Trivia, bitches!

I’ll be hosting trivia night at the Wonderland Ballroom this Monday, September 24th.  I can only promise not to have some stupid category like “Florida State University” where no one can get a single answer right.  The question now is, will Nobody Summons Megatron show?

Damned if you do…

The unabridged Kathryn Jean Lopez:

While I, of course, think her silence on the MoveOn ad is despicable and that she should have been first out of the box to condemn it over a week ago, what was she going to do today? If she voted to condemn the ad, what would it look like? Like Republicans (and Darth Vader’s president!) shamed and harassed her into it. Now she can say, “The MoveOn ad was awful. But it was just an ad. I’m certain General Petraeus has handled worse attacks. And I know the Senate has more substantive things to do that make symbolic – largely political – points.” MoveOn certainly has something right. Let’s “move on,” there’s work to do here for our troops.

This can be filtered down to the following points:

• Hillary had, at most, a 24 hour window to do what I wanted her to do. If she does what I want now, it’s only because of the tremendous pressure I applied.
• This issue is really not that important, even though my blog has talked of nothing else since the ad ran.

That is all.

Bring Back the OTA!

I’d just like to pimp Mark Hoofnagle’s many, many pleas to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment. I didn’t know that such an organization existed in the first place, let alone it being shut down, but it certainly explains a lot about the state of science in Congress over the last decade. Contact your congressman or senator today!

Matt Zeitlin doesn’t sleep. He waits.

From Details magazine’s Gadabout blog, two weeks ago:

Among the universe’s cruel ironies—pretty much anything having to do with puberty, say, or the career arc of Michael Bay—this has to be near the top of the heap: Women typically hit their sexual stride in their mid-thirties, just as many guys the same age are pulling up lame with the equivalent of a sex-drive charley horse.

Okay, the sprinting metaphor is a bit much, but you get the idea. Guys experience a huge surge of testosterone during adolescence, but by their late twenties, that jolt is already on the wane. A few years later, women are finally ready to join the party.

Does it get any crueler?

And this situation may be more acute than ever.

“There are a lot of very attractive women in their thirties not getting the sex they want,” says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love,
and the Sensual Years. “And it happens as the relationship matures.”

From CNN.com, last week (H/T Eve Fairbanks):

A 2003 study by AARP revealed that 34 percent of all women over 40 in the survey were dating younger men, and 35 percent preferred it to dating older men.

“Societal attitudes have definitely changed,” says Susan Winter, 52, co-author of “Older Women, Younger Men: New Options for Love and Romance” — and she would know. At age 40, she was dating a 19-year-old. “We had to break it off. Quite frankly, his mother made it so impossible,” Winter says of the six-year relationship, which inspired her book. “But (that kind of discrimination) would not be allowable now.”

Just give it 7 to 10 years, Young MZ. She’ll come around.

For those not familiar, my take on the current status of Matt and his crush below: