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A few random links have been floating around in the “To be posted” part of my brain for awhile now, but I hadn’t been able to figure out exactly the right tone for the post… Until now! So here we go:

First, I was at Starbucks on Monday, and I saw a copy of the Red Eye (Chicago’s local-paper equivalent of Cosmo/Maxim) lying around. The cover was (as you can see) pretty eye-catching, so I picked it up to see if the cover article would offer any stimulating or insightful commentary on the whole “Media distortion of the female body image” issue. Or, you know… to see if there would be any more pictures inside. (There was, FYI =) Anyway, the article did contain a pretty fantastic quote from one of the covergirls, which I’ll share with you here: “I love them! Sometimes I like to just sit there and hold them.” And I’m sure you can figure out what the pronouns in that quote are referring to. I was struck by her honesty, and then I thought to myself, “Maybe guys and girls aren’t so different after all.” =) So anyway, I had that quote in mind as I was reading this article, about the psychological problems faced by soldiers in the Iraqi conflict. Here, a soldier remarks: “The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever felt.” Again, not the kind of thing you’d expect an ostensible “peace-keeper” to say, on the record, but as with the young lady from the previous article, I find his honesty both surprising and amusing. (Somewhat less amusing is a quote from another soldier, in the same article: “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. It’s like it pounds at my brain. I’ll figure out how to deal with it when I get home.” Although, I guess it is sort of amusing that he could say something so creepy, probably without intending to.) So anyway, surgeons and pyschologists alike are, of course, up in arms about both the teen implant craze, and the crazed soldier stuff. Perhaps we should consider the long-term consequences, they warn, but nobody seems to listen. Instead, the media pretty much sleeps on the psycho soldiers, in favor of an investigative photo essay on the authenticity of Lindsey Lohan’s rack (or something to that effect). And the beat goes on…