Some interesting reading

It’s easy to break your child’s leg by having him/her ride down the playground slide on your lap: I used to do this all the time with my kids. Never knew how easy it was to hurt their little legs! It’s actually safer to let them ride down the slide by themselves.

Regular, aerobic exercise makes you smarter:Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying. “They loved the toys,” Rhodes says, and the mice rarely ventured into the empty, quieter portions of their cages. But unless they also exercised, they did not become smarter.

The evolution of the runner’s high:  this is the reason I run. I feel SO GOOD afterwards. All those natural endocannabinoids flooding my system after a long, hard run keep me coming back for more–even though I find the actual running itself tedious and painful. I’ve discovered I have to create a story for myself while I’m running: my latest one is that I’m running away from zombies. I also distract my mind by talking to a running partner. I don’t have an iPod so I haven’t used music yet. But I’m thinking I need to do that, too.

Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey have made female submission the new erotica: “it’s natural to wonder why women are thronging to the story of an innocent who jumps into the arms of a Seattle sadist with a “Red Room of Pain” full of chains, clamps, whips, canes, flogs and cuffs, falling in love to the soundtrack of the Police’s “King of Pain.” Yeah, I’m wondering about that, too. Ick. Am I the only one who isn’t titillated by the sexual subjugation of women? Call me a prude, but I don’t want a pornified marriage.

Hookup culture debases women: Bill Bennett provides an interesting insight into why Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey are so popular. “If this is progress for women, what would regression look like?”

 

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  • http://somewiseguy.com ThatGuyKC

    Yikes! Thank you for the slide tip.

    I HATE running and always feel like dying afterwards. Lifting weights, however, is totally different. Definitely addicted to those endorphins.

    Never read the Twilight books and hadn’t heard about 50 Shades of Grey until yesterday. I think disgusted and disappointed about covers it.

    Glad to see you and the likes of Tamara (Out Loud) combating crappy culture trends.

  • gooddaysunshine

    On Twilight:  I read the books and absolutely hated the character Bella.  What a boring, one dimensional protagonist.  And I didn’t like the idea in this book that he’s the “bad boy” and she shouldn’t be with him, but she is anyway.  I do not want my future daughters to get the idea that real life bad boys are deep down really good guys. Yuck.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4QMUQWAZLLY4IXV7UKUW42HTSQ jeanelane

    Speaking to your last 2 points, isn’t is amazing (not not really) what life without God or with making something/someone else your god can bring you to.  We will never combat it without the Lord’s help.

    Speaking to your first point, we will never, ever be able to keep our children entirely safe.  And don’t beat yourself up about being the cause of any accident.  Just learn and move on.  I burnt my son’s leg with a curling iron because he pulled on the cord.  I felt awful for a long time, but it doesn’t fix anything.  Yes, we need to learn to engage brain first.  Which I suppose speaks to your second point. 

    Whenever I have done exercise before, I have never ever noticed anything that would give me incentive to keep on.  I’ve never been able to run, even as a young child.  Now at 59, no way!  But I have tried other things, which never made a change.  If nothing happens within 3-6 months, what is there to keep me going?

  • Jwhit221

    In defense of Twilight, it actually has no real similarity to 50 Shades. There is no sexual subjugation (in fact, no actual sex at all, other than the implied honeymoon sex scene). I actually love the books, but they are obviously fantasy–not a statement on real human relationships, because the relationships focused on are neither real nor human. :)

    50 Shades is linked to Twilight only because it was posted on a fan-fiction site, but it has no actual link to the plot or characters of the Twilight series. And you are not alone in being skeeved out by that particular theme, lol.

  • theresa46

    50 shades was on Dr Oz today…..call me an old fashioned prude, but I call this degregation and it does NOT turn me on.  I can see a whole lotta law suits coming out of this

  • KatR

    The 50 Shades books are atrociously written, with graphic sex scenes on every other page. Just horrendous, smutty trash.

    I loved them.

    Listen, after several years of reading mostly books on Christianity and it was time to close the chapter (pardon the pun) on that time period. The books are the literary equivalent of a vanilla-bacon-maple ice cream with twinkies binge – I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, and I can’t say it’s good for me, but it was fun at the time.