The argument for letting your hair grow long and white as you age and not getting any facial surgery or Botox.

From 83-year-old "supermodel" Daphne Selfe. (Great name, by the way.)

Selfe, who went gray in her 40s, gave up coloring her hair and decided to let it grow.

“My hair is long now because it’s cheaper. I don’t have to do anything but put it in a topknot or a French pleat,” she said. “It avoids that old lady permed look, lengthens the neck and lifts the face.”

Pacifier use retards emotional development in boys.

According to a UW-Madison study by psychprof Paula Niedenthal, who tested the boys and theorizes that the problem is that when you've got a pacifier in your mouth, you can't mimic the facial expressions you see, and it's this mimicry that causes the brain to become capable of feeling the emotion the other person is expressing.

That sounds plausible, but why is it a boy problem?

Niedenthal said studies on girls did not show the same phenomenon. She said that may be because of societal norms that prompt parents to work harder at encouraging the expression of emotion in girls.

Or maybe girls are innately more emotional. Maybe you want to plug in the pacifier so they don't get overemotional. If Niedenthal is right, and it's those parents trying so hard to get a smile out of their girls, why not use the pacifier on the boys but encourage them more? Eh. I don't know. I only had boys. We used pacifiers, and we were always trying to get them to laugh and smile. I seem to remember lots of smiling and laughing around the pacifier, which often fell out as a result.

Niedenthal... compared her work with babies and pacifiers to studies that have shown people who use Botox, which paralyzes facial muscles, have a more limited range of emotions and also have difficulty recognizing the emotions behind others' facial expressions.

Would that mean that if you're a woman who's all excitable and dependent on what other people think of you, you could go in for a good Botoxing so you could calm down and get things done in a more manly way?

[Niedenthal's] current research had a much less scientific origin. Her own three boys did not use pacifiers, Niedenthal said. She recalled a dinner at which her 3-year-old son was throwing a fit. She noticed that another child at the table, who was using a pacifier, did not respond to her son's flailing tantrum.

"The parents took the pacifier out, and the child still did not respond," Niedenthal said. "That's when I got the idea for this research."

Funny that the research showed that her boys were better off. Science! It has so many applications!

I don't know what emotional intelligence test Niedenthal used, but some of the tests were done on adult men who'd used pacifiers when they were babies. One test I noticed recently was the "mind in the eyes test." Try it.

"In an act of shockingly retro, sexist stupidity, a local unit of the Republican Party of Minnesota..."

"... has broadcast a new reason you should vote Republican: GOP women are hot, and Democratic women are not."

My comments, in list form:

1. That's not just some guy's viral video, that's an official Republican group? Uh, speaking of "Who Let the Dogs Out," put a leash on those guys. They're not helping.

2. Did they pay royalties to appropriate "She's a Lady" and "Who Let the Dogs Out"?

3. There's a certain silliness to picking (what you think are) the prettiest pictures of one party's women and (what you think are) the ugliest pictures of the other party's women, which might be enjoyable if it was just some YouTube foolery.

4. I liked the natural look of some of the Democratic women who were supposed to be unattractive. Most of the ugliness had to do with making faces. Good for them if they can make faces. It means they aren't botoxed into expressionlessness. Too much of the supposed prettiness of the Republican women came in the form of glitzy TV makeup and hair. I got really tired of looking at them. Too much sameness.

5. The old cliché GOP argument that your women are better than your opponents' women is offputting and sad.

6.  Whoever made this video is ugly.

"I want my kids to know when I'm pissed, when I'm happy and when I'm confounded.."

Why Julia Roberts won't get Botox.

"It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons.... I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates."

Cleaning the slates? As in wiping the slate clean, the slate being the face? If I get that correctly, I think she's saying you should initially let yourself age and see how that is going, then make a judgment about whether to erase the signs of aging.

And... does Julia Roberts really talk like that? Confounded... dysmorphic... These quotes are in a British newspaper and they sound like their were written by a Brit.

It's also interesting that she says she wants to keep her natural face so her children will see her emotions. We moviegoers need to see that emotion too. I say "we," but the truth is, my moviegoing habit has decreased over the years, seemingly in proportion to the destruction of the human face. I don't want to see it. Ah, but I don't know. I remember a few years back — in my peak moviegoing times — hating a halfway good movie because I got sick of the big closeups, and it was a Julia Roberts movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding." My reaction was: Yes! I get it! You have a face! Now, step back!

It was around the same time that I walked out on a movie because the closeups were inducing nausea. That movie was "Antz." And I don't know what I hate more, plasticized human actors or computer generated animation. But those 2 phenomena are a big part of why I almost never go to the movies anymore.

Botox interferes not only with the ability to display emotions, but also with the ability to understand emotion.

Fascinating!

"We know that language moves us emotionally," said the lead author, David Havas, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "What this study shows is that that's partly because it moves us physically."...


The researchers asked 40 women waiting to receive first-time Botox injections to read a series of 60 sentences on a computer, pressing a key when they understood each sentence. To make sure participants were reading the sentences, the researchers periodically checked their reading comprehension. Participants repeated the test, using a fresh set of questions, two weeks later when the Botox treatment's paralyzing effect was at its height.

After treatment, participants were slower to understand sentences conveying sadness or anger than they had been before treatment. There was no such change for happy sentences. Mood analyses ruled out the possibility that the women were simply happier after receiving Botox, making them quicker to comprehend happier material.

The results indicate that our own facial expressions help the brain make sense of the social world, Havas says.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

When the face's ability to provide feedback is disabled, as in Botox treatment, our understanding is hindered.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

This has deep implications, far beyond the obvious reason to avoid taking Botox.