THE 10 SIGNS OF AGING FOR MEN

1.) You are now starting to wear reading glasses

2.) When it comes to music, sports, gimmicks, and even fashion, you think the
70’s and the 80’s rule.

3.) Your favourite music collection is mostly made up of vinyls (and in
fairness, it was been proven that vinyl has superior sound quality than CD’s)

4.) You no longer like wearing printed t-shirts (you prefer plain colored ones)

5.) Sticking racing stickers on your car or motorbike is in bad taste.

6.) You now frown when young women wear sexy clothes inside the church.

7.) Your average annual beer consumption is declining.

8.) Forget new age, your idea of a chill out music is still Pink Floyd’s “Dark
Side of the Moon” album.

9.) Your parents, teachers and especially the principal were right all along-
freedom goes hand in hand with responsibilities.

10.) You just come to realise, that despite its flaws, the system actually
works, and more than that-you are now part of it!

INVESTMENT PROPSAL: What should I do to marry a rich guy?

A young and pretty lady posted this on a popular forum:



I'm going to be honest of what I'm going to say here. I'm 25 this year. I'm very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above. You might say that I'm greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York . My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married? I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you? Among those I've dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit. If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden ( ? ) , $250k annual income is not enough.

I'm here humbly to ask a few questions:

1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)

2) Which age group should I target?

3) Why most wives of the rich men is only average-looking? I've met a few girls who don’t have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys

4) How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (my target now is to get married)

Ms. Pretty


Awesome reply:

Dear Ms.. Pretty,

I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analyse your situation as a professional investor. My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I'm not wasting time here. From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you.. The answer is very simple, so let me explain.

Put the details aside, what you're trying to do is an exchange of 'beauty' and 'money': Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square. However, there's a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can't be prettier year after year.. Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It's not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worried 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a 'trading position'. If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term - same goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or 'leased'. Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income. This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps. If you are interested in 'leasing' services, do contact me...

signed,
CEO J.P.. Morgan



DEFINITION OF FINANCIAL TERMS (POST SUB-PRIME)

BULL MARKET – A random market movement causing
an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius

BEAR MARKET – a 6 to 18 month period when the
kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewellery, and the husband gets no
sex.

VALUE INVESTING – The art of buying low and selling lower..

P/E RATIO – The percentage of investors wetting
their pants as the market keeps crashing.

BROKER - What my financial planner has made me.

STANDARD & POOR – Your life in a nutshell.

STOCK ANALYST – Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT – When your ex-wife and her lawyer
split your assets equally between themselves.

MARKET CORRECTION – The Day after you buy stocks..

CASH FLOW – The movement our money makes as it disappears down the
toilet.

WINDOWS – What you jump out of when you're the
sucker who invested in PIP, Franc Swiss, and Legacy Plans on the same year

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR – Past year investor
who's now locked up in a nuthouse.

PROFIT – an archaic word no longer in use.

SOURCE: Forwarded email

LOVE’S IN THE HEAD, NOT THE HEART

So now we don’t call it broken hearted anymore, but brain damaged..and the songs "Going out of my head (over you)" and "Head over heels" makes sense after all.

Philippine Star: February 13, 2009

WASHINGTON – Like any young woman in love, Bianca Acevedo has exchanged Valentine hearts with her fiancé.
But the New York neuroscientist knows better. The source of love is in the head, not the heart.

She is one of the researchers in a relatively new field focused on explaining the biology of romantic love. And the unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics.

That seems to be the case for the newly in love, the long in love and the brokenhearted.

“It has a biological basis. We know some of the key players,” said Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. There, he studies the brains of an unusual monogamous rodent to get a better clue about what goes on in the minds of people in love.

In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love.
Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.
The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.

The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain.

“These are cells that make dopamine and send it to different brain regions,” said Helen Fisher, a researcher and professor at Rutgers University. “This part of the system becomes activated because you’re trying to win life’s greatest prize – a mating partner.”
One of the research findings isn’t so complimentary: Love works chemically in the brain like a drug addiction.
“Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly,” Fisher said.

“People kill for love. They die for love.”

The connection to addiction “sounds terrible,” Acevedo acknowledged. “Love is supposed to be something wonderful and grand, but it has its reasons. The reason I think is to keep us together.”

But sometimes love does not keep us together. So the scientists studied the brains of the recently heartbroken and found additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is even more strongly associated with addiction.
“The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I’ll call craving,” said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist also at Einstein medical college. “Similar to craving the drug cocaine.”

The team’s most recent brain scans were aimed at people married about 20 years who say they are still holding hands, lovey-dovey as newlyweds, a group that is a minority of married people. In these men and women, two more areas of the brain lit up, along with the VTA: the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

The ventral pallidum is associated with attachment and hormones that decrease stress; the raphe nucleus pumps out serotonin, which “gives you a sense of calm,” Fisher said.

Those areas produce “a feeling of nothing wrong. It’s lower-level happiness and it’s certainly rewarding,” Brown said.

The scientists say they study the brain in love just to understand how it works, as well as for more potentially practical uses.

The research could eventually lead to pills based on the brain hormones which, with therapy, might help troubled relationships, although there are ethical issues, Young said. His bonding research is primarily part of a larger effort aimed at understanding and possibly treating social-interaction conditions such as autism. And Fisher is studying brain chemistry that could explain why certain people are attracted to each other. She’s using it as part of a popular Internet matchmaking service for which she is the scientific adviser.

While the recent brain research is promising, University of Hawaii psychology professor Elaine Hatfield cautions that too much can be made of these studies alone. She said they need to be meshed with other work from traditional psychologists.
Brain researchers are limited because there is only so much they can do to humans without hurting them. That’s where the prairie vole – a chubby, short-tailed mouse like creature – comes in handy. Only 5 percent of mammals more or less bond for life, but prairie voles do, Young said.

Scientists studied voles to figure out what makes bonding possible. In females, the key bonding hormone is oxytocin, also produced in both voles and humans during childbirth, Young said.

When scientists blocked oxytocin receptors, the female prairie voles didn’t bond.
In males, it’s vasopressin. Young put vasopressin receptors into the brains of meadow voles – a promiscuous cousin of the prairie voles – and “those guys who should never, ever bond with a female, bonded with a female.”
Researchers also uncovered a genetic variation in a few male prairie voles that are not monogamous – and found it in some human males, too.
Those men with the variation ranked lower on an emotional bonding scale, reported more marital problems, and their wives had more concerns about their level of attachment, said Hasse Walum, a biology researcher in Sweden. It was a small but noticeable difference, Walum said.

Scientists figure they now know better how to keep those love circuits lit and the chemicals flowing.

Young said that romantic love theoretically can be simulated with chemicals, but “if you really want to get the relationship spark back, then engage in the behavior that stimulates the release of these molecules and allow them to stimulate the emotions,” he said. That would be hugging, kissing, intimate contact.

“My wife tells me that flowers work as well. I don’t know for sure,” Young said. “As a scientist it’s hard to see how it stimulates the circuits, but I do know they seem to have an effect. And the absence of them seems to have an effect as well.” - AP

HAPPY VALENTINE'S TO ALL!