1. Brush twice a day!

2. Dress right for the weather.

3.  Visit the dentist regularly.

4.  Get plenty of rest.

5.  Make sure your hair is dry before going outside.

6.  Eat right.

7.  Always wear a seatbelt.

8.  Get outside in the sun every once in a while.

9.  Control your drinking of alcoholic beverages.

10.  Smile!  It will make you feel better.

11.  Don’t over indulge yourself.

12.  Bathe regularly.

13.  Read to exercise the brain.

14.  Surround yourself with friends.

15.  Stay away from too much caffeine.

16.  Use the bathroom regularly.

17.  Get plenty of exercise.

18.  Have your eyes checked regularly.

19.  Eat plenty of vegetables.

20.  Believe that people will like you for who you are.

21. Forgive and Forget

22. Take plenty of Vacations.

23. Celebrate all Special Occasions.

24. Pick up a Hobby

25. Love your neighbors as yourself.

Do all these things and you will be a happier, healthier person!

Humor: Till Derrida do us part
Posted on Thursday, August 25, 2005, on Harpers magazine, originally from August, 2002. This transcript is from the wedding of Cary Wolfe and Allison Hunter. Wolfe teaches critical theory at SUNY Albany; Hunter is an artist.

JUDGE SILVERMAN: Friends and relatives, we gather here today to witness the marriage of Allison and Cary. To do so, we must perform these vows in an act of ceremony. But what are these things: to wed, to marry, to take a wedding vow? They are what the philosopher J. L. Austin, in his study How to Do Things With Words, calls ‘speech acts,’ of which there are two different kinds: constative speech acts, whose primary attribute is that they say something; and performative speech acts (of which this ceremony is an example), whose primary attribute is that they do something. A performative speech act, as Austin puts it, doesn’t describe a state of affairs; it possesses the crucial feature of accomplishing the very act to which it refers. The very act of saying it makes it so. It’s not enough just to think the words of the wedding vow, no matter how sincerely you may think them. (If it were enough, I wouldn’t be here and neither would you.) It’s not enough even to say them. (If it were, Allison and Cary could just recite these lines to each other on the subway, say, or while making risotto, and—voila—they’d be married.) Although we’ve just begun the ceremony—or have we?—some interesting questions have already gathered on the horizon: Is this set of words, so far, ‘accepted’? Are they ‘appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked’? Are we executing the procedure ‘correctly’ and ‘completely’? Is it enough simply to say, ‘Do you, Allison, take Cary to be your lawfully wedded husband?’

ALLISON: I do.

JUDGE SILVERMAN: And do you, Cary, take Allison to be your lawfully wedded wife?

CARY: I do.

JUDGE SILVERMAN: As it turns out, it is enough, and the words just uttered by both Allison and Cary are sufficient—but not because of the words themselves. First of all—according to Austin and according to the law—the words must be meant ‘seriously’ and not self-referentially. The problem with that, though, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out in his discussion of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin, is that the distinction between serious and nonserious is always uncertain, always subject to deconstruction, and any attempt to solve that problem by insisting on the ‘proper’ context for a statement is bound to fail. For example, we are all familiar with the signs at airport security checkpoints that read, ‘All remarks concerning bombs and weapons will be taken seriously.’ Such signs, Culler notes, attempt ‘to preclude the possibility of saying in jest, “I have a bomb in my shoe,” by identifying such utterances as serious statements. But this codification fails to arrest the play of meaning, because ‘the structure of language grafts this codification onto the context it attempts to master,’ creating ‘new opportunities for obnoxious behavior,’ such as, ‘If I were to remark that I had a bomb in my shoe, you would have to take it seriously, wouldn’t you?’—a statement ‘whose force is a function of context but which escapes the prior attempt to codify contextual force.’ It’s a bit like George Carlin’s observation about those same signs. ‘NO JOKES,’ perhaps, ‘but what about riddles?’ Our point is that the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘nonserious’ as determining what makes a performative binding doesn’t solve the problem; it only pushes it back a notch. At which point, we can only fall back on the very invocation of ‘sincerity’ that Austin’s idea of the performative seems designed to deflate. We can only ask, Did you, Cary and Allison, seriously mean what you just said about taking each other as husband and wife?

CARY AND ALLISON: Yes, we did.

