According to a survey by a British clothing website called Very.co.uk, women want to know the TRUTH when they're trying on clothes.
--82% of women say that when they ask if something makes their butt look big, they want their significant other to be honest. And 70% think that their man actually WILL answer truthfully.
--But most men KNOW BETTER. 64% of guys admit that they've LIED to their wife when they were asked that question, and, quote, "said the right thing."
--68% of men say that they think telling the truth would make their wife upset . . . and 11% think telling her how she really looks would ruin an entire weekend.
--Of course, women eventually find out how clothes really make them look, and the average woman has $160 worth of clothes in her closet that she's never worn.
--More and more Americans are saying . . . sleep over sex.
--Memory foam mattresses keep getting more popular. And while they give you a great night's sleep, they're not so great for getting-it-on.
--In the last eight years, they've gone from 14% of the market to almost 20%. Even though people know memory foam is great for sleep but not relations.
--And . . . we don't really mind. 40% of memory foam owners say the sex isn't great on them, but 80% say they're happy with memory foam.
A new documentary called "Mansome" comes out in limited release this Friday. It's by Morgan Spurlock . . . the guy from "Super Size Me" . . . and it's about the rising popularity of "manscaping".
--Here are the five rules they came up with.
#1.) Shave or Wax Your Back, but Keep It a Secret. Basically, they want you to do it if you have a lot of back hair. But they'd rather not know about it. (--On the other hand, maybe you can bond over it.)
#2.) Don't Shave Your Chest Hair, but Trim It if It Gets Out of Control. If you need to clean it up a little bit, use trimmers. Don't shave everything, and don't get it waxed.
--The only time it's even ACCEPTABLE to shave all your chest hair is if you're in outstanding shape. Otherwise, leave a little.
#3.) Never Completely Shave Your Package. One woman said it best, quote, "It makes me think he's trying too hard, or [he's] a weirdo who loves staring at his naked crotch."
--On the other hand, don't let it get TOO crazy down there. They say to use scissors or trimmer . . . never wax . . . and be VERY careful.
#4.) Don't Shave Your Face on Weekends. If you HATE having facial hair . . . or SHE hates it . . . then by all means shave. But apparently a lot of women like it when you're scruffy sometimes.
#5.) Don't Shave Your Arms or Your Legs. Again, one of the women they talked to nailed this one. She said, quote, "I would find it very, very odd if a guy waxed his arms and legs and wasn't a cyclist or a swimmer."
--We assume the same thing goes for the hair under your arms.
--According to a new survey, women are SLIGHTLY more uncomfortable talking about SEX than talking about THEIR BOWELS. But it's close.
--30% of women said sex is the most uncomfortable conversation topic, 29% said constipation and other things related to their extended time on the toilet.
--When women DO talk about their bowels, they're more likely to talk to other women than men.
--Only 7% of women who would talk to a man would tell anyone but their husband or boyfriend.
"Man, the media ate me alive," Wright told me when we met in his office at Chicago's Kwame Nkrumah Academy. "After the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election."
"Who sent the e-mail?" I asked Wright.
"It was from one of Barack's closest friends."
"He offered you money?"
"Not directly," Wright said. "He sent the offer to one of the members of the church, who sent it to me."
"How much money did he offer you?"
"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Wright said.
"Did Obama himself ever make an effort to see you?"
"Yes," Wright said. "Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, "You're used to coming to my home, you've been here countless times, so what's wrong with coming to my home?' So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don't know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere.
"And one of the first things Barack said was, "I really wish you wouldn't do any more public speaking until after the November election.' He knew I had some speaking engagements lined up, and he said, "I wish you wouldn't speak. It's gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.'
"And what did you say?" I asked. "I said, "I don't see it that way. And anyway, how am I supposed to support my family?' And he said, "Well, I wish you wouldn't speak in public. The press is gonna eat you alive.'
"Barack said, "I'm sorry you don't see it the way I do. Do you know what your problem is?' And I said, "No, what's my problem?' And he said, "You have to tell the truth.' I said, "That's a good problem to have. That's a good problem for all preachers to have. That's why I could never be a politician.'
"And he said, "It's going to get worse if you go out there and speak. It's really going to get worse.'
Police found 49 mutilated bodies scattered in a pool of blood near the border with the U.S., a region where Mexico's two dominant drug cartels are trying to outdo each other in bloodshed while warring over smuggling routes.
