Answers to your questions about Spring, Spring things and other things.
Why do girls like the color pink?
Because it matches their pudendaAs Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, speculates, “Women think that men are attracted to pink, and men are indeed, for a very simple reason: fertility. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, and if you look at most of the animal world, females indicate their readiness to mate with red and pink. Biologically, that’s the color of engorged tissue; first it gets pink, then it gets red.”
Girls — baby girls — wear pink because pink became the color that denotes “girl” in our own society (and only fairly recently; early last century, blue was a conventional color for girls, pink for boys). Now, says Lyn Mikel Brown, a developmental psychologist at Colby College, “they’re sort of pinkified. Girls come to associate girlhood with wearing pink.”
Which returns us to engorged tissue. “For thousands of years,” Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard neurobiologist, “women have been painting their lips red. They do this because men find red lips attractive. Why? Because sexual arousal makes your lips look pinker. When you have increased blood flow, you have increased sexual arousal — and then pink clothing accentuates that.”
And then, of course, AF trots downstairs to fetch the Tylenol.
How much should you spend on a wedding present?
The question here isn’t really how much you should spend, but how little you can get away with spending while still looking good. And the answer is: It depends, heavily, on any number of factors.
Surveys say the average wedding gift costs $70 to $100 (this range varies with geography, with the pointy-headed big spenders in the Northeast at the high end), but that doesn’t take into account your means, your tastes, your take on their tastes, and the nature of your relationship to the turtledoves.
The experts encourage creativity and personalization, but not for business relationships, where the registry should provide fair guidance, both for specific items and for price range. Of course, if the business at hand is olive oil or waste removal, an envelope stuffed with cash may be de rigueur.
What is the most number of times you can physically have sex in one day?
If “you” refers to “some actual yet unspecified male,” the documented answer is 17 — but that refers only to the number of orgasms by a single subject recorded at the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies during one hour-long session, not over the course of an entire day.
The useful answer — the one that balances these sad extremes — is “It all depends.” It depends on the man’s age and condition. It depends on whether he defines orgasm as ejaculation; they are not necessarily the same. Assuming ejaculation — the title, by the way, of Bill Clinton’s forthcoming memoir — even the most virile of men require some recovery time before spurting again. This so-called refractory period lengthens as he ages, but no hard and fast rules exist to determine how long he’ll need between geysers.
According to Barnaby B. Barratt, the director of the Midwest Institute of Sexology (My goodness, all this and soixante-neuf, too!), “How many times? Who knows? In principle, as many hours as there are in a day, you could be having ejaculations, if you’re in reasonably good health. Six is easy for a man of any age if he’s in good health. But I wouldn’t want to quote numbers if I were you. You’ll get someone writing to you from Idaho, saying, ‘I do it 48 times a day and have done it out in the fields for the last 20 years.’”
Why do we call the area where relief pitchers warm up a “bullpen”?
Casey Stengel, the Ole Perfessor, said it was because that’s where pitchers sat around and shot the breeze. Others claim that the term came from Bull Durham ballpark signs of yore. Its current baseball usage dates to 1915 in print. As far back as 1877, though, bullpen was used by a Cincinnati sports page to denote a roped-off area in foul territory where fans stood to watch the game.
The term may have come from “bull pen,” slang for a stockade where prisoners were held, a usage that appeared first in 1809. By 1903, at any rate, “bull pen” had come to refer to any enclosed waiting area.
How do you calculate slugging percentage?
Finally — a question about something vital. You add the number of total bases (single=1, double=2, triple=3, dinger=4) and divide that sum by the total number of at-bats.