“Change a man-whore? Don't bet on it - CNN” plus 3 more

Change a man-whore? Don't bet on it - CNN
Intriguing: Tiger to apologize - CNN
France's national library gets Casanova's memoirs - Tacoma News Tribune
The crucial role Rabbi Elon played in my life - Haaretz.com

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Change a man-whore? Don't bet on it - CNN

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:31 AM PST

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Editor's note: Audrey Irvine is a senior assignment manager for CNN. Her experiences in the dating world inspire her "Relationship Rant" column. Check back every week for her take on dating and relationships

(CNN) -- Two television shows, "The Bachelor" and "For the Love of Ray J," have one thing in common: They both contribute to the glamorizing of the man-whore.

To understand where I'm going with this, let's first define man-whore.

According to Urban Dictionary.com, a man-whore is "someone who repeatedly sleeps with random women indiscriminately without regard to any consequences. Man-whores are mainly found at local pubs, bars, parties, although they can be found anywhere throughout the world."

Man-whores used to be easy to spot, like that old man hanging out in the nightclub, trying to pick up young ladies.

But the new, improved man-whore wants you to believe he wants to be committed but just hasn't found the right woman to commit to -- yet.

How does he get away with it? Here is where the problem lies, and I fully expect to get some flak for this. Women are the reason the man-whore continues to exist and evolve into the "misunderstood guy who can't commit." Women feed the never-ending addictive cycle. If there were not women around willing to service these men, the man-whore would cease to exist.

Watch any episode of "The Bachelor" -- yes, I admit that I occasionally watch the show for entertainment value and research, of course -- and you will see another version of the man-whore. More than a dozen women are primping and throwing themselves at the bachelor in hopes that he will choose them to be his prize.

The TV bachelor may not appear to fit the definition of man-whore, because the show would have you believe he has some regard for the consequences of his romances. After all, the ladies want to think the goal of the "The Bachelor" is to be monogamous, right?

Another TV show also helps perpetuate the glamorous life of the man-whore. VH1's "For the Love of Ray J" is a less classy version of "The Bachelor." The star is singer Brandy's brother. While Ray J is trying to chose his partner for a long-term relationship, the bevy of women demonstrate how willing they are to meet his needs.

The Ray J antics get raunchier and more in-your-face than on "The Bachelor," where affections are implied while the bedroom doors are closed. However, the common thread of both shows is that women are willing to do whatever they can to close the romantic deal.

Women have a tendency to celebrate the exception instead of paying attention to the rule.

For example, Warren Beatty was for years one of the most famously celebrated man-whores. A new biography on the actor alleges he slept with more than 12,000 women. It wasn't until Beatty met Annette Bening that he finally settled down.

Can you imagine the angst of all the other women in his life who had thought they were the one? This is where women get in trouble. There are many women who believe they are their man-whore's Annette Bening. A woman's constant need to please and nurture has helped coddle and allow the man-whore to survive.

What's the solution? Ladies, my hope is that we can all learn from each other's missteps.

So, the next time you meet that guy who has no regard for commitment and he says one day he'll meet the woman of his dreams and that maybe you're the one? Tell him, "Back off man-whore, I refuse to be one more rat in this rat race of getting you to commit."

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Intriguing: Tiger to apologize - CNN

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:16 AM PST

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Editor's note: Every weekday, CNN focuses on a handful of people in the news. This is a chance to find out more about what they've done -- good or bad -- what they've said or what they believe, and why we think they're intriguing.

(CNN) -- Tiger Woods: He may be the greatest golfer now -- or ever. According to tigerwoods.com, Woods "has had an unprecedented career since becoming a professional golfer in the late summer of 1996. He has won 95 tournaments, 71 of those on the PGA Tour." This prowess made him one of the planet's most admired and wealthiest athletes. The Web site reports, "Tiger increased his record total on the PGA Tour career money list to $92,862,539, through 2009, and had won $111,433,044 worldwide."

After November 27, the world's relationship with the world's No. 1 golfer changed. The Florida Highway Patrol reported that Woods had lost control of his SUV outside of his home. His car had reportedly hit a fire hydrant and a tree. His wife, Elin Nordegren, said she had used a golf club to smash out the back window to free him. Officers arrived and found Woods on the ground.

A day after he paid his $164 traffic ticket, Woods' seemingly perfect world began to crumble under what would eventually become an avalanche of allegations of infidelity threatening his five-year marriage to Nordegren.

In early December, he posted a statement on his Web site. "I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves," he wrote. He also posted these words: "Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions."

