The academic study, published in the European Journal of Operational Research looked at 1,074 couples aged between 19 and 75 years, to find which social factors were most important to a long and happy relationship.
Besides the man being five years older than his bride, and that his bride should share the same heritage, they concluded that a wife should be at least 27 per cent more intelligent than her husband. She should also hold a degree, while he should not.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the academics found that marrying a divorcee reduced the chance of wedded bliss.
Nguyen Vi Cao, who led the research, promised: “If people follow these guidelines in choosing their partners they can increase their chances of a happy, long marriage by up to 20 per cent.”
Relationship experts thought there might be something in the research.
Kate Figes, who interviewed 120 people for her recent book on understanding relationship, Couples, said: “Aren’t most women the more intelligent in a relationship anyway? That’s my first reaction.”
Scientists find mathematical formula for the perfect wife (Telegraph)
Last November, I posted about the protests that erupted within the UC system over registration fee increases of 30%. Police struck students with batons and tasered them during protests during the regents meeting in Los Angeles where the fee increase was approved on a bipartisan basis. Students thereafter barricaded themselves within buildings at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. As students occupied Wheeler Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley for approximately 15 hours, a large crowd of students, UC staff and the public generally rallied in their support, and prevented their forcible, potentially violent arrest, by UC police.
The protesters positioned themselves within the social framework of opposition to the imposition of neoliberal policies within California, policies that result in incomprehensible increases in salary and benefits for people like UC President Mark Yudof and the newly hired Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, while classes are cut, class sizes increased and students required to pay substantial increases in fees during one of the worst recessions in US history. Meanwhile, rank and file state workers experience 15% pay cuts, while judges complain about the closure of the courtrooms one day a week. In California, the more you make in the public sector, the more immune you are from participating in the sacrifice being imposed by the Governor and the Legislature.
Now, the students are back… having performed significant outreach into the community, especially in the East Bay. Not surprisingly, the faculty at UC Berkeley, as it was during the occupation of Wheeler Hall, is scared the protesters will take control of the movement away from enlightened minds like them.
Via io9, check out Susan Treister’s epic map of science fiction weaponry from the dawn of the genre till now. Ms. Treister aligned the weapons on a successive series of Qabalistic trees of life (nice scheme… no, her attributions don’t look correct, but nice try!) A stunning piece of work!
In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.
“As 1966 began, San Francisco was rapidly becoming the epicenter of a cultural and musical shift that would impact the world. Dance hall promoters like Bill Graham and Chet Helms were in the early stages of opening venues where local bands could perform for the throngs of young people looking to dance socialize and listen to live music. Local writer Ken Kesey and his friends (known as The Merry Pranksters) were doing the same on a smaller scale, but adding high quality LSD to the mix, which was then still legal and readily available. As Kesey’s parties, or “Acid Tests” as they were called, began attracting more and more adventurous people, it was inevitable that The Merry Pranksters parties would merge with local dance hall venues, which is exactly what happened on January 8, 1966.
On that night The Pranksters and their Acid Test house band, The Grateful Dead, descended on Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, loading in piles of sound equipment, projectors and strobe lights and ready to turn attendees on to LSD while subjecting them to sensory bombardment. The band had literally just become The Grateful Dead, having recently changed their name from The Warlocks, and was just one component of the overall experience. Ken Kesey, strategically overseeing everything, was also plugged in to the P.A. system and could ramble stream-of-consciousness commentary over the proceedings. Various Pranksters were also equipped with roving microphones, which could be fed in and out at any time. Mass free-form creativity while under the influence was the goal. Often it was utter chaos, sometimes it was divinely inspired and for the vast majority of attendees, it was incredibly liberating to “freak freely” with others who felt the same.
While no mere audio recording could ever capture an Acid Test experience, this one does manage to capture some of the spontaneous free-formlessness and remains one of the earliest (if not the earliest) examples of a live Grateful Dead recording, when they were essentially still a cover band playing for dancers.
The recording begins with the proceedings just getting underway and not surprisingly, plenty of chaos onstage. As The Grateful Dead attempt to get the stage powered up, Captain Ken Kesey is rambling away, welcoming attendees to tonight’s journey. After several minutes of embracing absurdity, The Grateful Dead begin the slow blues of “I’m A King Bee,” sounding not too different from the early Rolling Stones, but more hypnotic. Although primitive, many of the elements of the prototype San Francisco sound are in place, from Garcia’s banjo style electric guitar picking and his use of twang bar to end his riff lines to Pigpen’s largely improvised vocal style. Garcia and Pigpen team up on lead vocals for the next number, a bouncy cover of “I’m A Hog For You Baby,” which also includes Kesey interjecting Prankster style public service announcements over the band. Although occasionally tempo-challenged, up to this point drummer Bill Kruetzman comes across as the most accomplished musician here and when others drift off, he and Phil Lesh help keep things somewhat anchored.
