Forget the trees! If you would only look at the forest, you'd see that it's actually underwater.

In fact, the vast majority of US ports are owned by foreign companies. But ownership ranks toward the bottom of the vulnerabilities, says Flynn, who hopes the attention garnered by the recent purchase will emphasize the need to work with foreign entities in addressing larger security concerns. Regardless of who owns the ports, the volume of goods flowing through them is so massive that providing security oversight for incoming containers is a daunting task.

UAE Port Purchase Raises Outcry

"It's totally like a networking thing."

There was a time when only phreaks had memorized the area codes. And back then, there were far fewer codes to know.

"I'm totally from Richmond."

Like, totally. "Give me a C, give me a U, give me a T ... TAX CUT!"

Samantha Test, 27, is the proud owner of the Cadillac of area codes, San Francisco's 415. It has enormous cachet.

Ms. Test says she just "feels more like a 415 than a 202."

Of course, this has been years in the making.

KRAMER: It's a whole different world downtown-- different Gap, different Tower Records, and she's a 646.
ELAINE: What? What is that?
JERRY: That's the new area code. They've run out of 212s, so all the new numbers are 646.
ELAINE: I was a 718 when I first moved here. I cried every night.

...

PHONE MAN: All right, miss Benes, all finished. Here's your new number.
ELAINE: Ahem. 646? What is this?
PHONE MAN: That's your new area code.
ELAINE: I thought 646 was just for new numbers.
PHONE MAN: This is a new number.
ELAINE: No, no, no, no. It's not a new number. It's--it's--it's just a changed number. See? It's not different. It's the same, just...changed.
PHONE MAN: Look, I work for the phone company. I've had a lot of experience with semantics, so don't try to lure me into some maze of circular logic.

...

Elaine and a man are talking.

MAN: You're probably one of those women who doesn't like to give out her number.
ELAINE: No, I'm not. Here you go.
MAN: 646?
ELAINE: It's a new area code.
MAN: What area? New Jersey?
ELAINE: No, no. It's right here in the city. It's the same as 212. They just multiplied it by 3, and then they added one to the middle number. It's the same.
MAN: Do I have to dial a one first?

Elaine nods and the man crumples up her number.

Ah, Area Codes ...

Don't you get it?

What makes you happy is keeping the other guy down.

The data show that what matters on the happiness front is not how much money you have, but whether you have more (or less) at any given time than everyone else.

Pew Research Center: Are We Happy Yet?

The only major difference between doing business in Iraq and any other place in the world, said Mr. Sawiris, is having to negotiate with kidnappers.

Egyptian Mobile Phone Provider Treads Where Others Dare Not

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

The author of this essay has a new book out. Review is available in today's NYT. From the First Chapter:

Don't they see that I am busy? Don't they realize that obsessive self-pity is an all-consuming activity that leaves no room for conversation? Don't they know that the entrance to the park lies right next to the Eighty-first Street playground and that if I am not completely prepared, if I do not clear my mind, stop my ears to all sounds other than my own breathing, it is entirely possible -- likely even -- that instead of striding boldly past the playground with my eyes on the bare gray branches of the trees, I will collapse outside the playground gate, the shrill voices of the children keening in my skull? Don't they understand, these ladies with their petitions and their dead banker husbands and bulky Tod's purses, that if I let them distract me with talk of Republicans stealing elections or whether Mrs. Katz from 2B saw Anthony the new doorman asleep behind the desk last Tuesday night, I will not make it past the playground to the refuge of the park beyond? Don't they get that the barbaric assault of their voices, the impatient thumping of their Lucite canes as they wait insistently for my mumbled replies, will prevent me from getting to the only place in the entire city where I am able to approximate serenity? They will force me instead to trudge along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, pressed against the grimy stone walls, inhaling exhaust fumes from crosstown buses all the way to the East Side. Or worse, they will force me to take a cab.

Today, thank God, the elevator is empty all the way to the lobby.

You may also wish to check out the review by former Poet-Laureate Robert Pinsky of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking":

The geological imagery conveys the disparity of scale between any mortal intelligence and those immense, lethal gulfs and mountains. It is a terrain often lied about, and routinely blurred by euphemism. Didion's book is thrilling and engaging -- sometimes quite funny -- because it ventures to tell the truth: a traveler's faithful account of those harsh but fascinating cliffs.

Modern Love: Truly, Madly, Guiltily

In affluent McLean, elementary school girls judge one another on whether they have a new Louis Vuitton bag.

At Park Lawn Elementary School in Alexandria, the cool girls wear Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops.

Online bullying is big in McLean. At Park Lawn, most students have never heard of Instant Messenger.

The Many Social Complexities of 21st Century Elementary School

Why is Google the lone holdout? It is worried about protecting itself.

Nielsen/NetRatings says that p*** sites attracted 38 million unique viewers in December -- or a quarter of all Internet surfers.

Why Google Won't Give In | Forbes Magazine

Sure, we'll all live longer, but how will this affect the future of flirting?

These days, Americans flirt feebly, liquor-soaked and anxious. But for lo, these many years we at least have had cigarettes, instruments of seduction.

"Girl comes up and she says, 'Can I bum a smoke?' and it was obviously a pretext," says Jason. The girl talked to him awhile after that, one of those classic Washington dialogues about law school.

Hrm...

Not sexy: those people outside office buildings.

You might also wish to check this out:

Efforts to make us more like the rest of the world in that regard strike a blow at the very essence of Spanishness: should our schedules change, we'll be much more like France or Switzerland - and definitely more boring.

A totalitarian state is one that sticks its nose where it doesn't belong and attempts to intervene in every aspect of its citizens' private lives, and many governments today, whether left, right or center, have developed this practice of behaving like busybodies. The old notion that only dictatorships can be totalitarian seems terribly naïve nowadays. And that is the worst thing about this antismoking law and others of the same ilk: they unfortunately prove that totalitarianism is no longer incompatible with the democratic systems that once guaranteed our freedoms.

Got a Light? A Ritual Gone in a Puff of Smoke

In today’s networked society, e-mail, instant messaging, online chats and other applications are instrumental in establishing and maintaining social ties, so creating what Manuel Castells calls a private "portfolio of sociability".

Apparently the path to profitability for MemeStreams involves partnering with a developer of urban housing for hip, young professionals.

Networked communities: an answer to urban alienation?

The reality is that Paris and its "difficult" banlieues [impoverished suburbs] are two worlds that are completely foreign to each other. They don't even speak the same language: polished, accent-free French on one side, the verlan, or "reversed" speech, of the housing projects on the other.

I was intrigued by the notion of verlan and decided to look it up.

Verlan is a form of French slang that consists of playing around with syllables, kind of along the same lines as pig Latin. Unlike pig Latin, however, verlan is actively spoken in France - many verlan words have become so commonplace that they are used in everyday French.

Verlan was invented as a secret language, a way for people (notably youths, drug users, and criminals) to communicate freely in front of authority figures (parents, police). Because much of verlan has become incorporated into French, verlan continues to evolve - sometimes words are "re-verlaned."

About verlan, [2], Wikipedia adds:

Generally speaking, creating a verlan word on the fly from any random French word will result in smirks.

A brief clip from NPR's On Point about verlan is available.

The French Disconnection