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Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays & Wonderful Football!

Happy Holdiays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah.... and Great and Merry Football!

Laura and I tend to send out cards every year that speak to some of the things we all areup to… as they say, ” a picture is worth a thousand words.” Although I am always amused at those who send these great tomes of family successes… you know what I mean… ( in truth, I am happier when folks are doing well )   

” Jason was really miffed this year getting cheated out of the Heisman… but his well earned Nobel prize was waiting for him when he returned and Amanda was a little wild this year sharing her underpants with Britney who forgot hers.. but she is settling down after her Oscar… and my Husband Xerxies invented something called ‘fusion’… oh and that silly little award I got from Oprah as ‘woman of the century’… who would have believed it? so all in all it hasn’t been a bad year….. and how are you?”

 
However, I am willing to endure all of these in order to avoid the ones saying that Missy is finally getting her life together with the father or ‘fiancee’ of child number 4 now that she is out of rehab. Fiancee’? who are you kidding? 

 

Soooo… our card was a ‘sporting theme’ representing all of the Universities in which one or all of us have attended… USC, UCLA, SMU, U of Florida, United States Military academy at West Point, University of Missouri at Rolla…. and Cal Poly. 

  Enjoy the holidays, enjoy your life    

Roger Freberg    

 

 

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it’s TAKE YOUR HUBBY To WORK DAY!

take your hubby to work day
What I am about to say is going to cause a number of very different reactions.

Allow me to advocate for a new and very special day called….. TAKE YOUR HUBBY TO WORK DAY!

Instantly, what goes through your mind,  ladies? Are you saying, “this is a great way for my husband to see and better understand my life?”… or…. are you thinking,” akk! he’ll see what I am really up to during the day! I gotta hide Sven the thong wearing cabana boy.”

My guess it is neither of those… but more on the side of…. hmmmmm… ‘let me think about that for a moment.’

I won’t go into all the details, but my daughters did spend time with me at work and Laura did visit with me as she could… but this isn’t about them… this is now about ME! In our ever changing world, visiting with your wife at work is a great way to see her in a new setting, better understand her challenges and do something positive for your relationship. If nothing else, it gives some background and texture to the stories she brings home each night.

Seeing each other at work addresses some real issues, the average couple spends less that 30 minutes a day talking to each other… and people wonder why their relationships seem to be rocky? So whether it is meeting for a regular lunch ‘date’ or spending time in each others workplace once in a while… the time together is well spent.

My Laura is a Professor, so it seemed only natural for me to take a day every once in a while to sit in her classes and play at being a student again. Hey, I actually learned something…. just ask me about ‘cranial nerve 8’! I have also had the opportunity to watch her interact with students, which only proved to me that she has ‘adopted’ a number of them….  Maybe I am looking through ‘rose colored’ glasses… but she never fails to impress me.

So, if you are not as able as my wife is to ‘take your hubby to work day’… what can you do?….  try to meet more often during the work week…. maybe over lunch. The atmosphere is more relaxed… and you’ll be surprised … and maybe, just maybe… you’ll enjoy yourself.

Roger Freberg

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John Kerry … the gift that keeps on giving!

Happy Halloween!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gosh, I thought that this would just blow over. Usually, most thinking people recognize their boo boos and apologize… but oh no… not more ‘money than sense’ John Kerry.

The fine Senator and veteran from Arizona John McCain asked John Kerry to apologize for his remarks to those men and women serving in Iraq…  and John ‘three and fly*’ Kerry has gone on record by saying:

“I refuse to apologize!”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any creepier… the crypt opens… and he can speak…. but can Kerry earn top good grades?

Happy Holloween!

Roger Freberg

* three purple hearts qualify a soldier during the Vietnam Conflict for a transfer stateside… the ‘reasons’ for his purple hearts has always been a question.

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Can women and men EVER be just ‘friends’?

the orignal debate.... can men and women be friends?Ranking up there as one of the top topics on the internet… behind sex, dating and marriage is the simple question:

“Can Men and Women just be friends?”

“when Harry met Sally” the underlying theme is exactly that… “Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?”.

The movie provides their own sort of answer… but people tend to respond to this question based on what they bring into the situation.

Here’s a few ‘answers’ to the question I found on the internet… but search the net for yourself… some of the solutions are very amusing:

1) I told him/her that I just ‘wanted to be friends’ because I definitely don’t want  to go farther with this person.

2) I told him/her that I wanted to be ‘friends’… because then I would have more access to them … and could bump the relationship up in the future.

