Oddity Central

Oddity Central

World’s Unluckiest Bachelor Has Been on 250 Blind Dates, Is Still Single

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 02:52 AM PDT


He’s rich, single and most importantly, he’s not cheap, but despite all these qualities, 47-year-old Larry Greenfield can’t seem to find a suitable life partner. In the last 12 years he has spent around $65,000 on matchmaking services, has been on 250 blind dates, but he has yet to find a wife.

Larry sounds like a really unlucky guy, but according to the New York Post and Yahoo Shine, he’s apparently just really picky. ”His problem is he’s a six and he wanted tens,” Maureen Tara Nelson, one of his former matchmakers told Shine. He would pick out his dates according to their photos and profiles, but at the end he’d always say there was no chemistry. The Post also paints out the retired Wall Street trader as very detail-oriented: he wants a woman who is slim, Jewish, funny, and a non-alpha (isn’t interested in a career). That’s apparently a very rare breed in New York. ”He thinks because he’s wealthy he could get a beautiful women, but what he doesn’t realize is that beautiful women in New York are also already successful,” Nelson said.

Photo: Grind365

But Larry Greenfield says his love slump is actually the matchmakers’ fault. ”You pay them up front and they don’t provide a service. They tell you how wonderful you are, whatever you want to hear,” the millionaire says. “High-priced matchmakers prey on people’s fear of rejection and often make a lot of false promises”, Nancy Slotkin believes, adding that they get blinded by fat checks instead of turning down overly-picky clients who will never be satisfied with what they consider a purchase.

Photo: Dennis Clark/Polaris

In his first interview with the New York Post, Larry sounded like a man who was honestly looking for love. "I'd trade it all in for a white picket fence, two kids, a dog. And you can have it all! I'd take a $50,000-a-year job, work until I retire," the ex-securities trader said. "I'm not a bad guy. I haven't been to prison. It's just a very frustrating thing." He admits he focused on his job in his early years, thinking he’d first get the career and then the girl. But it just didn’t work out the way he planned it. But, after some of the six matchmakers he used in the last few years started spilling the beans, Larry came out as a guy looking for perfection. “He would always come back with some minor, minor thing that the person wasn't perfect," Maureen Tara Nelson remembers, which made he drop him as a client after a year.

Photo: Dennis Clark/Polaris

But Larry has one more chance – Janis Spindel of Serious Matchmaking. "Men are picky. It's in their DNA. They want the four B's — beauty, brains, body and balance," Spindel said, adding Greenfield is no different. "Larry wants a normal girl who's in her thirties who wants to be his wife, who will be a sweet and loving wife and mom. …. I told him I will not take money from him until I have her." Who knows, maybe the 251st time is a charm…

World’s Unluckiest Bachelor Has Been on 250 Blind Dates, Is Still Single was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

Woman Spends a Year Living According to the Bible

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 01:39 AM PDT


31-year-old Rachel Held Evans has spent an entire year trying to follow of the Bible’s instructions for menstruating women, from “submitting” to their husbands to removing themselves from the community. Now she’s launching a book on her religious experiment, called “A Year of Biblical Womanhood”.

The Tennessee-based evangelical blogger set out to obey the Bible’s strict rules for women on their period, from Leviticus Chapters 15 to 18. In case you didn’t know, the Holy Book sets a strict set of rules for women, some explicit, others implied, and Evans tried to obey most of them as precisely as possible. During the 12-month-long experience, she stayed home from church, made her own clothes, abstained from sex and even touching her husband, let her hair grow, slept in a tent once a month, and even carried a  seat cushion with her wherever she went to avoid sitting on chairs outside her home. It might sound funny, even kooky, but  through her experiment Rachel tries to make a serious point: all Christians choose to respect those parts of the Bible that suit them.

Ironically, her biggest critics throughout the whole Biblical project have been conservatives who should’ve been most sympathetic to her idea. ”It goes to show at some level there’s a fear of exposing what it means to follow the Bible literally,” the writer told Slate Magazine. But despite criticism she went through with her experiment and managed to complete her self-set 12-month challenge. Now she’s preparing to launch a book on it, but she’s faced with other hurdles. LifeWay, one of the largest Christian bookstore chains in America, has chosen not to carry “A Year of Biblical Womanhood” because of its use of the word “vagina”. She was ready to remove the word after her editor suggested not doing so would seriously affect sales, but online petitions by her blog readers to leave it in made her change her mind and just face the consequences. “Writers adjust our content to fit this very sanitized, very strict conservative mold, which means we're not producing the best writing or the best books we can produce. Everyone bends over backward to meet these demands”, Rachel said.

Photo: tntech.edu

Due to come out on October 30, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood” is taking on powerful theological questions like gender equality and the future of the Christian Church, so it’s definitely a title to watch out for.

Woman Spends a Year Living According to the Bible was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

Broken-Hearted Dog Stands Guard over Dead Mate’s Body for over a Week

Posted: 16 Oct 2012 12:06 AM PDT


Even in the animal kingdom, the loss of a loved-one isn’t easy, and this grieving dog, on the outskirts of Filippovka, a village in Russia’s Perm region, is proof of that.

His mate had been by a car while trying to cross the road, over seven days ago, but he’s still standing guard over her body, hoping she will wake up. Eye-witnesses say the dog dragged his mate from the road right after she was hit and hasn’t left her side since. He kept trying to move her with his paws and keep her warm with his own body, and the story of his loyalty spread among the locals in just a few days. Children and even adults who passed by and heard his heartbreaking whines and howls, and saw him standing guard over her body often broke into tears. ”It’s very sad. He won’t let anyone near her and he keeps trying to warm her up with his own body”, a local said.

Realizing the dog’s mate isn’t even going to wake up, some villagers tried to lure him away from her body, so they could bury her, but the grieving canine won’t let anyone get withing ten feet of her, not even when tempted with meat. Everyone in Filippovka was touched by this sad love story. “We call them Romeo and Juliet”, one of the villagers said, adding that such devotion and tenderness is most times hard to find among humans.

 

When he finally realizes he’s not coming back, this special dog will have plenty of homes to choose from, as many compassionate villagers want to adopt him, after witnessing his display of loyalty.

Life News via Nothing about Arbroath

Broken-Hearted Dog Stands Guard over Dead Mate’s Body for over a Week was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

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