The musical highlight of this recording follows as The Grateful Dead play a solid 17-minute sequence consisting of Pigpen’s “Caution” segueing directly into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” Here one can hear the promise of this band and everyone turns in a respectable performance, particularly Pigpen and Garcia, who were clearly leading the way. “Caution” soon becomes a driving hyper-jam, featuring a great early example of Garcia’s shredding technique. The “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” that follows is downright spooky, thanks in no small part to Pigpen’s organ work, which rarely gets much mention. With the band cranking away about nine minutes in, suddenly the police pull the plug!
Kesey, not one to miss an opportunity for increasing the absurdity, announces “The chief security agent has taken over and has pulled the plug on the band! Completely nullifying the engines!” Several other roving microphones are also heard, including what sounds like an instantaneous tape loop of a police officer saying “Clear the house! The dance is over!” Many humorous and sarcastic comments are heard eminating from the stage as well as the room, while Bob Weir begins baiting the cops with a spontaneous monologue. As the police converge on the stage, several people begin belting out a hideously off-key rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” just to needle the police a little more. Amidst grumbling and noise, the tape runs out with a commentary from Jerry Garcia, who exclaims, “In the end, its nothing but mindless chaos. Good old mindless chaos, hassling, ever hassling…”
One of the nice things about the era we live in—sometimes I call it the YouTube era, other times “The Age of Consumer Enlightenment,” it varies—is that this is a time when any piece of music or video is almost instantly consumable just for the asking, and as a result the “walls” between the various genres of music have fallen by the wayside. If it’s good, it’s good.
For the past week, I’ve been obsessively listening to two mixed CDs given to me by DJ Nobody (he of Low End Theory fame) that skip wonderfully between musical genres and the cracks between them. They might be the best mixed CDs I’ve ever heard. From pastoral folk to glammy heavy metal to insane psych to easy listening, love songs and thick, thick FUNK, these mixes work, and work great You can buy them from his MySpace page. If you trust my tastes at all, these CDs are the shit, believe you me. I’ve probably listened to them 30 times each.
So this got me thinking that I needed to make a CD back for him, you know, to show him how it’s done—the young whippersnapper!—and this is one of the tracks I set aside. In the punk era it would have been heresy to say you liked prog rock, but how naff would you feel about boosting a song like Mason William’s Classical Gas to all of your bemohawked friends? That’s what I thought, but seen in the light of day in the year of our Lord 2010, this song is fucking rad, isn’t it? Enjoy!
Self-promotion wank-fest alert ! My duo project with composer/wunderkind Alex Graham dba The Internal Tulips has just had our first LP released on esteemed UK electronic music label Planet Mu. It was about 5 years in the making and we are proud parents indeed. The occasional critic has agreed ! Sez Fact Magazine : “Strewn with feeling, wonderfully imagined and beautiful conceived, you couldn’t ask for an LP with more personality, emotion, guts and soul.” Thanks very much, check’s in the mail. There are excerpts up on the label site and below is a spooky video by my bro, Josh Laner for one of the tunes. It’s nearly as good as Final Placement.
The Letter (1940, William Wyler. Bette Davis)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor)
Shadow Of A Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock. Joseph Cotten)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck, Fred Macmurray)
Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk. Dick Powell)
Scarlet Street (1945, Fritz Lang. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett)
Laura (1945, Otto Preminger. Gene Tierney)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulhmer. Ann Savage)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman)
Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth)
The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak. Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks. Humphrey Bogart)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Tay Garnett. John Garfield, Lana Turner)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth, Welles)
Out Of The Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur. Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum)
Brute Force (1947, Jules Dassin. Burt Lancaster)
Force Of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky. John Garfield, Marie Windsor)
The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise. Robert Ryan)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed. Orson Welles)
Criss Cross (1949, Siodmak. Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo)
Gun Crazy (1950, Joseph H. Lewis. John Dall, Peggy Cummins)
In A Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray. Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston. Sterling Hayden)
Night And The City (1950, Jules Dassin. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney)
Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder. Gloria Swanson, William Holden)
Ace In The Hole (1951, Billy Wilder. Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger. Jean Simmons)
Pickup On South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller. Richard Widmark)
The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang. Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich. Gaby Rodgers)
Night Of The Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton. Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick. Sterling Hayden)
Elevator To The Gallows (1958, Louis Malle. Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet)
Touch Of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller. Constance Towers)
Directed by Tamra Davis, the documentary features never-before seen footage of the prolific artist painting, talking about his art, and existing in the two years prior to his death in 1988.
The OST features music from Mike D and Ad Rock.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child was released on Feb 21st.
dba 
has just had our first LP released on esteemed UK electronic music label