Who doesn’t love a good train wreck like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears? For us “ordinary folk” (those of us who wear Old Navy, drink PBR and dream of tetris being an Olympic sport) there’s nothing like a healthy dose of tabloid exploitation on those who live in (what at least appears to be) an alternate universe… where dogs wear juicy couture, cars come equipped with mini-bars, breasts double as flotation devices and pocket lint is laced with cocaine.

Is it true though? Or are the tabloids just running exaggerated fantasies to harpoon mass appeal? It’s hard to know because these grandiose lifestyles are perpetuated by the attention drawn to them (unless the celebrity is actually talented). Case in point — the Kardashian sex tape.

Bad publicity is good publicity, I suppose… especially for the venues that become associated with celebrity attendance (who doesn’t want to go to places where you might see a rockstar in a bar fight or catch Paris Hilton stripping down to… well… a slightly more naked version of her usual self?).

When talking about club publicity, nothing turns up the temp on a particular venue more than the drug habits of the celebrities. The scandalous behaviors of one Miss Britney Spears has made headlines for a variety of clubs in New York including an all time personal favorite, Marquee. Yes, she has been caught using drugs in the public bathrooms all around town and she’s not the only one. The question then becomes, of course, how many drugs are being done in these places? Certainly you run a high risk (pun intended) of being caught abusing drugs if you are a celebrity, but what about us ordinary folk? Are drugs swimming through the clubs as the tabloids would have us believe? Read More »

Happiness is on the rise! At least, those are the findings of a super-scientific research study released this week. The World Values Survey has been tracking happiness for 17 years in 52 countries and involving 350,000 people. The positive results are attributed to “societal shifts in recent decades: Low-income countries such as India and China have experienced unprecedented rates of economic growth; dozens of medium-income countries have democratized; and there has been a sharp rise of gender equality and tolerance of ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians in developed societies.”

The results surprised scientists, who had previously believed that happiness was stable when looking at societies over time. Bucking the conventional knowledge, happiness levels in forty countries “rose substantially.”

Denmark is the happiest nation, Zimbabwe the least, and the US was rated as the 16th happiest country. A similar survey released last week determined one reason America isn’t ranking higher on the list: Baby Boomers are generally miserable compared to other generations. Read More »

Okay, it’s official, Facebook is officially getting out of hand. Not only do employers use social networking tools such as Facebook or Myspace to check on prospective employees, but now Oxford University has actually used photos as evidence of students violating their code of conduct.

ScienceDaily reports that “fines of nearly $200 are being doled out to students deemed to be guilty of ‘trashing’ fellow students — a practice that involves covering a comrade in champagne, confetti, flour, raw meat, octopus and other foodstuffs.”

These fines are in relation to the students celebrating the end of exams. Okay, come on, if they are students at Oxford and made it through another year of school there, I say they have reason to celebrate!

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Remember when Facebook was the simple, straightforward, selective version of MySpace? When it was “the facebook”? All we had was a profile, a wall, poking, messaging, and groups. There was no photo feature, so we had to agonize over that one, single, perfect profile picture. No status updates, no events, no high school students.

As Facebook gradually became bigger, more complicated, more cluttered, and more creepy, we complained, but after the initial outcry, we always acquiesced and eventually embraced the new developments. Newsfeed threatened to tear us apart, but as always, we broke down and accepted it. And then came the greatest betrayal, when Facebook opened its once closely guarded gates and welcomed in anyone, anyone at all.

If anything could drive me away from Facebook forever, it would be the über-sketch appearance of members with the words “(no network)” appearing ominously after their names. And yet, we tolerate even this.

Somehow, the latest Facebook phenomenon still managed to take me by surprise. I’m referring, of course, to the applications. After years of slowly but surely adopting one gimmicky, gratuitous feature after another, Facebook decides to let us create our own, and in doing so, flood profiles with clutter. Well I hate it. Read More »

Now that summer’s here and I have lots of time to sit around and do nothing, I often spend more hours on Facebook or Myspace than should be humanly possible. I’m not even sure what I do for so long on these sites. I click, stare, click, stare, click…it’s sort of like an odd addiction, and I’m not proud. Not proud at all.

And sure, there are days when I question the validity of such sites. In the beginning of the Facebook craze, I was totally against it. What the hell do I want an online profile for? I thought in the beginning. What do you do, just stare at people at all day? Initially, I thought it was a completely stupid idea.

Somewhere along the line my thoughts changed, and I became one of the millions who gladly post pictures and contact information for all to see. Isn’t this what our parents warned us about when we started signing on in the 1990’s?

“Don’t you dare put any personal information up on the internet, young lady!” My mom would warn as our modern screamed and coughed and finally signed me on with a computerized You’ve Got Mail! “There are crazy people all over the place.” Read More »

I remember when this odd new website, thefacebook.com, first surfaced at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. I thought it was a weird stalkery thing that would never really catch on. Well, boy was I wrong.

At first, I was anti-facebook and refused to put a picture up and only opened an account so that I could see what all the broohaha was about. After a few months, I looked like the creepy one with only a question mark to represent me. So, I gave in and posted my first facebook picture.

In my mind, the aspect that made facebook legitimate at first was the fact that it ONLY for college students. Somehow that justified it to me and seemed to minimize the amount of creepy old men posing as fourteen-year-olds that could be on it.

But now, The New York Times reports that Facebook is heading towards a future more similar to that of Myspace, and that sucks.

“Some of the new features, demonstrated by software developers at a Facebook event, will allow members to recommend and listen to music, insert Amazon book reviews onto their pages, play games and join charity drives, all without leaving the site.

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