I am honored...really. :) When Tony Thomas, some "pastor" I've never heard of either, calls your book worthless, you're onto something. What are the qualifications for being a "pastor", anyway? Are there any?

2/16/2007

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GUEST COLUMNIST: Love the one you are with By TONY THOMAS I learned early on that many of our presidents were all too human. From 1952 to 1974, all our presidents had extramarital trysts. Athletes weren't much better. Ever hear of Mickey Mantle? He grew up three miles north of my hometown and he had a string of girlfriends from northeast Oklahoma all the way to centerfield in Yankee Stadium. NASA seemed to be the last bastion of integrity. In the early days, the major networks covered every launch, almost always during school hours. As a result, our astronauts were revered, just behind God. Apollo 8 took Bill Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell to the moon and back and while they orbited, they read from the Bible. Those feelings might explain the disappointment of many in hearing the news of Lisa Nowak, the astronaut-obsessed mission specialist who drove her car for 900 miles in diapers to allegedly murder the woman dating her Cape Canaveral crush. The 43-year-old Naval Academy graduate and married mother of three had seemingly managed career and motherhood, but somewhere between Houston and Orlando, Nowak jettisoned reality. Letterman, Leno and the media have been merciless. Question: how long does it take to drive from Houston to Orlando? Answer: that Depends. Letterman's February 6 list was titled, "Top Ten Signs An Astronaut Is Trying To Kill You." Humor can be therapeutic, but making fun of a person's misery at her own expense isn't funny. It's cruel. Stephen Stills wrote, "If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with." That's why Nowak divorced her husband, attempted to pick off Colleen Shipman, flushed away her career, and in the process became the butt of late-night jokes. She forgot to guard her heart. Judith Brandt wrote a worthless book in 2002 titled, "The 50-Mile Rule: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette". Labeled as the ultimate handbook for cheaters, Brandt claims that "...a successful affair is an undiscovered affair. Let the 50-Mile Rule show you how to best stray so that you don't have to pay." In the movie "Spanglish", Adam Sandler married Tea Leoni, a self-absorbed and small-minded control freak that accepted no responsibility for her own problems. Her selfishness eventually led her into an affair. Cloris Leachman played the mother who eventually intervened in an attempt to remind her daughter of what she was throwing away. Leachman told Leoni that her actions had been "dumb". Stunned, Leoni replied: "You've done it again, mother. You made me hate myself." Leachman turned around to say, matter-of-factly: "Honey, lately, your low self-esteem is just good common sense." The seventh commandment reads, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," (Exodus 20:14, KJV). God gave that commandment to protect man's intimate relationships by enforcing a ceiling, limiting how far we can go with another person's heart. "Above all else," writes Solomon, "guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life" (Proverbs 4:23, NIV). When common sense makes good sense, seek no other sense. And love the one you're with. Tony Thomas is senior minister at Woodland Heights Christian Church.

From "The Local", Sweden's news in English...

Cheating partners given away by DNA (not really any new technology...but a timely reminder.)

A Swedish company makes it possible for people who suspect their partners of being unfaithful to have their suspicions either confirmed of allayed. The website pappatest.se primarily offers DNA tests for potential fathers or family members. But if a sample is provided the company will also be happy to carry out an infidelity test.

"The technique gives customers the possiblity to find out if their partner has been unfaithful," spokesman Bo Erlandsson told The Local. He is quick to add that the website has not yet been bombarded by hordes of jealous lovers."We have just had a couple so far. This service is not something we beat a big drum about," said Erlandsson. Any customers harbouring suspicions of infidelity on the home front must first be able to provide some form of evidence.

"There must be a reason to come to us. For example, a man might suspect that his wife is unfaithful. "If he finds stains in her underwear he can send it to us. We can then determine if it is sperm. "Then we can find out if it comes from another man or from himself," said Erlandsson. The company then sends the sample to a lab in the USA and the hypothetic husband will know within two weeks whether or not he has been cuckolded. Regardless of whether the result gladdens or saddens him, it will cost him 2,590 kronor.

The service is of course available to both sexes; the company also analyses stains believed to contain female DNA. But Erlandsson points out that a saliva sample from a cigarette may be enough to find out if there have been unexpected visitors in a customer's home.

(Sheesh - if you smoke, maybe you should move to Sweden.)

From "The Scientist" online --

Why you can't smell infidelity
Posted by Brendan Maher
[Entry posted at 30th January 2007 08:33 PM GMT]

Some data have shown, not quite conclusively, that the major histocompatibility complex profile of a man plays some role in the type of woman he attracts. Women prefer non-matching MHC profiles, sometimes, but not all the time. These preferences haven't been followed up much in those aspects that go beyond simple mate choice.

A newly published study in Psychological Science looked at 48 couples in long-term relationships (median 17 months, range 1 month to 12 years). Based on a genetic test and questionnaires, they found that as MHC sharing at three alleles increased, females were less sexually responsive to their partners and reported more sexual partners outside of the relationship. The effect was stronger when the women were in their fertile period and extended from such things as whether a woman found their partner sexy, to how often they rejected a partner's attempts to initiate sex, to how many orgasms they experienced with their partners. MHC sharing didn't predict these behaviors for male partners, interestingly enough. (C.E. Garver-Apgar et al., Psych Sci, 17:830-5, January, 2006.)

It's been proposed that women choose MHC-mismatched mates based on scent. In a feature this past September, Nick Atkinson wrote about this as part of a larger story on the biological rules of attraction. Mice can detect MHC profiles in the scent of urine. Women given sweaty tee-shirts have been known to choose the mismatch, and the theory goes that the preference may be an adaptation to suppress inbreeding and/or increase heterozygosity and immune competence in offspring. Men, in the dark when it comes to many things including histocompatibility, just don't seem to have the nose for it. (My dogs do, I bet. :)