The bodies of 43 men and six women with their heads, hands and feet chopped off were dumped at the entrance to the town of San Juan, on a highway that connects the industrial city of Monterrey with Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas.
At the spot where authorities discovered the bodies before dawn Sunday, a white stone arch that normally welcomes visitors to the town was spray-painted with "100% Zeta" in black letters â€" an apparent reference to the fearsome Zetas drug cartel that was founded by deserters from the Mexican army's special forces.
The bodies, some of them in plastic garbage bags, were most likely brought to the spot and dropped from the back of a dump truck, Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said.
Domene said the dead would be hard to identify because of the lack of heads, hands and feet. The remains were taken to a Monterrey auditorium for DNA tests.
The victims could have been killed as long as two days ago at another location, then transported to San Juan, a town in the municipality of Cadereyta, about 105 miles (175 kilometers) west-southwest of McAllen, Texas, and 75 miles (125 kilometers) southwest of the Roma, Texas, border crossing, state Attorney General Adrian de la Garza said.
Only one couple looking for their missing daughter visited the morgue in Monterrey where autopsies were being performed Sunday, a state police investigator said.
The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, said none of the six female bodies matched the missing daughter's description. He said some of the bodies were badly decomposed and some had their whole arms or lower legs missing.
De la Garza said he did not rule out the possibility that the victims were U.S.-bound migrants.
But it seemed more likely that the killings were the latest salvo in a gruesome game of tit-for-tat in fighting between the Zetas and the powerful Sinaloa Cartel.
Mass body dumpings have increased around Mexico in the last six months of escalating fighting between the Zetas and Sinaloa, which is led by fugitive drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, and its allies, the federal Attorney General's Office said in statement late Sunday.
The two cartels have committed "irrational acts of inhumane and inadmissible violence in their dispute," the office said, reiterating it is offering $2 million rewards for information leading to the arrests of Guzman, Ismael Zambada, another Sinaloa cartel leader, and Zetas' leaders Heriberto Lazacano Lazcano and Miguel Trevino.
Under President Felipe Calderon's nearly six-year offensive against organized crime, the two cartels have emerged as Mexico's two most powerful gangs and are battling over strategic transport routes and territory, including along the northern border with the U.S. and in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.
In less than a month, the mutilated bodies of 14 men were left in a van in downtown Nuevo Laredo, 23 people were found hanged or decapitated in the same border city and 18 dismembered bodied were left near Mexico's second-largest city, Guadalajara. Nuevo Laredo, like Monterrey, is considered Zeta territory, while Guadalajara has long been controlled by gangs loyal to Sinaloa.
"This is the most definitive of all the cartel wars," said Raul Benitez Manaut, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University.
The Zetas are a transient gang without real territory or a secure stream of income, unlike Sinaloa with its lucrative cocaine trade and control of smuggling routes and territory, Benitez said. But the Zetas are heavily armed while Sinaloa has a weak enforcement arm, he said.
The government's success in killing or arresting cartel leaders has fractured other once big cartels into weaker, quarreling bands that in many cases are lining up with either the Zetas or Sinaloa. At least one of those two cartels is present in nearly all of Mexico's 32 states.
A year ago this month, more than two dozen people â€" most of them Zetas â€" were killed when they tried to infiltrate the Sinaloa's territory in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit.
But their war started in earnest last fall in Veracruz, a strategic smuggling state with a giant Gulf port.
A drug gang allied with Sinaloa left 35 bodies on a main boulevard in the city of Veracruz in September, and police found 32 other bodies, apparently killed by the same gang, a few days after that. The goal apparently was to take over territory that had been dominated by the Zetas.
Twenty-six bodies were found in November in Guadalajara, another territory being disputed by the Zetas and Sinaloa.
Drug violence has killed more than 47,500 people since Calderon launched a stepped-up offensive when he took office in December 2006.
Mexico is now in the midst of presidential race to replace Calderon, who by law can't run for re-election. Drug violence seems to be escalating, but none of the major candidates has referred directly to mass killings. All say they will stop the violence and make Mexico a more secure place, but offer few details on how their plans would differ from Calderon's.
Benitez said the wave of violence has nothing to do with the presidential election.
"It has the dynamic of a war between cartels," he said.
According to MyGovCost.org, which is an affiliate of The Independent Institute, the Obama administration has permanently increased the size and expenditure of government by 16.5% in four years.
In fact, the site states that government expenditure is one-sixth bigger today than originally projected four years ago. Investors Business Daily revealed earlier this month that government dependency had increased by 23% in two years!
