had such mediocre judgment; we're disappointed at other people for being so cruel and mediocre," Neal Pollack writes in the foreword to the aptly titled, Love is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts (Plume, $20), edited by Michael Taeckens.

"And, most of all, we're disappointed at the world for not caring enough, for not giving us better options, for leaving us to ponder the void with only a string of disastrously dead relationships to show for our troubles on Earth."

Pollack observes that what he calls "our current human situation" has produced an abundance of breakup literature. Could be that we live in a society so fragmented that it is difficult to actually connect with people, he suggests. Then again, "the human heart has been continually broken since the first one began beating."

Elements in these stories made me so uncomfortable I squirmed as I read. Cringed. Winced. And nodded -- as I recognized my own stories in theirs.

Wendy McClure wrote of saying "I love you" to her boyfriend, not knowing whether it was even true, but saying it because, as she explained, "I wanted to see if it needed to be said." I knew before I got to the line "Our doomsday was just a matter of time after that" that her admission was a death knell.

I did that once, told someone I loved him when I wasn't entirely sure I did. Actually, I was pretty sure I didn't. I wanted to hear how it sounded, mostly, and how he'd respond. He'd said "I love you, too. Really." Later, he'd said that the "really" was a sign he hadn't meant it at all. But then, I hadn't either. The messes we make.


"Toward the end," Don Kennedy writes, "I was a jerk, she was a jerk, we were jerks to each other -- nothing too terrible, but we were always punctuating a point by slamming a door. We were always raising our voices and feeling like we weren't heard. Maybe because we had to make it clear to ourselves why this couldn't work. And then, one random Tuesday or something, you both get tired of the smoke, and somebody finally yells fire, and it's over."


Desperation figures frequently. "Nights went by when I called his number repeatedly, letting the phone ring dozens of times," Michael Taeckens writes. "Was he there? Was he punishing me? Was he alone?

"I'd tell myself, 'Okay, I will let the phone ring 20 times.' If he doesn't answer, it means that he truly doesn't love me anymore."

Margaret Sartor writes of being stunned at the sheer intensity of her heartbreak when the high-school senior with whom she'd fallen in love as a sophomore broke up with her - through an intermediary, no less. "The shattering of trust, the brutal sense of loss and sudden awareness of my heart's true vulnerability, like a tree branch snapping off in an ice storm."

Happily, though, there are the lessons we learn -- about love and, more important, about ourselves.

Points To Ponder

If you're not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he's the famous erudite scientist who once said: "I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates." His mind sees things differently than most of us do, to our amazement and amusement. Here are ten of his gems:



1. I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

2. All those who believe in psycho kinetics, raise my hand.

3. I almost had a psychic girlfriend...
but she left me before we met.

4. How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?

5. I intend to live forever.... so far, so good.

6. What happens if you get scared half to death -- twice?

7. My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes,
so I made your horn louder."

8. Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

9. The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

10.Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.

Is Twilight Eclipsing realistic expecations?

I wanted to vent a little bit about the Twilight series. What does everyone think? As an adult I didn't fall in love with the characters and become obsessed with Edward. However, I will say that I really loved the first book "Twilight" and did really love the slow unveiling of Edward's supernatural abilities and the relationship between the two. "New Moon" which is about to come out, made me ill. For Bella to so shut down when Edward left and become less of herself made me so ANGRY! Although I can empathize with your first love and the first break up seeming to be so important when you are in High School. Being young does seem to elevate everything.

Is Bella a good role model for girls reading these books? Should book characters even be considered role models? Is this idealizing romance with the “bad boy” where you stick it out despite everything telling you not to? How are girls supposed to learn what is too much and what is something that can be overcome in a relationship? Did you like the books?

I almost threw the fourth book away when Bella got pregnant. I didn’t understand why that had to happen and I didn’t like it. Anyway I will chime in with more comments later. I have many thoughts. :)

Bachelor schtuff

A thread dedicated to Bachelor #14, On the Wings of Love: Jake Pavelka

Season begins January 4, 2010.

