Musings and Amusings

Is this too good to be true?Men Having it all in SwedenMikael Karlsson owns a snowmobile, two hunting dogs and five guns. In his spare time, this soldier-turned-game warden shoots moose and trades potty-training tips with other fathers. Cradling 2-month-old Siri in his arms, he can't imagine not taking baby leave. ''Everyone does.'' 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don't face questions from family, friends and colleagues....

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Womenomics

Women claimed three of the top five spots in Forbes magazine’s 2010 Celebrity power list, with singer Lady Gaga making her first entry and Oprah Winfrey retaking her No 1 position. Talk show host Winfrey earned an estimated US$315 million (NZ$445m), putting her stop the annual Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list for the fourth time.Grammy-winning R & B singer Beyonce rose to second with an estimated US$87 million from a tour and album sales, together...

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Why?

From the New York Times by Maureen Dowd.I had tea and sweets with a group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.I asked why they were not more upset about living in a country where women’s rights were strangled, an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern nation. They told me, somewhat defensively, that the kingdom was moving at its own pace, glacial as that seemed to outsiders.How could such spirited...

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Finance and Investment

From one of my favourites; the Psy-Fi Blog: Geography Is WealthSummarising briefly, the peoples of the European-Asian land mass were favoured because the East-West directionality of the continents meant that people and animals could spread without encountering hugely unfavourable climate conditions. In Africa, for example, spreading North-South meant overcoming widely different temperature conditions, a malarial zone and the Sahara Desert.Europe...

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Who’s counting?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote How do I love thee? Let me count the ways?One assumes she would write a simple numbered list. Easy to read and understand mathematically.Sometimes however we are presented with statistics which on the face of it look impeccable but which are wrong.A recent example caught my eye – abortions for girls have doubled since 1991! The headlines shrieked, the moralists pontificated. But allow for population growth of...

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