JUDGE SILVERMAN: Okay, good. Now we’re getting somewhere, legally speaking. Austin may in the end be wrong, as Derrida suggests, about seriousness being decisive, but what he is right about is this: when such words are uttered in the ‘appropriate’ context—by two parties who have obtained a marriage license, presided over by me (‘by the power vested in me,’ as one often hears), and so on—then those words are nevertheless binding, no matter what anyone thinks. All of which is why the very first definition of the word ‘marry’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘to join for life as husband and wife according to the laws and customs of a nation.’ And this, in turn, is why it is misguided to think that what validates a wedding ceremony is the making public of innermost feelings, and the sincerity or earnestness thereof. That may be a satisfactory performance, but it is beside the point of the wedding vow as a performative. This is why Austin insists (in a stipulation almost too good to be true for our purposes) that ‘the act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting’—which is, incidentally, one of the meanings of the word ‘wed’—‘is to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign.’ To understand the act otherwise—to see it as, indeed, the outward sign of an inward and spiritual action—is precisely what makes most wedding vows written by the bride and groom so unsatisfactory to Cary and Allison. Such pronouncements, heartfelt though they may be, indulge in a fundamental misunderstanding. They do not understand that the power of the wedding vow as a performative utterance derives not from its external registration of the bride and groom’s intimate, spiritual feelings—as if somehow the more heartfelt and confessional your ceremony is, the more married you are—but rather from the external, conventional nature of the act itself. This is why Cary and Allison are not going to drone on today about how much they care about each other, how they promise to do this and not do that, and so on. First of all, they assume that you all already know how they feel about each other without being told in graphic and maudlin detail—that’s why you’re here. And second of all, it takes a lifetime, not twenty minutes, for two people to define for themselves what the word ‘marriage’ means. Your presence here is simply to witness their commitment to undertake such a definition. In sum, then, it is not the ‘uniqueness’ or ‘originality’ or ‘sincerity’ of the vow that carries its force but precisely what Derrida calls its ‘iterability’ or ‘citationality’, its repeatability, its utter unoriginality (Culler: 316-17). So it is that we find ourselves at this moment in the middle of a vow that is itself largely about vows. That such a vow may itself be taken as highly ‘original’ perfectly exemplifies Derrida’s point about statement and context that provides the lift in George Carlin’s joke about airport security signs: If we wrote a vow about vows, you would have to take it seriously, wouldn’t you? So it isn’t that you, Allison and Carey, have said particular words, or even that you have performed particular acts such as the customary exchanging of rings to symbolize your commitment to each other.

[Cary and Allison exchange rings.]
Rather, it is that you have agreed to do and say these things under certain binding circumstances—circumstances to which you have, as it were, surrendered yourselves. And now I will say, ‘by the power vested in me’, that I now pronounce you husband and wife. Cary, you may now kiss not your girlfriend, or your domestic partner, but your wife with a binding force more powerful than all the kisses that came before.
[Cary and Allison kiss]

USA: Some people ask if handwriting has a practical purpose in an era of computer keyboards beside the occasional retro appeal of a handwritten thank-you note?

When the Remington typewriter was introduced in 1873, people began predicting the death of penmanship. The Zaner-Bloser Co. published penmanship curriculum starting in 1904 and during the 1960s and 1970s recommended 45 minutes a day of writing. By the 1980s, they recommended only fifteen minutes a day, and now more like ten, and only 12% of teachers had taken a course in how to teach penmanship. Educators noticed decline in quality of students’ penmanship and increase in letter-reversals: they’d forgotten to mind your p’s and q’s.

But ‘when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these students to learn if handwriting was an automatic process’, says Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting without Tears.

Since this and other evidence suggests that handwriting fluency helps build learning, the College Board, to reverse the de-emphasis on handwriting and composition in 2005 added a handwritten essay to the Scholastic Aptitude Test. ‘If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children’s skil level will begin to be addressed,’ says Ed Hardin, senior content specialist at the College Board. The effect will probably trickle down to the middle schools and to third grade, where the problem often begins.

A new study by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham says most primary school teachers believe students with fluent handwriting produce written assignments superior in quality and quantity and so get higher grades. From KG to grade 4, children think and write at the same time. Only later is mental composition separated from the physical process of writing. If they struggle to remember how to write, their ability to express themselves suffers. They need automatic motions, both for expressive writing and for note-taking, which they’ll need later in life. ‘Measures of speed among elementary-school students are good predictors of the quality and quantity of their writing in middle school,’ says Stephen Peverly, professor of psychology and education and Columbia University Teachers College. So now they want it back in the curriculum. ‘After all, no one has suggested that the invention of the calculator means we don’t have to teach kids how to add, and spelling is still a prized skill in the era of spell check. If we stop teaching penmanship, it will not only hasten the dreaded day when brides acknowledge wedding gifts by email; the bigger danger is, they’l be composed even more poorly than they already are’, says Raina Kelley, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Newsweek 2007 Nov 12, p69.