Reen in Love

I tried for maybe two days to extinguish my Reid admiration. I obviously failed. So for your reading enjoyment, snippets from the life of "Reen in Love."


Reen goes to the grocery store
Reid says, “I want someone who can cook.”
I say, “Right. That’s why we’re at the grocery store.”
He says, “Oh.”
I say, “It’s time for you to learn.”
He say, “I got nuthin.”
I say, “You’ve got these vegetables.”
We spy a man roto-rootering his right nostril
He says, “Right, we better wash these a few times”


Reen on clothes
Reid says, “What should I wear to Thanksgiving dinner?”
I say, “Is this a trick question?”
He says, “Just making sure that you like underwear.”


Reen on the Phillies
Reid says, “Tonight’s a big game. We’re down one.”
I say, “I’d only make you get down one time, and I’d be won.”

Blog is Open

Just an FYI.

I have opened the blog so that anyone who had things set up with GOOGLE for automatic notification of new posts and comments, can do that again. We are still the only one's who can comment, but we have a window open so we know when someone has added something new, even to older posts we don't check anymore.

If you want to know how to do this look at Jim's post titled: How to Keep Track of New Comments from 8/03.

Cheers to all! :-)

November Book List: What's popular right now

Here is this week's Bestseller List from the New York Times. Assuming I ever get time to read again, are there any picks and pans from those who may have read some of these books?



Hardcover Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance

1. THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown
2. THE SCARPETTA FACTOR, by Patricia Cornwell
3. PURSUIT OF HONOR, by Vince Flynn
4. NINE DRAGONS, by Michael Connelly
5. THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

Hardcover Nonfiction

Top 5 at a Glance

1. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom
2. SUPERFREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
3. WHAT THE DOG SAW, by Malcolm Gladwell
4. TOO BIG TO FAIL, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
5. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others

Paperback Trade Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance

1. PUSH, by Sapphire
2. THE SHACK, by William P. Young
3. OLIVE KITTERIDGE, by Elizabeth Strout
4. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson
5. SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, by Uwem Akpan

Paperback Mass-Market Fiction

Top 5 at a Glance

1. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham
2. CROSS COUNTRY, by James Patterson
3. HEAT LIGHTNING, by John Sandford
4. TRUE DETECTIVES, by Jonathan Kellerman
5. SCARPETTA, by Patricia Cornwell

Paperback Nonfiction

Top 5 at a Glance

1. I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, by Tucker Max
2. FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
3. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
4. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls
5. THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE, by Max Brooks

Hardcover Advice

Top 5 at a Glance

1. KNOCKOUT, by Suzanne Somers
2. JIM CRAMER'S GETTING BACK TO EVEN, by James J. Cramer with Cliff Mason
3. THE CONSCIOUS COOK, by Tal Ronnen
4. GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS 2010, edited by Craig Glenday
5. THE KIND DIET, by Alicia Silverstone

Paperback Advice

Top 5 at a Glance

1. NEW MOON, by Mark Cotta Vaz
2. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING, by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
3. THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES, by Gary Chapman
4. THE POWER OF NOW, by Eckhart Tolle
5. SKINNY BITCH, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

Children's Books

Top 5 at a Glance

1. LEGO STAR WARS, by Simon Beecroft
2. JULIE ANDREWS’S COLLECTION OF POEMS, SONGS, AND LULLABIES, by Emma Walton Hamilton and Julie Andrews
3. SKIPPYJON JONES, LOST IN SPICE, by Judy Schachner
4. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, by Barb Bersche and Michelle Quint
5. LISTEN TO THE WIND, by Greg Mortenson and Susan L. Roth

Why romantic comedies are bad for love

Why romantic comedies are bad for love


By Nick Lewis, Calgary Herald


"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over," says Rob, the central character in Stephen Frears' adaptation of High Fidelity (2000). "Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

Rob was onto something with his correlation between pop music and unhappiness, and now researchers in Scotland are finding the same correlation between unhappiness and Hollywood's romantic comedies.

