I am ALL FOR experience gifts. Of course, this is after years of getting nearly random crap from my mom who would give me huge bulky (unwanted) things that I couldn't fit in my suitcase, and I then had to argue with her about the disrespect of leaving it behind when I flew home.

Poor Leif, he won't be 16 until his senior year.

He'll do fine--just have him befriend older kids with licenses for the rides, or younger kids who ALSO can't drive. I didn't get my license til senior year (I was 17) and lived in a suburb where you needed a car to get around. Of course, I also had a completely pathetic nerdy social life that mostly involved late nights at restaurants playing cards, or watching X-Files with friends, but whatev'.

Please stop me from arguing with a moron about a 2008 paper about women being more risk adverse than men.

He's taking to mean that women are just more risk adverse, period.

However, upon reading the paper I discovered that it was a)written by two economists b) was a survey of 1300 American college professors c)was solely looking at their financial investment strategies d) did not reference one scholarly journal on any sort of anthropological studies of homo sapiens.

So what I'm getting at is, if you're going to state that "women are more risk adverse as a whole, about everything, all the time, throughout history" you're going to have to provide better evidence than this paper by American economists about how white collar first-worlders invested their money at the start of a recession in the United States.

I am going to need these people to go out and interview 1300 bush people in Africa during a goddamned drought to see how risk-adverse those folks are at investing money in the American stock market.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to forage for a root.

Online video game for people who hate Christmas: [link]

Well, if he's actually saying risk adverse vs. risk averse, you could point out that issue. :)

[link]

And just because someone takes a "safer" route with their finances, doesn't mean in GENERAL...women might be argued to be reacting to societal forces that mean they are more often left penniless by divorce, laid off, likely to be on maternity leave, etc etc. (I'm making up the whys)

Given some of the economic risks taken in the last decade, perhaps a better term would be "stupid averse".

"Would you like to invest in these questionable mortgages?"

"No, no I don't think I would."

"Chicken."

Scola, I got the pog joke (it was a Simpsons reference, wasn't it? "Remember pogs? They're back, and better [bigger?] than ever!").

I'm thinking of doing something similar for Mark, since he doesn't want to do gifts this year, but I'd still like to do something for him

We bought a furnace. I'm thinking about slapping a big shiny bow on it, but Toke the cat would eat it.

Well, I did also buy The Boy an angler fish. It's a thing.

And latex stockings.

Well, sure. Women have been pulling through the recession/stock market fall/housing market fall much better than men. I'm unsure if that has to do with being frightened of risk, or that women have less capital to go bungee jumping with.

MANSPLAINING!

I had to leave the internet yesterday after coming across some pernicious mansplaining on a blog and being unable to point it out without sounding like an asshole. Still was accused of putting sexist words in his mouth!

Same dude just wrote this:

1. We live in a democracy. 2. Women had no right to vote. 3. It was democratically decided by men who did have the vote to allow women to vote too. 4. Therefore, men gave women the right to vote.

Oh, I gotta tell about my glasses!

Um... they're nice. Great to be able to see close up yadda yadda yadda.

Immediately after I left the glasses store with my new glasses, I walked about 20 feet to an ATM. While I was ATMing, a cute woman made eye contact with me. We made eye contact once or twice more, then before I left she smiled at me and held eye contact for a long time.

Then Tuesday, one of my bosses asked me if I had new glasses. When I told him, "Yes," he said, "I thought you were looking smarter yesterday."

So I've concluded my new glasses give me superpowers.