That is 67 million people reliant on a federal program. You cannot have a shrinkage of government when 67 million people are added onto a federal program and total federal spending has increased. Mr. Goolsbee is dead wrong.
This is the left-wing dependency agenda. It's the delivery of free lunches for 151.7 million Americans. To make a comparison, the number of people in 1984 who did not pay federal income taxes was at a mere 14.8% or 34.8 million Americans.
It took a debate that stretched to nearly seven hours, and votes on over a dozen amendments, but the U.S. House of Representatives finally approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act on April 26.
Passions flared on both sides before the final vote on CISPA, which cleared the House by a comfortable margin of 248 to 168.
CISPA would "waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity," Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and onetime Web entrepreneur, said during the debate. "Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on."
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and author of CISPA, responded by telling his colleagues to ignore "all the things they're saying about the bill that are not true." He pleaded: "Stand for America! Support this bill!"
While CISPA initially wasn't an especially partisan bill -- it cleared the House Intelligence Committee by a vote of 17 to 1 last December -- it gradually moved in that direction. The final tally was 206 Republicans voting for it, and 28 opposed. Of the Democrats, 42 voted for CISPA and 140 were opposed. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said afterward on Twitter that CISPA "didn't strike the right balance" and Republicans "didn't allow amendments to strengthen privacy protections."
The ACLU, on the other hand, told CNET that the amendments -- even if they had been allowed -- would not have been effective. "They just put the veneer of privacy protections on the bill, and will garner more support for the bill even without making substantial changes," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU.
Keep reading for some more details from CNET's FAQ about what you need to know about CISPA.
Q: What happens next?
CISPA heads to the the Senate, where related cybersecurity legislation has been stalled for years. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, however, has said he'd like to move forward with cybersecurity legislation in May. Its outlook is uncertain.
Senate Democrats may be less likely than House Republicans to advance CISPA after the White House's veto threat on April 25. The administration said CISPA "effectively treats domestic cybersecurity as an intelligence activity and thus, significantly departs from longstanding efforts to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres."
CISPA Excerpts
Excerpts from the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a self-protected entity may, for cybersecurity purposes -- (i) use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such self-protected entity; and (ii) share such cyber threat information with any other entity, including the Federal Government...
The term 'self-protected entity' means an entity, other than an individual, that provides goods or services for cybersecurity purposes to itself."
CISPA's opponents are already rallying Americans to contact their senators to oppose CISPA. Demand Progress has created a petition. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it "vows to continue the fight in the Senate."
Q: What does CISPA do? Let the National Security Agency spy on Americans?
CISPA wouldn't formally grant the NSA or Homeland Security any additional surveillance authority. (A proposed amendment that would have done so was withdrawn on April 26.)
But it would usher in a new era of information sharing between companies and government agencies -- with limited oversight and privacy safeguards. The House Rules committee on April 25 rejected a series of modestly pro-privacy amendments, which led a coalition of civil-liberties groups to complain that "amendments that are imperative won't even be considered" in a letter the following day.
Q: Who opposes CISPA?
Advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and the libertarian-leaning TechFreedom, launched a "Stop Cyber Spying" campaign in mid-April -- complete with a write-your-congresscritter-via-Twitter app -- and the bill has drawn the ire of Anonymous.
A letter (PDF) from two dozen organizations, including the Republican Liberty Caucus, urges a "no" vote on CISPA, and over 750,000 people have signed an anti-CISPA Web petition. Free-market and libertarian groups have opposed it. The Center for Democracy and Technology flip-flopped twice on CISPA as the result of a short-lived deal with the bill's authors not to criticize it.
Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican and presidential candidate, warned on April 23 that CISPA represents the "latest assault on Internet freedom" and was "Big Brother writ large." And 18 Democratic House members signed a letter (PDF) the same day warning that CISPA "does not include necessary safeguards" and that critics have raised "real and serious privacy concerns."
Q: Why is CISPA so controversial?
What sparked significant privacy worries is the section of CISPA that says "notwithstanding any other provision of law," companies may share information "with any other entity, including the federal government." It doesn't, however, require them to do so.
By including the word "notwithstanding," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) intended to make CISPA trump all existing federal and state civil and criminal laws. (It's so broad that the non-partisan Congressional Research Service once warned (PDF) that using the term in legislation may "have unforeseen consequences for both existing and future laws.")
