Now it can be told (and Star is wasting no time, or compassion):

Brevi (Levstol?) was probably done long before the GOP was done with them.

Man, I still feel for those kids.

I thought it was just the English major in me that despised the butchered staccato — not to mention the soulless narrative and truncated nuance — of texting. Turns out, it was probably just my estrogen talking.

Studying text messages submitted by young men and women to Allmusic, Italy’s TRL-like interactive music channel, researchers from Indiana University found that “while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue …  it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions, and who implement more emoticons (like smiling and frowning faces).”

In other words, while men historically out-verbiage women oratorially, women seem to try harder and longer (yup, that’s what she said… and said and said) at conveying content and meaning when they have to do so via SMS.

Funny enough, I was planning to announce to my friends this week (via my much-loved Facebook page, a technology I so prefer to txt) that I am *off*texting*for*good!*. My status shall soon read: “Rose no longer emits or accepts text messages. She is a callivore, not a textinarian.” And yeah, I just made up those two zeitgeist-ready words. Feel free to pass along.

And by “good time,” they mean hiking, eco-activism, trading nerdy theories about “Lost.” Yes, Ryan Blitstein and his girlfriend/wingman have each other — and Facebook and MeetUp and CraigsList — but they also have solitary jobs in a relatively new city (Chicago), and, as Blitstein writes in a nice essay at Salon.com, they are also having a hard time making friends.

“My Facebook profile is bursting at the seams with hundreds of acquaintances, colleagues and contacts, many within walking distance. But I can count on one hand the number I’d even take out for a drink. So much for the brave new world of social networking,” Blitstein writes. “Until recently, I thought of myself as different, especially when it came to maintaining friendships with other men. I am not afraid to ask a guy out on a so-called man-date. I don’t need to use SportsCenter or an action movie or an indie rock show to overpower the supposed latent homoeroticism that some men attribute to one-on-one male socializing. I’m as comfortable talking about relationships with another dude as I am arguing about politics. But it seems the older I get, the harder it is to find new people to engage in these conversations.”

And: “There is a vast gulf between vaguely keeping in touch with someone and actually sharing, experiencing, exploring and all the other things you give and get and take from a close friendship. I find it increasingly difficult to cross over that gulf with those I’m meeting now. It’s a poignant thing to be a full-grown human and realize you’re deficient in something that seems so effortless for children.”

Blitstein’s essay is not an obvious broadside against the “alienation” of “technology,” yadda yadda. (I’d argue that the “connectedness” fostered by Facebook, while often superficial in one sense, still does the job of affirming one’s role in one’s own life story. High school! Camp! That crappy post-college internship! OMG! Hi hi hi!) But judging by many of the letters written in response, Blitstein and his girlfriend are not, so to speak, alone — and I think there is something new and modern, if not high-tech, about that. When we married much younger, skipping the seeking-our-fortunes/-selves segment of our twenties, we kept our high school and college friends because we’d graduated with them, like, last year. Now, like our phones, we’re mobile. There are more phases in our lives, more places to put down — and pull up — stakes. Makes sense to me.

What about you? Has making friends gotten harder for you as you get older? Might that also make it harder to make more-thans, too, given that “through friends” can be a romantic goldmine?

You’ve heard of Alaska bachelors trawling the lower 48 for love. Now this, via the BBC:

More than 100 unmarried villagers in India’s Bihar state are working flat out to build a 6km (3.7-mile) road to help their efforts to get married. The village of Barwaan Kala, in the west of Bihar, is located high in the Kaimur hills and is known locally as the “village of unmarried people”. Some 121 villagers aged between 16 and 80 remain bachelors, they say, because of the remoteness of the village. The last wedding in the village was reportedly 50 years ago. “Even those who have managed to get married have done it surreptitiously by taking temporary shelter in the less remote villages of their relatives,” Ram Chand Kharwar, a 50-year-old bachelor, told the BBC.

Read more here.

From BG’s alter-ego, at The Daily Beast:

You probably heard that singer Chris Brown, after turning himself in for beating his girlfriend, Rihanna, enrolled in anger-management classes in an effort to, as Rolling Stone reported, “repair his image.” Swell. Where can I sign up?

Because as images go, Brown’s seems to be doing remarkably, enragingly, well. True, Brown was promptly dropped from his now-creepy Got Milk? and Wrigley’s Gum ad campaigns, and from the upcoming film, Bone Deep. And it’s not hard to find folks who have forever redacted “Forever” from their iPods. But otherwise, the whitewash seems to be flowing like Cristal at Clive Davis’ bash—and not just from the bonehead sector of the blogosphere (though yeah, there is that).

