great danes

Five things I learned from Oprah this week:

- I like them Danish. No, not the pastry, but the peeps who live in Copenhagen. (I know they are called Danes - but then you wouldn't have gotten the pastry joke.) They are supposedly the happiest people on earth. They have free health care, they pay you to go to university, they subsidize you for three years after you lose your job, and they don't believe in getting married for the sake of getting married. How novel. And they are not very religious. Oh, and they got cool furnitures - clean lines, minimalist. I need to move there. It's time to stop feeling like a loser just because I am single (I want to feel like a loser for all the other, more legitimate reasons).

- I do not want to live in Dubai. I don't like those clothes people wear. Men wear kandura, and older women wear some beak-y masks on their face. Makes them look like the Nite Owl from The Watchmen. I know that's pretty culturally insensitive, but seriously they kind of freak me out, like talking chimps and Michael Jackson's face. (Wait, now I've gone from being culturally insensitive to being dead-celebrity-icon-insensitive.)

- Sometimes robbers need love too. The story of Greg Smith, the robber who ended up praying with his victim Angela Montez (bless her heart) and giving up his gun, totally tore me up. I was like a whimpering idiot watching that segment. Life is hard, and sometimes it just takes somebody to look you in the eye and treat you like a human being- to save you.

- Rick Springfield looks freaky these days too, in a wax museum kind of way. There really is no good way to fight aging, other than to let it happen and welcome it with your open (arthritic) hands.

- Flash mobs make the world a better, happier place.

By the way, if the Danes are so happy, what the hell was chapping Hamlet's hide? I guess he didn't get the memo.