"Notwithstanding" would trump wiretap laws, Web companies' privacy policies, gun laws, educational record laws, census data, medical records, and other statutes that protect information, warns the ACLU's Richardson: "For cybersecurity purposes, all of those entities can turn over that information to the federal government."
If CISPA were enacted, "part of the problem is we don't know exactly what's going to happen," says Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sued AT&T over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. "I worry that you can get a version of cybersecurity warrantless wiretapping out of this."
CISPA's authorization for information sharing extends far beyond Web companies and social networks. It would also apply to Internet service providers, including ones that already have an intimate relationship with Washington officialdom. Large companies including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer records to the NSA; only Qwest refused to participate. Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.
Q: Are there other examples of this public-private cooperation for eavesdropping?
Unfortunately, yes.
Louis Tordella, the longest-serving deputy director of the NSA, acknowledged overseeing a similar project to intercept telegrams as recently as the 1970s. It relied on the major telegraph companies including Western Union secretly turning over copies of all messages sent to or from the United States. "All of the big international carriers were involved, but none of 'em ever got a nickel for what they did," Tordella said before his death in 1996, according to a history written by L. Britt Snider, a Senate aide who became the CIA's inspector general.
The telegraph interception operation was called Project Shamrock. It involved a courier making daily trips from the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., to New York to retrieve digital copies of the telegrams on magnetic tape.
President Richard Nixon, plagued by anti-Vietnam protests and worried about foreign influence, ordered that Project Shamrock's electronic ear be turned inward to eavesdrop on American citizens. In 1969, Nixon met with the heads of the NSA, CIA and FBI and authorized an intercept program. Nixon later withdrew the formal authorization, but informally, police and intelligence agencies kept adding names to the watch list. At its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
This apparently has continued. In his 2006 book titled "State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen wrote: "The NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships."
In a recent Wired article, author James Bamford described how the NSA is currently building the nation's biggest spy center, a $2 billion facility in the Utah desert. Bamford quoted William Binney, a former NSA official, as saying the NSA's backdoor into the U.S. telecommunications network goes far beyond AT&T's facility on Second Street in San Francisco. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney said. "That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast."
Q: Would CISPA allow companies to violate their terms of service by turning over information to the Feds without a search warrant?
Yes. Though to be clear: if you trust your Internet provider, e-mail provider, and so on, to protect your privacy, CISPA should not be a worrisome bill. The U.S. government can't force companies to open their databases and networks; federal agencies can only request it. But as the warrantless wiretapping debate shows, the private sector may acquiesce.
One reason CISPA would be useful for government eavesdroppers is that, under existing federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication"--unless specifically authorized by law--could face criminal charges. CISPA would trump all other laws.
Q: What's the argument for enacting it?
A position paper on CISPA from Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger says their bill is necessary to deal with threats from China and Russia and that it "protects privacy by prohibiting the government from requiring private sector entities to provide information." In addition, they stress that "no new authorities are granted to the Department of Defense or the intelligence community to direct private or public sector cybersecurity efforts."
During the April 26 floor debate, Rogers said:
In just the last few years, nation states like China have stolen enough intellectual property from just defense contractors, that would be equivalent to 50 times the print collection of the US Library of Congress. We have nation states who are literally stealing jobs and our future. We also have countries that are engaged in activities and have capabilities that have the ability to break networks, computer networks. Which means you can't just reboot. It means your system is literally broken. Those kinds of disruptions can be catastrophic when you think about the financial sector, or the energy sector, or our command and control elements for all our national security apparatus.
You know, without our ideas, without our innovation that countries like China are stealing every single day; we will cease to be a great nation. They are slowly and silently and quickly stealing the value and prosperity of America. One credit card company said that they get attacked for your personal information 300,000 times a day, one company.
Q: What industry groups support CISPA?
One of the biggest differences between CISPA and its Stop Online Piracy Act predecessor is that the Web blocking bill was defeated by a broad alliance of Internet companies and millions of peeved users. Not CISPA: the House Intelligence committee proudly lists letters of support from Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon, AT&T, Intel, and trade association CTIA, which counts representatives of T-Mobile, Sybase, Nokia, and Qualcomm as board members.
In February, Facebook VP Joel Kaplan wrote (PDF) an enthusiastic letter to Rogers and Ruppersberger to "commend" them on CISPA, which he said "removes burdensome rules that currently can inhibit protection of the cyber ecosystem."
