Surprises In The Story

There were a few surprises for the University of Washington's Class of 1957 when they opened a time capsule sealed 50 years ago.
Among audiotapes and copies of the yearbook and school newspaper were 1980s-era porn, a condom and some dirty underwear.

Alumni opened the capsule earlier this week in preparation for a public unveiling Saturday during a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the university's communications program. The capsule had been placed in an interior wall of the then-new Communications Building in 1957.

The capsule is being replaced by another created by a student-faculty team.

"The good news is that all the things that were in there are still there," said Jerry Baldasty, chairman of the Department of Communication. "The interesting news is that some other things were added."

There aren't any suspects in the case. But it was located outside the offices of The Daily -- the campus newspaper -- and it's assumed someone from the paper was responsible for the revisionism, said communication alumni and development manager Victoria Sprang.

The new capsule will be filled with digital media with a focus on "communication from a global perspective," said Coma Te, a senior among six students who created the new capsule.

UMMM Iam Cummm.... & loosing

IT could be the answer to many women's prayers - not to mention men's.

A wonder pill has been developed which not only boosts a female's sex drive, but helps her lose weight at the same time.

So far it has been tested only on shrews and monkeys, but scientists believe humans could be taking it within a decade.

Professor Robert Millar discovered the double benefit while developing a hormone to treat loss of libido, a problem which affects millions of women.

During tests on animals, he found that as well as displaying a greater keenness for sex, they also seemed less interested in food.

Female musk shrews and marmosets were injected with the Type 2 Gonadotropin-releasing hormone and displayed classic mating behaviour towards their male counterparts.

In the shrews, this was shown by "rump presentation and tail wagging", while the monkeys began "tongue flicking and eyebrow raising", said the professor.

But the laboratory animals also ate significantly less than usual. In some cases their daily intake was cut by a third.

Professor Millar, director of the Human Reproductive Sciences Unit at the Medical Research Council in Edinburgh, said: "This hormone is distributed in the brain in areas that we suspect affect reproductive behaviour.

"The musk shrew is a very primitive ancestor of primates and when given to the females they displayed reproductive behaviour, and the males would mate with them."

The professor believes women given the hormone would see a similar boost to their sex drive and suppressing of appetite.

He is now working on reproducing it in the form of a pill, which could prove extremely profitable given the amount of interest pharmaceutical companies have shown in enhancing libido.

He said: "It is considered a major pharmaceutical endeavour to address the area of libido. So the next stage is to produce a drug that simulates the actions of this hormone.

"It is most likely that we will do it in partnership with a pharmaceutical firm. It could be available to women within ten years."

Although a number of drug treatments are already on the market aimed at treating obesity and sexual dysfunction, Professor Millar believes his discovery could lead to the first "lifestyle drug" that works on the sex drive and the appetite.

He suspects a pill which simulates the hormone could also work for men, but as yet he has not carried out any tests on male animals.

Dr Lesley Perman-Kerr, a chartered psychologist, said women would be more likely to take the pill to suppress their appetite than to increase their sex drive.

"Some women have problems specific to libido, but often if they go off sex, it's more to do with their relationship than with their level of libido," he said.

"In my experience, when couples come to me and they are not having sex, the last thing they want to do is examine their relationship. They want to believe that it's nothing to do with their relationship.

"So it may be that women would take the pill when they have a good sex life and they want to enhance it."

Angry Kya?

What is the reaction of an individual when extremely angry? Verbal abuse, curses, physical abuse to the self or another person, destruction of property etc.

Bad Anger leads to destruction of relationships.

A father verbally cursed his daughter when he was angry because she didn’t behave in a way that pleased him or treat him the way he wanted to be treated — as the king of the castle.

Guess what happened to their relationship?

The father’s curses, betrayal and emotional abuse didn't affect his daughter at all, but she instead detached herself completely from him forever.

Many of us let our tempers run out of control, turning others bitter over time.

So what should you do when you’re angry? Discuss the issue. Communication resolves misunderstandings.

Or take a walk. Step out for a few minutes to cool off. Cry your heart out, rather than physically abusing someone. Crying when angry and hurt is a great way to express yourself.

And always, always mind your tongue.

Make a conscious effort to stop using abusive words and demeaning sentences.

Learn to forgive. No human is perfect. Learn to adjust rather than constantly being angry and dissatisfied with others.

Who Is She????????????

Born in London, England in July 1967, and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998).

In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of Time Latin America. Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.

Taught creative writing at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis.

Awards Won By Her

• 1993 - TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation
• 1999 - O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 1999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 2000 - Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• short story "Interpreter of Maladies" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies
• 2000 - M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation
• 2002 - Guggenheim Fellowship

Gave up shen is none other then Jhumpa Lahiri

My Weekend

I double book my dates with women. It sounds all jerky and stuff, but when I make plans with a girl I don’t know very well, I almost always make plans with another girl on the same day and time. One of them invariably cancels, so I have a backup. What happens if neither of them cancels? Believe it or not, it has never happened.