Wednesday, Woods' agent, Mark Steinberg, told CNN, "Tiger Woods will be speaking to a small group of friends, colleagues and close associates at 11 a.m. (EST) Friday at the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL. Tiger plans to discuss his past and his future and he intends to apologize for his behavior."

CNN: Woods to speak publicly for first time since accident

Lindsey Vonn: Living up to her billing as the golden girl of the Winter Olympics, Vonn scored a dominant victory in the women's downhill at Whistler Creek on Wednesday. Vonn had been troubled by a shin injury in the buildup to the Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, but showed no ill effects with a blistering run of 1 minute 44.19 seconds to win her first Olympic medal of any color.

The Minnesotan -- the reigning world champion in the discipline and totally dominant on the World Cup circuit leading up to the Games -- demolished the time set by fellow American and silver medal winner Julia Mancuso by over half a second. "I dreamed about what this would feel like, but it is much better in real life," said the 25-year-old. Vonn is the first American woman ever to win Olympic downhill gold.

Her chances to win at all were put in doubt right before the Winter Games when she suffered a deep bruise during a training accident on February 2 in Austria. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Vonn said she dealt with her "excruciating" pain by applying a dairy product. "I put cheese on it to try to take the swelling out," she said -- specifically a German curd cheese called topfen.

CNN: Golden girl Vonn triumphs in women's downhill

Christian Science Monitor: Vonn's answer to shin injury: cheese

Phyllis Schlafly: The Conservative Political Action Conference begins today in Washington. During the next three days, attendees will hear from such conservative superstars as Rep. Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Liz Cheney, Ann Coulter, Sen. Jim DeMint, Newt Gingrich, Wayne LaPierre, Rep. Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, J.C. Watts, George F. Will and many others. Today, one of the modern conservative movement's founding mothers, Phyllis Schlafly, will participate in a panel discussion, "Saving Freedom from The Enemies of Our Values."

According to the biography on her Web site, Schlafly started her pro-family volunteer organization -- now called Eagle Forum -- in 1972. She spent ten years battling what she called the "radical feminist movement" and was a main force in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. At the age of 85, she still produces a monthly newsletter, a syndicated newspaper column, commentaries that air on hundreds of radio stations, and a syndicated radio talk show. And she's written or edited 20 books. The mother of six children, she was named Illinois Mother of the Year in 1992.

In 2009, TIME magazine asked her what her next cause would be. Schlafly said, "Well, I guess the next cause is to keep Obama from taking this country into socialism -- which means the government running everything, which means having everybody believe that the government can solve their problems. And of course I grew up during the Depression. We didn't have any of the handouts and we grew up to be the greatest generation."

Eagle Forum: Phyllis Schlafly bio

TIME: Q&A with Phyllis Schlafly

Alice Fogg: For the past 13 months, Fogg has been at her sewing machine in Naples, Maine, making pillows for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan hospitals. We saw a report about Fogg by Adrienne Bennett of WABI-TV, so we just had to phone the energetic 82-year-old ourselves on Wednesday.

Fogg told us she has a friend whose son was a nurse in a military hospital in Afghanistan where there were some 1,000 wounded soldiers. So she had an exact address where she could send the pillows she makes by hand, sometimes using a 100-year-old Singer treadle sewing machine.

She has made some 1,600 pillows so far. Many times, the pillows are used to comfort wounded soldiers who must make a 10-hour trip from Afghanistan to a medical facility in West Germany.

Fogg has received many notes and cards from doctors, nurses, chaplains and soldiers. Air Force Lt. Col. Dr. B. Williams wrote, "Your homemade pillows made an experience for many young men and women more tolerable." He closed the letter with these words: "We promise to work hard and do our duty so that you and your family can sleep safely at night and live your lives as you desire as is our privilege as Americans."

Fogg says her father was in the Army, as was a brother. Another brother served in the Marines in World War II and a son was in Vietnam. Fogg says she will make the pillows as long as she is able. "I feel like I am worthwhile. I am doing something that's good, not just sitting around," she said.

WABI: Maine woman sends pillows to troops

Huck Finn: We've known the 14-year-old, pipe-smoking adventurer from the Mississippi Valley for 125 years. On February 18, 1885, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was first published in the United States.

Samuel L. Clemens, writing under the pen name Mark Twain, had introduced readers to Tom Sawyer eight years earlier, and now it was time for Tom's unschooled buddy, Huck, to escape from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and travel the Mississippi River.

He took that journey with Jim, a slave running from his owner, Miss Watson. Twain wrote, in Huck's voice: "It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened."