By mid-April, however, Facebook had been forced on the defensive, with Kaplan now assuring users that his employer has "no intention" of sharing users' personal data with the Feds and that section is "unrelated to the things we liked" about CISPA in the first place. (A Demand Progress campaign says: "Internet users were able to push GoDaddy to withdraw its support of SOPA. Now it's time to make sure Facebook knows we're furious.")
Q: Was CISPA rushed through the House?
Not really. It was introduced in late November 2011 and approved by the House Intelligence Committee a few weeks later. So the public had approximately five months to review the bill before the April 26 House floor vote.
On the other hand, CIPSA did move relatively swiftly through the legislative process, and the House Republican leadership moved up the floor vote by one day at the last moment.
During a town hall that CNET hosted on April 19 in San Francisco, a House Intelligence aide argued that it was a deliberative process. CISPA opponents say the measure is being "rushed through," said senior counsel Jamil Jaffer. "I can't disagree with that more."
Q: Is CISPA worse than SOPA?
For all its flaws, SOPA targeted primarily overseas Web sites, not domestic ones. It would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear.
It was kind of an Internet death penalty targeting Web sites like ThePirateBay.org, not sites like YouTube.com, which are already subject to U.S. law.
CISPA, by contrast, would allow Americans' personal information to be vacuumed up by government agencies for cybersecurity and law enforcement purposes, as long as Internet and telecommunications companies agreed. In that respect, at least, its impact is broader.
Nugent bristled at the suggestion that he isn't the kind of moderate Romney will likely need support from to win the general election.
"If you examine how I conduct myself," Nugent said, "I don't think a day goes by in my life for many, many years now that we don't do charity work for children. ... Call me when you sit down across from someone who has more families with dying little boys and girls who get a call to take them on their last fishing trip in life. "Call me," Nugent continued in a raised, irritated voice, "when you meet someone who does that more than I do. Because that's really moderate. In fact, you know what that is? That's extreme. ... I'm an extremely loving, passionate man, and people who investigate me honestly, without the baggage of political correctness, ascertain the conclusion that I'm a damned nice guy. ... And if you can find a screening process more powerful than that, I'll [expletive]. Or [expletive]. How's that sound?"
We have no idea where that unexpected outburst came from. The second part of it directed to a female CBS News producer who was off-camera. Nugent's wife told him after interview ended that Nugent owed an apology to the producer. And Nugent did.
He also called Glor Thursday and said that, after the interview, he was rushed to the emergency room and had a kidney stone removed. So, that's what Nugent said may have contributed to his high level of energy. Nugent said he wasn't surprised when the Secret Service contacted him.
"In this environment, when you have the conditions in our government, no, I'm not surprised." "They came in as professionals," he told Jeff Glor at his Texas ranch, "Good, solid, professional law enforcement representatives, some of the greatest warriors in law enforcement. Anyway, so we had a meeting and it was serious, dead serious, because I can actually be serious, and it was serious. ... I feel sorry for liberals who can be that brain dead as to take a clear statement of fear on my part and turn it into a threat against somebody else."
Nugent said he feels the agents weren't concerned that he had actually threatened the president - only that someone claimed he had. "In fact," Nugent continued, "I gotta tell you, and I don't mean to put any professionals on the spot, and I don't have the greatest hearing in the world, but I thought I heard something to the point of, 'I didn't think so."'
Nugent described the meeting as "adorable" and says he was "absolutely" happy with the way things went, and, "Nothing makes me happier than me." "They did their job perfectly, I answered the questions perfectly," Nugent says. Nugent did just have the dates from his just-begun Midwest Rock 'n' Roll Express cancelled by the U.S. Army - a group he considers the core of his support.
"These military guys are my blood brothers," Nugent said. "So then, when I hear that political correctness has somehow metastasized into the decision makers of the military, I was really let down that political correctness has any role at all in the military."
Nugent asserted that he's a "perfect human being. I stumble perfectly. But I also aspire to and accomplish a perfect standing up and dusting off in that arena and continue on. At the end of every day and at the end of my life, I will be in the asset column. I will better mankind. I will better the environment. I will better America. I'm dedicated to it. I can't be stopped."
Vanity Fair's new extract from David Maraniss's forthcoming biography of Obama is all over the Web, not necessarily for the right reasons. The flap over Maraniss's "revelation" that Obama, in his 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father," confected a composite girlfriend from his years in New York during the early eighties, and described at least one event that didn't take place there, has diverted attention from some of fascinating material Maraniss obtained from actual women who dated the future President. (In the introduction to his book, Obama said that some of his characters were composite and that he had played with the chronology.)
