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Comments

1. Well, I do desperately want a Tesla Roadster.

   If I get a well-paid job when I'm done with Presidio, I'll be an early adopter of the White Star.

   Posted by R.M. 'Auros' Harman on Oct. 17, 2007 at 12:38 AM

2. Hey, your software screwed up my link! It converted the underscores in the link into italics tags, and prevented the A HREF stuff from working. :-(

   EDIT: Link fixed. Happy Birthday! -Evan

   Posted by R.M. 'Auros' Harman on Oct. 17, 2007 at 12:56 AM

3. Choosing 30 for one's midlife crisis seems remarkably pessimistic about one's lifepsan to me.

   Posted by Mris on Oct. 17, 2007 at 5:15 AM

4. According to evolutionary psychology, men don't exactly have midlife crises - women do. A man goes nuts as a result of menopause. Which means that a 25-year-old man dating a menopausal woman will go through exactly the same thing as a 50-year-old man. Buying cars is a display of your reproductive fitness. :-)

   Posted by Jemaleddin on Oct. 17, 2007 at 5:38 AM

5. According to evolutionary psychology, men don't exactly have midlife crises - women do. A man goes nuts as a result of menopause. Which means that a 25-year-old man dating a menopausal woman will go through exactly the same thing as a 50-year-old man. Buying cars is a display of your reproductive fitness. :-)

   Posted by Jemaleddin on Oct. 17, 2007 at 5:38 AM

6. Ouch - sorry for the double post, as well as this one compounding the problem!

   Posted by Jemaleddin on Oct. 17, 2007 at 7:10 AM

7. Auros: Yup, comments use Markdown instead (see documentation at the bottom of the page). Welcome to 30, it's a cold, cruel, HTML-less world!

   I was totally thinking about suggesting the Tesla Roadster at your LJ. Great minds think alike... or maybe the Grandpa Bert gene is more powerful than I gave

   Mris: I don't know if you ever watched Scrubs, but in Season 5 there was an amusing Pilgrim funeral scene along these lines.

   Jemaleddin: That's fascinating -- do you have a link for that? And does that mean that if I'm 50, and I date a string of 25-year-old women, I'm trying to avoid a midlife crisis?

   Posted by Evan on Oct. 17, 2007 at 7:24 AM

8. As for cars displaying reproductive fitness, I'm in trouble, since I drive a dinged-up ten-year-old Nissan Sentra. On the other hand, I've been investing my money in a major remodel of the master bathroom, and it looks pretty awesome if I do say so myself.

   On the other other hand, it's clearly smarter to display reproductive fitness via your car rather than your bathroom. I've done this all backwards. "Hey baby, I know my car is crap -- but come home with me anyway, I'll show you the tile work in the bathroom..." Eh.

   Posted by Evan on Oct. 17, 2007 at 7:44 AM

9. I always thought that you were required to get a motorcycle (preferably a hog, probably a Harley) with a leather jacket in order for it to count as a real mid-life crisis.

   I think for 30 any crisis you have should be more sedate...take a trip, start a new career, get a haircut...

   Posted by Adivz on Oct. 17, 2007 at 8:13 AM

10. Well, I am in the process of starting a new career.

    Evan: Wacky non-standard markup systems are teh sUxx0r. Bring back limited HTML, just neutralize angle brackets that don't belong to some limited set of permitted tags. That was working fine here for ages! Why spoil it?

    Posted by R.M. 'Auros' Harman on Oct. 17, 2007 at 12:16 PM

11. Here's the appropriate snippet - let's hope i get the Markdown correct:

    The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of

    Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are. From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife's imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman. It's not his midlife that matters; it's hers. When he buys a shiny-red sports car, he's not trying to regain his youth; he's trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

    http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

    Posted by Jemaleddin on Oct. 17, 2007 at 12:57 PM

12. Jemaleddin, you're a Markdown ace! :)

    Auros: I used MT's built-in HTML filtering for a few years, and came to the conclusion that it sucks.

    • I'd like to allow people to comment with more complicated structures, such as ordered lists and blockquotes and <pre>formatted blocks. Unfortunately, simple element filtering doesn't work here -- if a commenter forgets to close an open tag, they could destroy the rest of the page.
    • Even restricted to inline elements only, HTML filtering sucks. Ever been to a blog where someone forgets to add a </i>, and then subsquent commenters desperately try to close the open tag? It's a sad spectacle, isn't it?
    • Finally, people at this blog might want to talk about HTML markup: <pre>, <code>, <a href="" rel="nofollow">. By encoding all < and > characters automatically, and using Markdown for markup, this blog provides a clean separation between "writing about markup" and "applying markup".

    The best solution, the Cadillac of Comment Systems, is to cobble together together like what Jacques Distler has. I've tried that, but I'm on a shared web host, and I can't get all the necessary CPAN modules installed. Oh well.

    Posted by Evan on Oct. 18, 2007 at 10:05 AM

The comments here use a variation of John Gruber's Markdown. The key differences are that all angle brackets get encoded and that blockquote syntax is slightly different.

• For emphasized text, surround your text with asterisks: *emphasis*. For strongly emphasized text, use two asterisks.
• For inline code, surround your text with backticks: the `<p>` element
• For an inline link, put the link text in square brackets, followed by the link URL in parentheses: [This link](http://example.net/)
• For a preformatted code block, start each line of the code block with four spaces.
• For a bulleted list, start each line of the list with a dash: - bullet item
• For a numbered list, start each line of the list with a number: 1. numbered item
• For a block quotation, start each line of the block quotation with a vertical bar: | "Ask not what your country can do for you...