| Hit-miss bliss
Maybe you want to be richer or slimmer, get married or get divorced, become gainfully employed or be thankfully retired. There is a single word that describes the goal of all these dreams and aspirations. They are all ways, ultimately, to make you happy. Some of us will get the things we want, and others won't. The more interesting question is: Why do people who get what they want rarely end up as happy as they expected, while people who fail to achieve dreams rarely end up as unhappy as they feared? Systematic experiments show that as strongly as we hold onto our dreams and fear setbacks, we are poor judges of what will make us happy and unhappy. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made it his life's work to understand why people not only make errors in predicting what will make them happy, but also why they make the same errors over and over again.
Taxes fuel discontent
Ehrlich's job approval ratings never dipped below 50 percent in his four years, and the Republican remains one of the most popular politicians in Maryland, with 58 percent of voters viewing him in a favorable light, compared with 28 percent who do not.
However, the survey found that only a third of voters thought the state improved under Ehrlich's tenure, with the rest believing it stayed the same or got worse.
If there is any silver lining for O'Malley in the figures, it may be that putting aside his job performance, 48 percent of voters view him favorably compared with 39 percent unfavorably.
And there is still a sizable portion of the electorate, 20 percent, that is unsure whether they approve of how he's doing his job.
The governor said in a recent interview that he advocated his budget-balancing plan knowing that it could hurt him politically because he believed that finding a fiscal remedy was unavoidable.
Australia in the dock
An opinion poll in the Sydney Daily Telegraph showed 82% of Australians believed Ricky Ponting was not a great ambassador for the country, and 79% felt the national team did not play within the spirit of cricket. Abusive phone calls were made to Ponting’s parents. The country has its jingoists – three years ago, spectators at Perth, the venue for this week’s third Test, racially abused the South African team – but in the main it is a conservative nation embarrassed by the sharp practice of its representatives. Geoff Lawson, the Australian fast bowler turned Pakistan coach, accused Australia of arrogance and disrespecting the baggy green cap, while John Bertrand, the America’s Cup-winning yachtsman, called on Cricket Australia to tell its players to show the game more respect.
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