After leaving Occidental College in 1981 and transferring to Columbia, where he majored in political science, Obama went through a period of soul-searching, during which he struggled to assimilate the various elements of his cosmopolitan heritage. His memoir, which is still well worth reading, begins with a phone call he received, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, informing him of his father's death in Kenya. In his own telling, he emerges as a conflicted and sensitive, but also intellectually confident and rather self-absorbed, young man, who is seeking his path. What Maraniss has done, thanks to some meticulous reporting, is complement this picture with a more objective view of Obama from two women, young at the time, who knew him intimately.
One of them was Genevieve Cook, a well-bred and somewhat rebellious New Yorker, who smoked non-filter Camels and drank Baileys Irish Cream from the bottle. When she met Obama at party in the East Village, in late 1983, she was a twenty-five-year-old assistant teacher at Brooklyn Friends, a private school in downtown Brooklyn. After Obama, who was three years younger, cooked her dinner and invited her to stay the night, they became an item. In her personal journal, which she shared with Maraniss, Cook recorded many details of the relationship, down to the odors that pervaded Obama's room in the rent-controlled three bedroom apartment he shared on West 114th Street: "running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing."
As the entries proceed, the Obama that Cook knew comes across very clearly. She found him intriguing and smart, warm sometimes, but also guarded and self-protective.
Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.
Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack's having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him-protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn-I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more-he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.
Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there-but the rest of it has sharp edges and I'm finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness-and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.
As the months went on, Cook's doubts about Obama grew:
Friday, March 9, 1984
It's not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others' cards out of their hands for careful inspectionâ€"without giving too much of your own away-played with a good poker faceI feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart-legitimate, admirable, really-a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there's something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness but I'm still left with this feeling of a bit of a wall-the veil.
Thursday, March 22
Barack-still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.
Saturday, May 26
Dreamt last night for what I'm sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life-she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him.
In late 1984, Cook and Obama moved in together, but it didn't work out. Obama's elusiveness continued to frustrate Cook, and, in the spring of 1985, they split up:
Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life-at least as far as being lovers goes I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack's withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he'd let go and "fall in love" with me. Now, at this point, I'm left wondering if Barack's reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he's sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)
During much of this time, Maraniss informs us, Obama carried around with him a dogeared copy of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel "Invisible Man," which is written from the perspective of an unnamed African-American who feels isolated from and ignored by the rest of society. The young Obama also had broader literary interests, and he dreamed of becoming a writer. Another of his girlfriends was Alex McNear, whom he knew from Occidental College, where she edited a literary magazine. In the summer of 1982, McNear spent the summer in New York, and she and Obama started dating. After she went back to California, Obama sent her a series of letters, one of which concerned an essay she was writing on "The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot:
Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter-life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.
Perhaps Obama was just trying to impress the lady. Clearly, though, this was no ordinary twenty-two-year-old. In another letter to McNear, he revealed his ambitions as a prose stylist:
I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl-aargh!-and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they'll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you're pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
What are we to make off all this? Setting aside campaign politics and the brouhaha over how exactly Obama put together his memoir, Maraniss has done something larger. He has shed new light on what is a remarkable American story. At one point during Obama's relationship with Cook, Maraniss reminds us, he visited her family's country estate in leafy Norfolk, Connecticut. Standing in the library, Obama recalled in his memoir, "I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as KenÂÂya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider." Ultimately, of course, Obama didn't remain an outsider for very long. He moved to Chicago, climbed the political ladder, and became, at the age of forty-seven, the President. "The ironic thing," Cook told Maraniss, "is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have."
A big increase in reports of Asian tiger shrimp along the U.S. Southeast coast and in the Gulf of Mexico has federal biologists worried the species is encroaching on native species' territory.
The shrimp are known to eat their smaller cousins, and sightings of the massive crustaceans have gone up tenfold in the last year, biologists say.
The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to eight inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp.
Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp. Both, however, can be eaten by humans.
"They're supposed to be very good,' Pam Fuller, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. "But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters.'
The last U.S. tiger shrimp farm closed in Florida in 2004, without ever raising a successful crop, according to a USGS fact sheet about the species.
Reports of tiger shrimp in U.S. waters rose from a few dozen a year - 21 in 2008, 47 in 2009 and 32 in 2010 - to 331 last year, from North Carolina to Texas.
'That's a big jump,' Ms Fuller told the Associated Press.
Bayou 95.7