Dr. Bjarne Holmes and Kimberly Johnson at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh examined 40 popular romantic comedies from the six biggest Hollywood movie studios--including Notting Hill, How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days and You've Got Mail--and suggested they portray relationships with "both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities. "When problems or transgressions arise in these relationships (i. e. the third act of the film), they "have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning."

Further, they wrote, "Adolescents repeatedly exposed to these highly idealized images may therefore come to perceive them as normal, which in turn could have an adverse effect on their satisfaction with their own future relationships. When their own relationships do not compare to the exaggerated depictions in the media they may come to feel as though they are lacking a relationship that others are enjoying."

It's not just adolescents, though, it's all of us. If you expect an exaggerated romantic moment such as the "Here's a rose for every time I thought of you last night" gesture in Sweet Home Alabama, you're probably going to be disappointed next Valentine's Day.

Because, face it, most romantic comedies are rubbish. They depict single people as lonely and frustrated, married people as bitter and loveless, they deal heavily in gender stereotypes, rarely show the day-to-day mechanics of a relationship, and wrap up neatly in that fairy tale, "and they all lived happily ever after" closure before the credits roll.

In an experiment, Holmes and Johnson showed 100 students the 2001 John Cusack-Kate Beckinsale romantic comedy Serendipity, and showed another 100 a David Lynch film. In a questionnaire afterwards, the Serendipity viewers were far more likely to say they believed in fate and predestined love.

And so you should do yourself a favour and completely avoid the traditional "Rom-com". Instead, we offer a list of recent movies for both couples and singles, inspirational yet realistic films from the past decade that make for great viewing whether you're on that couch alone or snuggling up with someone.

If you're in a relationship, they won't make you gag, and if you're single, they won't make you miserable. Sorry, fans of The Notebook.

Top 10 Realistic Romances Of The 2000S -

1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004): Michel Gondry directs this beautiful film about a young couple (Jim Carrey and Kate winslet) who fall out of love and decide to erase the other from their memory. wonderfully shot and edited, this brilliant film leaves you guessing until the end.

2. Amelie (2001): This charming French film stars Audrey Tautou as Amelie Poulin, a young Parisian waitress who falls for a boy and sends him a series of photographs and riddles to make their first kiss the most romantic moment of her life.

3. Before Sunset (2004): in 1995's Before Sunrise, Ethan Hawk is Jesse, an American who spends a day in Vienna with a Parisian named Celine (Julie Delphy). Nine years later they reunite in Paris and spend the day walking and talking, and nothing more. amazingly effective in its simplicity.

4. Wall-E (2008): It's almost sad that two animated robots can say more about love and romance than most real-life actors, but that's what Pixar man-ages with the amazing wall-e. Destined to become an animation classic.

5. Once (2007): A Dublin busker (Glen Hansard of the Frames) and a Czech immigrant (Marketa Iglova) meet on the street and soon start to make beautiful music together. little but flirtation happens, but it happens with such a gorgeous soundtrack that you're quickly swooned.

6. Slumdog Millionaire (2008): A young, uneducated boy from Mumbai's slums appears on the Indian version of who wants to Be a millionaire not to win money, but because he thinks the love of his life might be watching. A great movie alone or with a loved one.

7. Punch-Drunk Love (2002): Punch-drunk love finds an unlikely Adam Sandler playing Barry Egan, a desperately lonely man prone to fits of rage. He finds the adorable Lena Leonard (Emily Watson)who somehow accepts him for who he is. P.T. Anderson (There Will Be Blood) directs.

8. Brokeback Mountain (2005): The most romantic movies are about the subtle gestures, the moments in between intimacy, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain captures them against a vibrant Alberta landscape. Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger are amazing as ranch hands who fall in love.

9. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005): Writer/director Judd Apatow could have easily taken the raunchy route with his tale of a middle-aged virgin looking to "deflower," but instead, this is a sweet, funny and insightful film. Steve Carell is likable as always, and Catherine Keener plays his perfect match.

10. Love, Actually (2003): A predominantly British cast carries this Richard Curtis film through a series of different stories showing the different aspects of love. despite the presence of both Hugh grant and Colin Firth, it's not as twee as you'd think.

Long-term romance possible??

