Normally I think we resent people on Facebook that have the same name as us, but these two found L-O-V-E!

Kelly girl sends a cyber shout-out to Kelly boy, and he answers back. Three weeks of viral flirting leads Kelly boy to head east to Florida to meet girl Kelly. A couple of months later, he’s relocating — and come October, just eight months after their first connection, Kelly Hildebrandt will marry Kelly Hildebrandt.

Read the full story at MSN!

True story: Not only did I meet a female “Chris Kalb” once, she was the German exchange student LIVING WITH MY COLLEGE ROOMMATE’S FAMILY. Of course she didn’t give me the time of day.

Bride’s bouquet brings down plane.

(Normally, it just brings down the room.)

From EW.com:

“Queen Padme to be Jane Foster? Such is the case as Marvel Studios announced today that Natalie Portman will star opposite Chris Hemsworth in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Thor. The Academy-award nominated actress will play the nurse, Jane Foster, who becomes Thor’s first love.”

That was quick.

Via BoingBoing:

Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:

The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids’ ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.

Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.

The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.

Nice eulogy here.

…Certainly she embodied, in her rather brief career, many fairly significant shifts in how women were viewed, on television and in the culture, something I can’t imagine any of us expected as we gazed through the dim choking haze of adolescence at that mane of golden hair and perfect smile and wondered why the gods were so arbitrary with their gifts.

If nothing else, Farrah Fawcett proved something that should make life a little easier for the rest of us: You don’t have to have a huge body of work to make a pretty big imprint. Though a great smile certainly helps.

Sorry, nope.

OK, so maybe it’s not exactly revenge to read that muscular men have more sexual partners and tend to lose their virginity at an earlier age than untoned dudes. But payback time’s a comin’: turns out skinny guys actually live longer. Ain’t no party like a retirement-home party!

According to a recent evolutionary psychology study from the University of Pittsburgh, “The beefier the man… the more sexual partners he had. [But] compared to skinnies…muscular men also tended to producer fewer infection-fighting white blood cells and less of an important immune molecule.”  Point, emo dudes.

I often take a friend breakup harder than I do a lover breakup. Because we’re not supposed to break up with our friends. Boy- and girlfriends are practically designed to come and go, while friendship is so meaningful and precious that it makes us utter little sweet nothings like “A friend is forever” or “Friends till the end.” Nobody’s ever said “Boyfriend till the end.” Just doesn’t sound right.

So I take a little let-myself-off-the-hook comfort in this recent study showing that most friendships come with an expiration date, too. In fact, sociologists found that the seven-year-itch phenomenon applies just as much to our platonic relationships as it does our sexual ones.

During that stretch of time, as one summary put it, “personal network sizes remained stable, but many members of the network were new. Only 30 percent of  the original ‘helper’ friends and discussion partners had the same position in a subject’s network seven years later, and only 48 percent were still part of the social network.”

Perhaps we were readier to acknowledge that friendships evolve (or don’t!) as we do — and that some have a natural shelf-life — we’d be better able to take their ends in stride?

When second-to-last we checked, teens were getting much better at using contraception. But now, as it turns out, they’re slacking. Yet they’re still having the same amount of sex. Problem.

From a Guttmacher Institute press release today: “After major improvements in teen contraceptive use in the 1990s and early 2000s, which led to significant declines in teen pregnancy, it is disheartening to see a reversal of such a positive trend,” says lead author John Santelli, M.D., chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Guttmacher Institute senior fellow. “Teens are still having sex, but it appears many are not taking the necessary steps to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.”

Why the decline? “The authors suggest that the recent decline in teen contraceptive use since 2003 could be the result of faltering HIV prevention efforts among youth, or of more than a decade of abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education that does not mention contraception unless it is to disparage its use and effectiveness.”

That’s just what we’ll continue to do about ab-only ed.