Twain's manuscript -- all of his handwritten pages -- is kept in a vault at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in Buffalo, New York. But rare books clerk Peter Scheck told CNN that there's always a page or two on exhibit in the library's Mark Twain Room, and visitors can see Twain's writing -- mostly in black ink -- and the many corrections and notes he made to himself in the margins.

You can also see one of the reasons Huck Finn remains not only one of the greatest American novels, but still a controversial one. Twain refers to Jim by the N-word. Scheck says, "Mark Twain was living in a certain time, and to tell the story to the best of his ability, he needed to have his characters speak as people actually spoke. Twain was not a racist. He was just trying to recapture a dialect used 35 years before the book's action occurs." Not all scholars agree with that interpretation.

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library: Special collections

What makes a person intriguing?

There are people who enter the news cycle every day because their actions or decisions are new, important or different. Others are in the news because they are the ones those decisions affect. And there are a number of people who are so famous or controversial that anything they say or do becomes news.

Some of these people do what we expect of them: They run for office, pass legislation, start a business, get hired or fired, commit a crime, make an arrest, get in accidents, hit a home run, overthrow a government, fight wars, sue an opponent, put out fires, prepare for hurricanes and cavort with people other than their spouses. They do make news, but the action is usually more important than who is involved in the story.

But every day, there are a number of people who become fascinating to us -- by virtue of their character, how they reached their decision, how they behaved under pressure or because of the remarkable circumstances surrounding the event they are involved in.

They arouse our curiosity. We hear about them and want to know more. What they have done or said stimulates conversations across the country. At times, there is even a mystery about them. What they have done may be unique, heroic, cowardly or ghastly, but they capture our imaginations. We want to know what makes them tick, why they believe what they do, and why they did what they did. They intrigue us.

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France's national library gets Casanova's memoirs - Tacoma News Tribune

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:09 AM PST

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The crucial role Rabbi Elon played in my life - Haaretz.com

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 05:26 AM PST

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Rabbi Elon was such a life friend for thousands of teenagers (like me), while meteorically becoming a major public figure, perhaps the most revered in the religious community. We, his close students, who knew him almost from the beginning of his educational and rabbinic career, felt the public's adulation of him reflected on us and made us more special than friends who didn't study at Yeshivat Horev.

He was party to all our dilemmas. We told him about our first girlfriends, arguments with our parents, problems during military service and plans for the future.

We introduced him to our fiancees, and he danced at our weddings, holding us close. We would wait for hours on the steps to his office to get a few minutes of personal time with him, or we would go to his home, sometimes at 2 A.M., the only time he had left over from running the yeshiva, preparing and giving lessons, meetings and lectures.

Spiritual experiences

We shared with him our most uplifting moments, on trips to the extermination camps in Poland, when he announced the death in battle of a yeshiva alumnus and on nature hikes, which he always transformed into a spiritual experience.

Like when he told us to switch off our flashlights in the depths of the Haritun Cave and began singing and dancing with us in the dark. We grew up with him and with his children. We never understood how he found time for everything. I have no idea whether the allegations against him are true. He gave my friends and I thousands of kisses and hugs but never did we feel there was anything untoward about that. I will be very happy if the allegations prove false.

But if I had been asked yesterday, before the story broke, how I felt (supposedly as a grown-up) about our decade-long relationship, I would have had to admit it was problematic.

My attachment to such a turbine of charisma filled me with energies that almost wiped out my own identity, which had barely begun to emerge, and set me on paths that - with hindsight - I regretted. I did not reflect on who I really am.

We complain today about the lack of role models in the Israeli education system.

A dark side

But there is also a dark side to charisma and admiration, especially when they suffocate the natural rebellion of youth and individualism. This problem isn't only in yeshivas. From reading biographies, I know that the youth of the old kibbutz movement, pupils in Catholic schools worldwide and the boys sent to public school in Victorian England experienced the same magnetism of strong charismatic figures.

Very often there followed painful disappointment and awakening.

A high incidence of sexual abuse is just one result of life in such a closed and intense environment. But the issue of generations of young men (women are more resilient) with uniform views and personalities, who only much later, if at all, begin to form their own identity and inner spiritual world, is a less recognized but no less painful part of it.

As a father, the only lesson I can impart to my children from my years close to Rabbi Elon is while they have a duty to respect their teachers, never suspend your critical faculties toward figures of authority; do not become dependent on objects of admiration; and beware of charisma, as if from fire.

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Biographies

Thursday, February 18, 2010