How love can last

New research suggests long-term romance is possible and deeply satisfying

By Sarah Treleaven, National Post

A new study challenges the belief that romantic love generally fizzles and is replaced by companionship love if things are going well in the relationship.
Photograph by: Photos.com, Oh sure, being crazy in love might be fine for Beyonce, but what happens 15 years down the road? Are you condemned to spend your Friday nights on the couch watching television while your husband tries to clean out his left ear with the tiny plastic arm of a wrestling figurine belonging to your youngest son? In other words, does romance always die?

Not according to a recent study published in the March issue of Review of General Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association. Lead researcher Dr. Bianca P. Acevedo, then at Stony Brook University (currently at University of California, Santa Barbara), says that the study challenges the belief that romantic love generally fizzles and is replaced by companionship love if things are going well in the relationship. "When taking a closer look, it seems like some people were still very much in love. They just weren't crazy."

Acevedo says that people often erroneously believe that romantic love and passionate love are the same. "Romantic love has the intensity, engagement and sexual chemistry that passionate love has, minus the obsessive component." She adds that passionate or obsessive love helps drive shorter relationships but not longer ones.

Acevedo and co-researcher Dr. Arthur Aron reviewed 25 studies with 6,070 individuals in short-and long-term relationships, classifying the relationships in each of the studies as romantic, passionate (romantic with obsession) or friendship-like love and categorized them as long-or short-term. Unsurprisingly, those who reported greater romantic love were more satisfied in their long-term relationships than those who classified their love as companion-like.

Aron says that the romance kept alive by these long-term couples is in some ways even better than the maddening love at the beginning of a relationship. "When people first fall in love we also have this mania component that comes with a lot of anxiety and concern and fear," he says. "If the person's out of your sight for five minutes, are they dead or have they found someone else? In a long-term relationship, those who are able to experience intense love not only get the benefit of being intensely in love but they're comfortable and confident and they don't have to be afraid. If you're with someone for 10 or 20 years, you know they're going to be there tomorrow."

Maggie Scarf, author of September Songs, a book about couples between the ages of 50 and 75, says that even when romance fades during the child-rearing years, it can be rekindled. "Sometimes people have gotten into the companionship mode because they're so busy negotiating with their kids and things that are happening in daily life with the family -- which, let's face it, are generally not very romantic," she says. "As the kids peel off to lives of their own, it's not that you're not involved with them and their families, it's that you have more time to re-find each other and that old intimacy."

So how can a couple increase their odds for longterm romance? Aron says that's "the $64,000 question" and he is appealing for funding to study just that. But he acknowledges five generally accepted factors for successful coupling: first, a lack of stressful external factors, such as living in a war zone, being poor, being discriminated against, or having a child die; second, neither party being highly anxious or depressed; third, good communication skills, and the ability to resolve conflicts and support each other; fourth, doing novel, challenging, exciting things together on a regular basis; and fifth, capitalizing on the other's successes. Aron points to the last factor as particularly important. "If your partner has a success and you can celebrate it with them, that is an unmitigated positive thing for a relationship. Many people just say, 'Oh, that's nice,' and go on with their business."

Scarf adds that relationships that began in a throbbing burst of flames might have a better chance at locating a spark 20 years on. "If you can look back, as I can to a particularly romantic moment with my husband where we kissed each other in a pine forest and the world spun on its axis, that's great," she says. "But not everyone has that. Some people got married because it seemed like the right time."

This recent study may change people's expectations of what they want in longterm relationships, according to Acevedo, with companionship love, which is what many couples see as the natural progression of a successful relationship, coming to be seen as an unnecessary compromise.

"Couples should strive for love with all the trimmings," Acevedo says. "For some people, stagnation might be a desirable state, but it doesn't have to be that way. And couples who have been together a long time and wish to get back their romantic edge should know it is an attainable goal that, like most good things in life, requires energy and devotion."

Love is not enough to keep a marriage, study finds

Love is not enough to keep a marriage, study finds


Reuters


A couple's age, previous relationships and even whether they smoke or not are factors that influence whether their marriage is going to last, according to a new study.
Photograph by: Photos.com, Living happily ever after needn't only be for fairy tales. Australian researchers have identified what it takes to keep a couple together, and it's a lot more than just being in love.

