It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences.

— Tim Kreidler - The Referendum. There are so many quotable sentences in this article, I just picked one. I may be still thirty, but totally identify with the writer - and the fact that Portugal is still a conservative society doesn’t help either. (via Kottke)

‘If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.’ ‘Women are better liars because they’re more psychologically sophisticated,’ says Dr Holmes.

— Via psychobabble: A study shows women cheat more often, but are better at lying about it. Yes, it’s a bit of ‘science reporting’ from the Daily Mail so take it with a very heavy grain of salt. But still, both the writer and the schlimazl in me revel in this kind of news. In related ‘news’, talking to attractive women renders men temporarily less inteligent. Again, it’s ‘science reporting’ from the British press so proceed with caution, but on the other hand - oh! duh!

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries.

— Erich Fromm (via psychotherapy)

Over at Boing Boing there’s an interesting post about how most people prefer cars with ‘angry faces’. This is, in fact, something that has bothered me for a while. Even though some people, such as your humble narrator, just drive some car (meaning: it was given to me so I hadn’t much of a choice), I think more often than not a car’s design offers a pretty good image of the person driving it. There is, for instance, a pretty interesting essay by Nick Perry on his book Hyperreality and Global Culture on why the BMW 635CSi is evil.

From an European standpoint, Audi and Seat are the main offenders in exploiting the ‘evil look’, and I’d say three-quarters of the time some bastard is pushing close behind me in the motorway, he’s driving one of those. Those cars may have the airbags and the intelligent braking systems, but are actually designed for unsafe driving. Remember the Honda CRX? One really good machine - shame that the place to see one is the junkyard, and it’ll be severely beaten.

Of course, there are also the ‘sensible’ Toyotas and whatnot whose drivers will cut you off only to drive very slowly - the single road event that makes me step out of the car in the next light and beat the guy who did it with a large stick - so unsafe driving is obviously not something only people with angry-eyed cars do. But as they probably say, the headlights offer a look inside the driver’s soul…

The rather interesting blog The Map Scroll has a post on Why We’re Fucked, that is, the world’s humungously uneven Balances of Trade.

You already know the United States owes a lot, China is owed a lot, however the true story lies here, in a per-capita account balance map. Americans and Australians, still not surprisingly, consume a real lot more than they can afford, but who else? Iceland, also not surprisingly is a black hole of deficit, but then come Greece, Spain and good old Portugal. Whaa? Us Portuguese spending far more than we can? No way, I’m sure we earned all those German automobiles with hard labour!

Entre uma rocha e um sítio duro

N’o Procrastinador Profissional lanço-me contra o fenómeno do trabalho não remunerado ‘oferecido’ aos licenciados.

- A rant against the no-pay internships that constitute 80% of job ‘offers’ for young people with college degrees here in Portugal. You can attempt to read it. It’ll seem funny even though it isn’t.