Monday, December 20th, 2010
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What Type of Flirter Are You?

This is not one of those quizzes that you can take before you "download" music/cry at how stupid you are for thinking that shit works, as the title suggests, but there is a quiz somewhere in here! According to some research published in the latest version of Communication Quarterly, flirting can be distilled into a kind of "flirting styles inventory" featuring five easy flirting strategies: physical, traditional, polite, sincere, and playful. Wait until Cosmopolitan gets their hands on this, and then wait a bit longer for me to get my hands on what they do with it.

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How to Redecorate Your Entire House for the Holidays

There is this phenomenon, perhaps you've heard of it, perhaps your mother is all about it, involving redecorating one's entire house for the holidays, usually Christmas, but it could be anything you wish, as long as that thing is bound to the colors green and red, appreciates the symbolism of the Christmas tree, thinks that pillows hand-stitched [by your grandmother or a teenager in China] are a great way to express holiday spirit/support your lower back, and believes its celebrants have more important things to do than string lights around a tree and put up valuable, been-in-the-family-forever ornaments one at a time for hours. Martha Stewart, who takes care, [...]

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Five Years in New York: To the Class of 2010 from the Class of 2005

To whom it may concern:

It has been exactly five years since I graduated from a prestigious-if interchangeable with many that are similarly-named-university in New England called Wesleyan and moved to the capital of the world. Though apartment living is but one aspect of life, I should warn you that this letter consists primarily of fond memories of slipshod landlords and asbestos-ridden antechambers. If this is not something that interests you, you will surely perish in New York and ought to make a U-turn on the George Washington Bridge as soon as you can. Over the course of the past 1,825 days on this island-Long Island, that is, and [...]

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Liveblogging the Friskies "Adventureland" Commercial

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The Only Three Female Musicians, According to Many Male Music Critics

In this February issue of Fictional Indie Music Magazine, we're celebrating! We've finally reached the bottom of our winter promo pile, and oddly enough, all of the remaining promos are by female musicians. This is purely coincidental! And there is no correlation between this and the fact that there is only one female music critic working in this office and we can't remember whether her name is Heather or Jennifer.

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The Wikipedia Entry for the iPad… Until Today, by Liz Colville

This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

This article is about Apple's allegedly portable device iPad. For other uses, see iPad (disambiguation). For the handheld digital music device, see iPod. For the gadget that looks like something Jon King would flash during a CNN election broadcast, see iPad(2).

iPad was a prototype for a feminine hygiene product that purported to digitize a woman's menstruation cycle and store it on a password-protected Web server.[1] In the trademark application submitted by the inventor, Larry Bobson, the iPad was described as a "a light-weight, leak-proof device that, for the first time, [...]

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The Unofficial, Unpublished Introduction To An Unfinished Memoir That You Totally Knew Existed, Discovered by Liz Colville

"Committed is an unfurling of [Elizabeth] Gilbert's profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn't indulge another person's emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)" -Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010.

Here I am again, alone in the world, like a newborn baby coated in an amniotic layer of guilt. When I started writing this book, I thought it was going to be about the children that I was finally-finally!-going to have with my second husband, [...]

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