A couple's age, previous relationships and even whether they smoke or not are factors that influence whether their marriage is going to last, according to a study by researchers from the Australian National University.

The study, entitled "What's Love Got to Do With It," tracked nearly 2,500 couples -- married or living together -- from 2001 to 2007 to identify factors associated with those who remained together compared with those who divorced or separated.

It found that a husband who is nine or more years older than his wife is twice as likely to get divorced, as are husbands who get married before they turn 25.

Children also influence the longevity of a marriage or relationship, with one-fifth of couples who have kids before marriage -- either from a previous relationship or in the same relationship -- having separated compared to just nine percent of couples without children born before marriage.

Women who want children much more than their partners are also more likely to get a divorce.

A couple's parents also have a role to play in their own relationship, with the study showing some 16 percent of men and women whose parents ever separated or divorced experienced marital separation themselves compared to 10 percent for those whose parents did not separate.

Also, partners who are on their second or third marriage are 90 percent more likely to separate than spouses who are both in their first marriage.

Not surprisingly, money also plays a role, with up to 16 percent of respondents who indicated they were poor or where the husband -- not the wife -- was unemployed saying they had separated, compared with only nine percent of couples with healthy finances.

And couples where one partner, and not the other, smokes are also more likely to have a relationship that ends in failure.

Factors found to not significantly affect separation risk included the number and age of children born to a married couple, the wife's employment status and the number of years the couple had been employed.

The study was jointly written by Dr Rebecca Kippen and Professor Bruce Chapman from The Australian National University, and Dr Peng Yu from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.

A Look Back

I found this among my drafts and now can't even remember if I ever even posted it on the Bachboard. Here, then, for a look back, were my thoughts on this show when they showed the men, ostensibly 'telling all'. It fits in with the discussion Leen started about how contestants are forever changed by having been on the show.

Marianna's Musings: The Men Tell All

The men may have told all they were allowed to tell but the evening definitely belonged to Chris Harrison and Mike Fleiss.

Together, frontman Spin Meister and behind-the-scenes Scheme Meister created a cleverly-pieced promulgation of propaganda. Jillian, the men and any objective presenting of the facts were clearly no match for this formidable duo.

They may have gone from subtly brilliant to slap-in-the-face obvious but let's face facts: all we know of this season, all we saw of this season and all we opined from this season, all this comes completely and utterly through the fickle and factitious filter of Fleiss.

First up, the final 3 bachelors get their 'human, endearing and imperfect' edit. We see athletic Kiptyn missing a step, flailing and straddling the ropes. We see nerdy, serious Ed loosen up after one cocktail too many and slap Jillian's knee, yank at her dress, attempt to touch her nose and assume odd positions in the hotel corridoor. We see poor rhythm-challenged Reid decide not to overthink any dance moves as he throws caution to the wind and attempts some rather unfortunate hula gyrations.

Next on the agenda is Fleiss' not-so-gentle reminder to us that, despite all the drama, true love really is his goal. He trots out Jason and Molly from last season and they are eager to reaffirm their case, salvage their reputation and show us that they are clearing that long-ago overgrown path to lasting love, originally forged by Trista and Ryan.

Momentarily forgetting that this is Jillian's limelight, Chris characterizes Jason's season with his customary superlatives of the 'most... ever' kind. Molly continues this dramatic theme, telling us that they were "ripped to shreds in the media", almost elevating their plight to one approaching world hunger, the economic crisis or the swine flu epidemic. Oh my godness, I guess I just never really realized how awful it's been for them!

But after a few select montages of domestic bliss, albeit only on alternating weekends, Jason and Molly are grinning like a couple of Cheshire cats and the Fleissian message, that tv dating is a viable way to form a long-lasting union, has been none-too-subtly delivered.

And now, for the semblance of spontaneity, the men start sharing their stories. At first, Mike and Michael confess that they really "fell for" Jillian. Jake even calls her a "doll face". But enough sweet talk. Fleiss wants drama and they oblige. Robby is called a drunk; Tanner is called a tattletale; Dave is called a "ticking time bomb".