This time, I was the cancellor, rather than the cancellee due to a series of crappy events that eventually got so ridiculous it made me laugh like a crazy person.

It all started at 8 am. I got up and decided to make my standard breakfast of scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of turkey bacon, or as I like to call it, “meat flavored paper”. In the course of making the eggs, I thought, “hey I should drop a little cheese on these guys and deep fry them, since just having eggs and bacon won’t destroy my heart as quickly as my ‘deep fried everything’ diet plan.”

I buy the shredded cheese in the re-sealable bags because I am either too lazy to shred it myself, or too poor to buy a cheese grater.

OPEN LETTER TO ALL PRODUCERS OF SHREDDED CHEESE IN RE-SEALABLE BAGS-

Please find a new vendor for the zip seal part of your bags. The zip seal bags you make can only be opened by destroying the zip seal part, thus rendering your cheese as un-resealable as every other crap cheese on the shelf.

Case in point- I tore the bag where they said to tear it, but the zip-up part of it was still hanging on with the tenacity of a fat chick who thinks she is in love. To solve this problem I used the man method, in which you overcome the offending object with brute force. The tensile strength of an 8 oz bag of sergento fancy shredded cheddar cheese is between 15 and 20 pounds, and results in catastrophic failure along the extrusion grain of the plastic (I know these fancy words because of several years spent as an industrial designer stress-testing products).

Shredded cheese showered down around my kitchen like a ticker tape parade. It was in my hair, in my shirt, all over the stove/counter/sink, and covering the floor. Nice. I got so involved in cleaning it up that I burned my bacon. Yes, it was the last two slices.

Grocery list-

Turkey bacon

Shredded cheese (non re-sealable)

I ate breakfast and checked my voice messages and e-mail to see which girl had canceled. Girl #1 had something else going on, so girl #2 was going to meet me at Willie’s on Piedmont at 12:30. Easy enough. I took a shower that was luckily uneventful and got I my car with plenty of time to spare. I had a flat tire, due to parking in the lot behind the building that is paved with glass shards and nails. I cannot put into words how much I can’t wait to get into my condo and away from this ghetto stinkhole building and the morons who live here. I always carry a can of “fix-a-flat”, so the tire problem was fixed in four minutes. By now I should have realized that today was going to be a tough one. I left and headed to Willies.

Not the willies on Piedmont, where the girl was supposed to be meeting me, but the Willies on Roswell because I am stupid. I think that after a couple of things go wrong in your day, you create the rest of your problems yourself. Having been preoccupied with the cheese dousing and the flat tire, I had a visual in my head of where I was going to meet this person, and that’s where I went, even though it made no sense. I pride myself in being on time or early, and arrived in the wrong place at exactly the right time.

By now I was pissed. Almost to the point of being unsalvageable. My own mistakes will irritate me more than anything else in the world, and once I reach a certain point of irritaedness, I’m canceling my plans because I’ll be in a foul mood and don’t want to be around anyone. So I had to call the girl and tell her that I was legally retarded and would be there in fifteen minutes. I said I’d call her when I got there and we’d meet up. Peoples’ agonizing driving habits are amplified when you are in a hurry.

When I finally got to the Piedmont Park area at 1 p.m. (we were going to stroll around the Dogwood Art Festival and make fun of stuff), I was turned away from three parking lots by rude cops whose job it was that day to make sure people didn’t use certain lots to park for the event. I didn’t get pissy with them, because after all, they are making $30k a year to get shot at and tell people where not to park. I was just having a bad day. I ended up driving around the surrounding neighborhoods looking for a spot to park, but was met at every turn by irate homeowners who didn’t want me parking in front of their house and more cops who said I couldn’t park anywhere.

Finally, I was parked in a spot about a mile from where I was going. I reminded myself why I hate big public events like this. I was going to walk a mile to go fight a crowd for a few hours so I can see a bunch of crap that I don’t care about and pretend to be charming for a girl who probably doesn’t think I’m as great as I am.

I flipped open my phone to call the girl, dialed her number, and was met with silence. My phone’s battery had died. It took every drop of my self-control not to spike my phone into the sidewalk and stomp on it until I felt better. Since I am a grown-up, I just put it in my pocket, got in my car, and headed home. I called her when I got home and apologized for being a massive flake. She was very understanding, and laughed at my account of the day’s events.

It really feels good to write about it. I am actually in a good mood again. Oh, I’m still a little nervous about the building falling down around me or something, but I’m all smiles. My chameleon is relaxing on the back porch eating bees and flies and stuff, the cat is doing a brilliant impression of a doorstop, and I’m about to resume work on the latest portrait.

Life is good.