The junk drawer

Talking Points

1. Marijuana vending machines
2. The Beatles in space
3. Snowstorms in the Middle East

And three things you can’t:

1. Free and fair elections in Russia
2. Hillary’s politically-motivated crying
3. Your favorite Super Bowl ads

Quotes of the week

“He was our prophet, seer and revelator. He was an island of calm in a sea of storm.”
-Thomas S. Monson, the newly-appointed president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on former Mormon leader Gordon B. Hinckley, who died last week. Monson was an adviser to Hinckley and is now the 16th president of the Church

“But you know, it’s much easier to take a political hit than to be run over by one of those linebackers.”
– President Bush, in an interview with Fox Super Sunday about the Super Bowl, when asked to draw a comparison between football and politics. Bush initially said that they were both “contact sports”

“I was just trying to put the ball on the green.”
– Leo Fiyalko, a 92-year-old man who is legally blind, on a hole-in-one he got while playing at Cove Cay Country Club in Florida. Fiyalko used a five iron on the 110-yard hole

Theme Party Suggestion

Revive the 90’s – The TV shows, the movies, the music. That’s why people so dearly miss the 90s, right? Not really. What they yearn for is the sound economy and popular president of that decade. They want the biggest national problem to be Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton fooling around in the Oval Office, not U.S. soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know you’ve had this party, but it’s time to recognize why.

Throwing this party? Let us know. TheStatement@umich.edu

YouTube Video of the Week

Forget your studies and enjoy life -Why do we all go to college? To get into a good graduate school, of course. And why all those hellish internships? To get a good job, obviously.

But to British philosopher Alan Watts, the goal-driven life we live didn’t make too much sense. In one of his spoken word recordings, Watts described the way children and adults alike are pulled along through life, the promise of success dangling over their heads.

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are never shy about challenging the cruel and arbitrary rules of modern society, created an animation to go with Watts’s recording. It shows a young man moving from grade to grade and job to job, bent on achieving success but without any idea why.

And then he’s 40 years old, having a midlife crisis and wondering why he wasted all those years in classrooms and cubicles.

“There was a hoax. A dreadful hoax,” Watts says. “They made you miss everything.”

So forget your GPA, your resume, your summer job. The snow’s falling on the Diag. Dive in.

– Gabe Nelson

See this and other YouTube videos of the week at youtube.com/user/michigandaily

Study of the week

People who are lonely more likely to believe in God – People who are lonely are more likely to believe in some form of the supernatural like God, miracles or angels, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science.

In the study, the researchers tried to elicit feelings of loneliness to gauge its effects on people’s thoughts about religious figures or pets.

In one part of the study, college students were shown clips from the movies “Cast Away,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Major League” in order to arouse certain emotions within them. The were asked to empathize with the main character to the best of their ability.

After watching the clip, the students were told to rate their belief in the devil, angels, ghosts, God, miracles and curses. The researchers found that those who watched “Cast Away,” which was supposed to induce feelings of loneliness and isolation, were the strongest believers in the supernatural.

-Brian Tengel

By the Numbers

24,470 – Percent annual inflation in Zimbabwe

150,000 Percent annual inflation projected in independent estimates

3 million – Cost of a Zimbabwean newspaper, in Zimbabwean dollars

Source: CNN