Then it's time to attack Jake. Dave accuses him of crying like a girl (or a "Mesnick") over the balcony; Jessie calls him "phony" and Sasha, in a flash of irony and perspicaciousness, calls him an "actor in a soap opera." Jake attempts to tarnish his perfect image by swearing at Sasha and later in the show, shares his anguish over Jillian with a highly sympathetic and mostly female audience who cheer him on and boo Dave, who has his own problems trying to justify his actions before wisely deciding to apologize for making Jillian uncomfortable.

Juan is the next victim but this time, Chris Harrison dutifully executes Fleiss' orders to play devil's advocate. There is much discussion of the "Man Code", many descriptions of how different Midwest jocks are from L.A. metrosexuals, and many varied definitions of what it means to tell someone you're going to "kill" them. Jake dismisses it all rather aptly as "alpha-male banter".

The next obvious Fleissian manoeuver is to teach Wes a lesson for not spouting the party line. Pretty much all the men have a field day assassinating Wes' perhaps already dubious character. Not surprisingly, Chris Harrison, who has never bothered to hide his growing contempt for Wes, gleefully leads the troops, calling Wes an "a**hole".

A few men make a feeble attempt to come to Wes' defense, but it is quickly squelched by a video 'tribute to the most-hated contestant in bachelor history", showing Wes' worst bits, edited to within an inch of their lives and accompanied by the soundtrack of his now infamous song. Not yet satisfied, Chris insists on asking Jillian several of the same but reworded questions about how she could have been blind to Wes' ulterior motives and deception.

The show's 'bloopers', however, seem to be a momentary lapse in Fleissian judgment. After all, isn't the very nature of bloopers to show that someone has veered off script? Yes, it's hilarious to see people fall off ski hills but when Jillian is shown reshooting again and again her flubbed line of "the guys keep getting hotter and hotter" and saying she wants to substitute it with the easier to pronounce (perhaps when slightly inebriated?) "better and better looking", then that's when it starts to look a bit like that scripted soap opera that Sasha so guilelessly referred to.

I suspect that this series may have originally started out trying to be a reality show. But reality is not always dramatic, nor its heroes and villains always black and white. And then there is the problem of how to make each season more compelling than the last, in order to draw in the viewers and, consequently, capture those all-important ratings. This is where Fleiss has decided that reality occasionally needs a little kick in the pants.

Actually, some of us viewers need that kick in the pants too. We need to realize that the show is, primarily, about entertainment and that the love story, although undoubtedly present, often ends up playing second fiddle to trumped-up tribulations and contrived contortions of reality. We need to remember that the hapless bachelors and bachelorettes who sign away, if not their lives then certainly their reputations, probably come out of this experience much wiser and, in some cases, quite a bit richer.

But now, on with the storyline. From the previews, next week's show certainly appears to be living up to Chris' promise of "the most emotional finale ever". We see both Ed and Kiptyn in the now classic limo pose, staring pensively at their respective engagement rings. We see a teary Jillian, who is clearly going to be put through the emotional wringer before choosing her Prince Charming. And we see just enough of a glimpse of something that could turn the final 2 premise utterly and completely on its head. We see Reid, ostensibly returning, and we see a ring in his hand too!

Could it be, that our proposal-possessed bachelorette from the last episode now has not one, not two but three promises to ponder?

Nicely done, Fleiss! Next Monday, you'll have us exactly where you want us: glued to our televisions.

October Book List wrap-up

Two books: old-school Best Sellers

1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Part thriller, part social commentary. It's rough in places divulging far-too-much on Sweden's economy, with a few graphic scenes of sexual violence. Regardless, the plot keeps you pushing through. If you want a quick, interesting read, this one's for you, as long as you can block out the violence against women. That was pretty tough for me.

2) Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson: 1/2 way through. More on it in November :)

Behind Melissa's public "humiliation"

For M:

Dumped! Betrayed! Humiliated! For a week now, the reality-TV universe has been obsessed with The Bachelor and its "After the Final Rose" reunion special that many perceived to be little more than an act of public humiliation.