3) I told him/her I wanted to be friends because that’s like saying,”let’s do lunch’, then I would never call.

I think the following is the best lines of the ‘When Harry met Sally”:

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

Well, this all is a bit over the top, but for those of you who BELIEVE that men and women COULD BE friends… think of it this way, scientists have shown that men think about sex every 51 seconds… so some of the spare time could be used to think about making friends…

However, all is not lost, there are some environments where men and women work together and it appears that a good working relationship or ‘friendship’ evolves… such as in the army. However, it is important to remember that the penalties for crossing the friendship line in the military are severe… you can get kicked out for adultery alone.

So it really depends on what efforts are in place to support workplace discipline. To make this point clear my wife (and friend) Laura in her psychology class will say that almost any behavior can be modified or changed with the right reward and punishment scheme. Imagine — she says — that it is determined that illegal parking warrants capital punishment… students will respond saying,’well …. it’s only 25 miles…. and it’s a good day for a walk!’

‘Platonic friendships’ can also work bnetween men and women… but it requires more effort than most realize…. and usually the right environment.

Here’s what other folks are saying on this very popular issue:

MedicineNet.com
Psychology Today
from a Christian Perspective
Confused
from Cosmo

There’s literally a ton of stuff on the net… Google showed over 36 million entries… I don’t have quite enough time to view them all… but from my observation, it could be summarized that a woman would be fortunate to have the following real male friends in her life… 1) her husband 2) her father 3) her brothers and possibly 4) other related men. Outside of this small universe, I haven’t seen it happen.

So, for now, let’s just be friends.

 

Roger Freberg

 

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Whose Women do Men Protect?

Fair Young Maiden , a bottle of run and thar be a full moon t'night, Luv!The Nature vs. Nurture debate goes on and on and don’t you just love it?

Some people just can’t let it go when faced with recent advances in the scientific community that appear to contradict their entire life’s work.

For far too long, one notion of how the world worked held sway. We were taught to believe that if you succeeded it was because of your environment and if you failed it was because of your environment… your ‘genes’ had nothing to do with it. Science is giving us a much clearer explanation, today.

We’re having to unlearn what we were taught and that is becoming most disturbing — even frightening — to those who have invested their career and their political life in one point of view. The resulting conflict between current dogma and the influences of new research in genetics shows up in the darndest places with often the most surprising of advocates.

A recent article by Shaunti Feldhahn and Diane Glass took opposing points of view in the discussion: CHIVALRY TODAY: SHOULD MEN BE EXPECTED TO PROTECT WOMEN. I leave the full reading to you in the attached link above, but allow me to offer this brief and rather incomplete & brutal summary: Shaunti says that it is in men’s nature to protect and Diane takes the position that women shouldn’t want male protection and — besides — it is a learned behavior. The truth is somewhat different from both.

There is plenty of research on the concept of ‘altruism’. This is a kinship phenomenon. As it applies to men, males will protect and defend women in their family… or whatever extension of ‘family’ they visualize. So, Shaunti is more correct by concluding that men will ( or we expect them to) protect women within their group.. and Diane is less correct in assuming that men will not protect women… with the exception that men are less likely to protect women outside their family group.

Unfortunately, folks like Diane appear to view these types of discussions with fear. They apparently worry that agreement in ‘hereditary’ issues and discussions might throw society back to the age in which women were relatively dependent and economically and sexually powerless and fret that the unintended concequences of her actions would be to find herself and all womenkind stuck in slavery once again. This is a case of fear driving politics and politics erasing science.

There is a chance that Diane only knows weenie men and cats, lots of them. I do seldom see women like Diane with anything like a man… more like a eunuch. I wrote about ‘Weenie men and the Women who love them”… I just hope you — Diane — aren’t one of them. Weenie men seldom make women happy in the long run.

Here are a few fans of Shaunti:

KLOPBLOG
I’d Rather Laugh than Cry
Spunky Chick’s book Club
Elizabeth
Respect or Love
Modesty Matters
DIRO
Patrick o’Connell

My Blog today reminds me of two things:

1) The world of science is opening doors we never dreamed… and all for the better… however, let’s hope we are wise enough to understand what we see…. ethics seems to travel slower than science.

2) Diane, to protect our culture and your world, you may need a few real men… and real women…… or we all may be viewing that horrific world yuo envision through the slits of a burka.

It’s never too late to see the world for what it is and change your point of view.

Roger Freberg

 

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