Singer Ne-Yo told MTV that Brown is still his “homeboy at the end of the day.” Kanye West reportedly asked a crowd to “Give Chris a break.” The New York Daily News asked, “Could Rihanna use [anger management] too?” CNN’s Kiran Chetry wondered if Rihanna—yes, Rihanna—might, moving forward, suffer the “stigma” of abuse. The Chicago Tribune reported that many area teens figured Rihanna must have done something to provoke Brown’s alleged assault. “People said, ‘I would have punched her around too,'” noted one sophomore. “And these were girls!”

Yes, Brown is technically innocent until proven guilty. And America believes in redemption and rehabilitation, often to its credit. But America also has a long and proud tradition of turning on celebrities quicker than you can say “Perez Hilton.” We put our stars through the wringer when they hurl cellphones at housekeepers or throw tantrums on movie sets, and in the end, rightly or wrongly, we tend to forgive them. But why is Brown, at least right now, seen as anything but Asshole of the Month? What makes it so easy for people to leap to his defense—at her expense?

Continue reading here.

We knew — or at least hoped — it! A clever sign-o-times hoax!

Dave Hamrick and Lindsey Nebeker, two people diagnosed with autism — and madly in love — are scheduled to appear on tomorrow’s Good Morning America. (Close to the top of the second hour, we hear.) From their profile (by BG’s alter ego) in this month’s Glamour:

“People like Lindsey and Dave put so much thought and dedication into making their relationship work,” says Diane Twachtman-Cullen, Ph.D., a speech-language expert who specializes in autism and knows the couple well. “Frankly, we could all take a page from their playbook.”

From the Chicago Tribune:

Ed Loos, a junior at Lake Forest High School, said a common reaction among students to Chris Brown’s alleged attack on Rihanna goes something like this: “Ha! She probably did something to provoke it.” In Chicago, Sullivan High School sophomore Adeola Matanmi has heard the same. “People said, ‘I would have punched her around too,’ ” Matanmi said. “And these were girls!”

As allegations of battery swirl around the famous couple, experts on domestic violence say the response from teenagers just a few years younger shows the desperate need to educate this age group about dating violence.

Yep.

(more…)

Did you miss End a Bad Relationship Day? Accidentally on purpose? Then check out this casting call, sent from a reliable FOBG. We mean, if all your friends are telling you to break up and it’s not working, perhaps you’ll listen to everyone who watches MTV?

TRUE LIFE: I Can’t Leave My Boyfriend/Girlfriend
Are you in a relationship that’s on the road to nowhere? Are your two opposing life situations (distance, finances, religion, culture) making it increasingly difficult to stay together? Do you want to break up with your mate but don’t know how to go about actually doing the deed? Are you hanging on to the relationship because you’re overwhelmed at the thought of being alone? Have you broken up before only to go running back to each other shortly thereafter?

We know that breaking up is hard to do, and if you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then MTV would like to hear your story. Tell us as much about your relationship as possible — let us know how long you’ve been together, what your attraction to each other was, what the circumstances were that led to your decision, and what your current status is as a couple

If you appear to be between the ages of 17-26, want to breakup with your boyfriend/girlfriend, and would like to share your story, please email us at CantLeave@mtvn.com. Please be sure to include your name, location, phone number, and a photo of you and your mate.

A group of scientists at Lafayette University recently found that kissing reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol. They also noted higher levels of the emotional-bonding chemical oxytocin in the guys  they studied — but curiously, not in the girls, whose oxytocin levels pretty much stayed the same.

The study’s subjects were male and female, college-age students from the school — no same-sex couples were studied! Erm! — who were asked to make out in the student health center for 15 minutes. Memo to Lafayette admissions: put that in the catalog!

While I am tickled to find that there’s a Latin-derived “-ology” for the study of kissing — philematology — I wish it didn’t sound quite so much like “phelgmatology.” And to an extent, I’m happy to remain a layman rather than overanalyzing the art of kissing. For example, I don’t think I need to know that “men prefer ‘sloppy’ kisses, in which chemicals including testosterone can be passed onto the women in saliva. Testosterone increases the sex drives in both males and females.” Dropping that bit of science on me has, I think, actually ruined my next makeout session.