While the show's season finale and reunion special were shown back-to-back on March 2, six weeks had elapsed between the finale — when bachelor Jason Mesnick chose Melissa Rycroft to be his bride —and the reunion special, during which he announced that he had changed his mind and professed feelings for runner-up Molly Malaney. With more than 17 million viewers watching, Rycroft arrived at the reunion special holding — not wearing — her ring, and Mesnick confirmed the suspicions that the engagement was off. (Read "Reality TV Wants to Heal You.")


As Rycroft fought back her tears and Mesnick turned to Malaney, the show's fans took to the Internet in a rage, decrying Mesnick as a "jackass," "playboy" and "bastard." It was clear that this particular chapter of reality TV struck some as a little too real. Yet creator and executive producer Mike Fleiss says the fireworks of March 2 reflected the best, not the worst, of the genre. "I'm not really surprised by this; it's just a sign that the show is working," he tells TIME. "That's really your job, to create television that the whole country will sit down at one time and watch together. But honestly, I really don't see the difference between [Mesnick's]dumping Molly in New Zealand [at the finale] and then dumping Melissa in Glendale [at the special]."


Some would say the difference is that Malaney knew there was a chance she could get kicked off the show during the competition, while Rycroft's departure occurred long after she had been picked as the winner — and purportedly gotten engaged. But Fleiss insists that Mesnick's change of heart hardly came as a shock to the bride-to-be. In the weeks leading up to the reunion special, Fleiss says, he started to hear word from other producers on the show that Rycroft and Mesnick were not getting along. Two weeks before the reunion, Fleiss says, he heard that Mesnick might be interested again in Malaney — whom Fleiss had already approached about taking part in the next season of The Bachelorette.


All of which set the stage for the most unpredictable "After the Final Rose" event in the show's history. Opting to film the show without a live audience for secrecy reasons, and unsure of how Malaney would respond to Mesnick's renewed affections, Fleiss says there was plenty of uncertainty when cameras started rolling — just not when it came to Rycroft. "She knew they were essentially finished before walking out on that stage," he says. "But still, doing it for real and making it official and handing back the ring brought out real emotions."


In various interviews, as well as in e-mails between Mesnick and Rycroft that were leaked to the press, Mesnick has blamed the production crew for some of the emotional fallout surrounding his ultimate choice of Malaney, saying he was obligated to dump Rycroft in front of the cameras. But Fleiss says that's only half the story. "We didn't want Jason to necessarily spill the beans prior to taping, to keep it as real and raw as possible," he says. "But he's a good guy and didn't conceal anything. He let her know before that show that he didn't think this relationship was going to work."


Fleiss seems to be basking in the buzz of the past week ("It's the first time in a long time that people have something to talk about other than the stock market"). He also believes the emotional outcry that has accompanied the show's dénouement points to a passion that a new wave of reality-TV contestants is inspiring. At one time, he says, it was next to impossible to recruit plausible contestants, or even hosts, for reality-TV projects. But as the genre has become increasingly mainstream, producers have been able to find people who are more than mere exhibitionists.


And with this new pool of talent, Fleiss says, the emotions involved have become more complicated — and engaging. "Believe me, I've seen Bachelor couples stay together who really didn't care about each other," he says. "Some of them feel an obligation to the show to try to be a couple, since we spent literally millions of dollars as their matchmakers and sent them all over the world."


But rather than playing to the expectations of producers or viewers, says Fleiss, Mesnick dared to reveal his true emotions and to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that love is not always a programmable enterprise. "More than any other bachelor in history, he was committed to love and to truly following his heart, even though he knew he was going to have to go through hell to do it," Fleiss says. "It's really a romantic notion, that he sacrificed chunks of his popularity to at least try to be with the woman he loved."

Reid on local Philly TV news story

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/index

Here's your daily dose of RR from the TR site. When the media player loads, select the #10 video at the bottom of the box "Life After Reality TV".

Happy Halloween!

