A Few More Odds and Ends

I'm running a little bit late this morning, having overslept my alarm by about 15 minutes, and so my brain isn't quite engaged yet. Therefore, instead of the usual insightful and erudite post you probably were expecting*, how about a few minor odds and ends from the old blog fodder file to hold you over until tomorrow, eh?

Saudi Arabia has very little to recommend it other than a whole bunch of oil. In fact, were it not for all that oil, it would probably have remained nothing more than a backward and misogynistic storehouse for sand. The desert kingdom is widely known for, among other things, forbidding women to drive ... but it seems that the government and religious authorities are sticking a tentative toe into the 20^th century** by considering the possibility of allowing women to get behind the wheel. Here's a photo from the news release ...

Halloween is not far off, and everyone is thinking about their costumes. Zombies are, for some reason, big again this year, so if you want to dress up as a zombie and be really believable, you should probably work on mastering the USDA-approved zombie diet ...

I think we're probably safe here in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac in the event of a zombie invasion ... the shortage of brains would probably cause hungry zombies to go elsewhere in search of nourishment.

You can tell there's an election coming by the geometric rise in the number of robo-calls that tell you that (insert candidate name here) is a worthless douchebag, rather than explaining clearly why you should vote for (insert candidate name here) instead. This makes it difficult to make an informed decision, which is why I don't pay much attention to polling results ...

I ran across this interesting story in The Atlantic yesterday - Study: In Homicide Defense, When the Beautiful Are the Damned. There's a general belief that a beautiful woman can - literally - get away with murder ... but that may not necessarily be the case. We all remember the classic scene in the movie Basic Instinct in which actress Sharon Stone attempts to ... uh ... distract the detective (Michael Douglas) who's interrogating her*** ...

According to a study done at the University of Granada in Spain, her ploy may not have worked as well as she might have hoped, as the study results indicated that women charged with murder who plead self-defense are more likely to be perceived as guilty if they have straight blonde hair and "a slender and elegant appearance." You can read the full study (titled Is Miss Sympathy a Credible Defendant Alleging Intimate Partner Violence in a Trial For Murder?) here, preferably before you decide upon a solution to your problems that might draw the attention of the coroner.

And that's it for today.

Have a good day. More ... and, hopefully, more coherent, thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Silly you.

** The 21^st would probably be a bit too much to expect.

*** That scene is #85 of the Top 100 Movie Moments, as ranked by the website IGN.com.