USA: Bedbugs: First, very itchy bites, raised welts overnight; Second, scarlet spots on your sheets, or clusters of little black dots; Third, red bugs, slightly bigger than ticks, crawling on sheets, pillows, legs. ‘This insect is a cryptic, bloodsucking parasite that bites people at night while sleeping, and it’s one tough critter….They used to be extremely common in hospitals and movie theaters, and now, that’s where you pick them up’, says Michael Potter, entomology professor at University of Kentucky. He adds, ‘Every major university in the US has bedbugs in their housing, but they don’t know it or don’t want to admit it.’ (So that tells us his university does.) Bedbugs often feast on one person and ignore another—even in the same bed. They want human blood, but don’t spread a known disease. When they appear to be gone, that’s not the end. ‘They can live for up to a year without a meal….You’ll always have these lingering questions. It’s a little like living with cockroaches, but these guys are living off you’, says Michael Raupp, entomology professor at University of Maryland. They can burrow and live in spaces as thin as a credit card—behind picture frames, in floor cracks and crevices, inside wooden hangers.

They’ve returned to life in the West due to: cheap air travel to exotic locales where the pest was never eradicated; elimination of long-lived pesticides people placed along baseboards. If you go four months or longer without being bitten, you’re probably safe, but check hotel mattress and linens.

BELGIUM: Ernst Rietzschel, with team, of Ghent University conducted a study of 1,301 women aged 33 to 55 in two Belgian towns, 81% of whom use the pill, and found that women who use the pill have triple the expected levels of an enzyme linked with cardiovascular inflammation. They used ultrasound to test carotid arteries on each side of the neck and femoral arteries in each leg. A woman’s odds of having plaque in one carotid artery increased by 17% and in both carotids by 42% for every ten years of pill use. The odds of having plaque in a single femoral artery increased by 28% and in both by 34%. Together, this means birth control pills can cause plaques that build up 20-30% every ten years in arteries and can endanger the heart.

The pill is already known to increase blood pressure and risk of blood clots. Jennifer Mieres of New York University School of Medicine, says, ‘If you’re going to take birth control pills, you need to be aggressive about reducing your other risk factors: smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol, diet and lifestyle.’

Better solution, long since known to South Indian women: eat papaya every day for breakfast—that’s a preventative. If you want a child, stop eating papaya. If you haven’t been eating papaya, and suddenly want a morning-after pill, eat green papaya.

He was named after Francis Scott Key, a distant relative who wrote ‘Star Spangled Banner’ (America’s national anthem).

Like most teens, Scott loved girls. After college temporary loves, he met Ginevra King on the last days before Christmas break in 1915. She came from a wealthy Chicago family. They became pen pals of love notes. By the end of the year, Scott dropped out of Princeton due to illness and poor grades. He wrote in his diary that the romance had stopped, that he rarely heard from Ginerva, and he felt crushed.

Scott wrote one of America’s greatest novels, The Great Gatsby.

Scott’s wife, Zelda, in an interview with the New York Tribune in 1922, said she more than once recognized in her husband work pieces of her old diaries and letters from friends.

Through his writing, he made the wealth he craved, but spent it just as fast in social life.
Scott drank consistently, died of a heart attack when he was only 44 years old.

Zelda became schizophrenic and was hospitalized in 1932. She died when a fire broken out in the Highland Mental Institution in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948.

I visited the Fitzgerald home in Alabama—it’s in the worst condition of any literary figure’s home I’ve ever seen. Very sad, like Scott’s and Zelda’s own end.

In 2002, a study by Brett Pelham, associate professor at SUNY University in Buffalo, New York, found people disproportionately likely to live in cities or states resembling their names, have careers resembling their names, and marry people whose surnames begin with the same letter as their own. His study emphasized positive outcomes.

In 2007, psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego, say in a Psychological Science article that people prefer their own names and initials—‘name-letter effect’, and so students with names starting with C or D get lower grades on average than students whose names begin with A or B. Major league baseball players whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out. The research effect is more than coincidence but still small.