The Obamas' Marriage

Disclaimer: I apologize to any non-BO fans. However, I thought this topic might allow for very interesting discussions about marriage, everyday stress, and character. A nice change of pace from the recent slew of Reid-love :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magazine/01Obama-t.html

Jake has met Mrs. Pavelka

http://www.accesshollywood.com/jake-pavelka

Jillian on Reid's return

http://www.accesshollywood.com/the-bachelor/jillian-harris-and-ed-swiderski-dish-details-of-bachelorette-finale-july-28-2009_video_1140187

Regis & Kelly`s take on the Bachelor

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6303106/16355378
A sneak peak from their Halloween show....

Going public

It seems like we're down to just a handful of regular bloggers. Since most of us seem to be on deck about returning to the public setup, might we make the switch?

I'm getting lost in trying to follow-up comments.

Hugs,
Leen

Happy Birthday, Papa Jim

We love you to bits and pieces. May you be blessed with 50 more years of life and love.

Hugs,
Leen

Jill Beland of BTv + the guys

Here's an update on the Calgary show. She frequently quotes Reid. I think she has a monster-crush a la Leen. And, for Nash, if she's out there in the ether, guess what song's playing? "It's rainin', oooh, baby, it's rainin'. Come here to me." ;)

http://blogs.btcalgary.ca/jill

New Reid pix

The best I could do right now is to post the Twitter page that has the shots. Just scroll through the page and click on any link that starts with "yfrog".

There are more I'm sure, but they're VERY slow coming in.

http://twitter.com/MollyFaraday

Another attendant's account of Reid

Patti from the DH thread did major PI on this event. Here's a report from someone she connected with who attended the event.

Keeva October 25 at 12:27am Report
yeah he does want to return to a normal life. he was asked if he was approached to be the next bachelor and he said he was but he turned it down because the fame is just getting tremendously hard to deal with and he said he doesnt want that forever and the bachelor just wasnt for him. he was sort of quiet he blamed it on his hangover haha. they basically were just goofing around the whole time not being toooo serios but he said he has some other things in the works, wont do any more reality tv but he has some projects having to do with real estate on the go . He was asked if there was any improper portrayel of his character on the show and he said that he wished he didnt look so readily available to get down on one knee but that the bachelorette did a really good job of speeding up the dating process by isolating you from the world so you're feeling those types of feelings in 8 weeks but to them it seems like a year. he said he saw jillian once in NY and it was really awkward but turned out ok but he hasnt kept in touch with her since then. i think thats all i remember ! ill e-mail u the pics tommorow !

Reid, Kiptyn, Jesse and Michael up close in Calgary

Wish I could have met them today when they were in Calgary to make an appearance at the Calgary Women's Show. Instead, I've copied and pasted a post from someone named "M" (!) in Calgary. She met them today and this is what she posted on the Bachboard. Interesting observations.

"I just got back from Calgary's Women Show and had the chance to meet the "boys". I must say that they are four very ordinary looking men, they are all about 5'9, Kiptyn just a little taller maybe 5'10. Not gorgeous or anything like that.

Michael is really funny and a chatter box, and so is Jesse. Reid and Kiptyn...not so much. Reid was asked why he turned down The Bachelor and he said that he couldn't see himself being "that guy" for the rest of his life, he did say however, that being on the Bachelorette was a PR bonanza for his business and that he is enjoying his 15 minutes but looking forward to returning to a more normal life. He is still single!

Kiptyn was offered the Bachelor but the "negotiations broke down", whatever that means. He said that he couldn't elaborate due to contractual reasons. Reid, Kiptyn and Michael went on the show to find love...Jesse "for the experience". If you ask me he went on the show for publicity for his winery.

Michael said that he might marry Holly Hurst and that he is crazy in love. They are loving Calgary so much that they cancelled their trip to Banff tomorrow so that they could spend another night partying here. Michael said when Jillian found out they were coming to Calgary, she put them in touch with her friends here and they have been taking care of them and that they were awesome.

Reid and Kiptyn came across as really shy and very careful about what they said, Jesse and Michael just "let it all hung out"! They were telling stories that were quite off colour and they were both making fun of Jake. Reid and Kiptyn were kinder and more generous when they were asked about Jake."