Suggestion Saturday: January 10, 2015

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

So You Want a Rationalist Girlfriend. This was so creative. I’d love to do something like this with statistics one of these days, I just need to think of a topic. (And convince my followers to fill out a survey. Ha!)

Why I Despise the Hipster Aesthetic. My feelings about this topic definitely aren’t as visceral as the ones the author describes, but I am irritated by people who thinks it’s fun to go “slumming.”

A Fleeting Glimpse via 4BethCarpenter. You all know how I like to harrumph my way through this time of year, but even I have to admit that this is a beautiful sight.

End of the Year 2014 Survey via K8Tilton. Kate Tilton is one of the many engaging authors I’ve met on Twitter. Right now she’s asking anyone who has ever visited her site to fill out a short, anonymous survey about your thoughts on what she can do to improve it. I’ve filled out the survey. Will you?

Reflections on Two Years of Marriage via juijonathan. Every January on Reddit there are a few posters who share all kinds of statistics about the frequency and type(s) of sex they had with their spouse over the last year. (Have no fear, relatives who lurk on this blog. I will never, ever share that kind of information here. 😉 ) This guy took that concept and stretched it a little further. Instead of talking about his sex life, he records all kinds of statistics and anecdotes about life with his wife so that their future – and currently completely hypothetical – child will know what mom and dad’s lives were like before he or she existed.

From The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty:

Shortly after the wedding, Oral called Richard and Patti into his study, sat down in an armchair by the fire, and began to cry. Oral said he’d had a dream: If either of them backslid—the term for leading an unchristian life, especially one outside Oral’s domain—they’d be killed in a plane crash.

“It never occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t God who had spoken,” writes Patti, “but Oral trying to manipulate us to protect the ministry.”

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is  good example of one of my favourite types of nonfiction: stories about unusual medical conditions and how they affect the lives of the people who are diagnosed with them. One of the reasons why I enjoy this genre so much is that it reminds me of when I used to read my mother’s textbooks when she was in nursing school. They fascinated me even though I was too young to understand everything mom was learning from them.

This particular book is about neurological disorders. Sometimes a tumour can cause drastic changes in someone’s personality, although I’ll leave it up to my readers to discover whether the personalities of the patient in that section was changed for the better or for the worse. 😉

It’s difficult to say much more about it without giving away spoilers, but I’d heartily recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by how the mind works.

What have you been reading?

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