Blog Posts by Sarah Beston, Shine Staff

I am self-admittedly a hopeless romantic, and maybe I have screwed myself by setting my expectations way too high. But I can't help it. When the hell did romance die, and why are prepubescent school boys better at romance than 30-year-old men with Porsches?

This is what I miss about elementary school romancing:

• Valentine's Day cards (granted they had Scooby Doo or G.I. Joe on them), that say "Love, Your Secret Admirer"
• A flower on my locker (even if it was a god-awful carnation dyed blue)
• The brave soul that walked over to the "girls side" of the smelly gymnasium to ask me to dance
• Boys actually saying what they mean. Period. "Meet me behind the dumpster after school." (OK, that never really quite happened to me, but I know of someone who it did happen to in elementary school and I was jealous.)
• The anticipation of the first hug or the first kiss (as opposed to the expectation of the first lay)
• The only games that boys knew how to play were kickball and

In the past few months, cheating men seem to be more popular than complaining about healthcare or talking about Kate Gosselin's hair. First, there was Tiger's naughty texts to his zillion mistresses, then there was Jesse's white supremacist strippers, and now, according to reports by the New York Post, Bruce Springsteen (AKA The Boss) is joining the ranks of the unfaithful many, and weirdly, no one seems to care.

According to court papers filed by the alleged mistresses' soon-to-be ex-husband, the affair of housewife Ann Kelly, 45, and The Boss, 60, started back in 2005. The two met while sweating it out at a New Jersey gym and apparently the casual chitchat turned into a romance-complete with front row concert tickets, rehearsal serenades, lunches, and eventually a full-fledged sexual liaison.

Ann's husband, Arthur Kelly, filed for a divorce last year alleging that his wife and the singer engaged in extra-marital somethings, while Arthur was in the hospital with heart troubles

Brian, the brainy family dog from the TV show 'Family Guy,' with his liberal political philosophy, has an agenda that may teach us a thing or two. Whether you agree with his politics or not, you can't deny that Brian possesses some of the textbook qualities of a typical politician - a witty liberal from New England with a liking for women, booze and vacationing in the Vineyard - hmmmm?

Here are some of Brian's visions and political positions:

Brian on equality:

He is a strong believer in equal rights for all and investing in our common humanity (even though he is not technically human). Brian gets upset with society for the way it treats dogs and wants people to understand that an animal's life is just as important as a human's life.

Brian on contraception and age discrimination:

We learn that Brian is a believer in safe sex when a condom accidentally falls from his pocket while talking to his date's mom. His date stands him up, but in nondiscriminatory fashion,

Attending the Beijing Olympics in August, 2008 as a spectator and fan, I was immediately struck by the all too apparent censorship of information. On my first day in Beijing, I remember grabbing a USA Today to read while sipping my coffee and wondering why it was only two pages thick (thin). Later, when I logged online at my hotel to check e-mails and see "what was going on the world," I had an eerie sense that I wasn't getting a full report. Turns out I was right. Apparently, the stabbing of an American couple by a Chinese man at the Games didn't make the news-I only learned of the occurrence days later on a phone call home to family in the States.

My thoughts on censorship at the Olympics were reignited yesterday as Google's relationship with China made headlines.

Google threatened that due to a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [its] corporate infrastructure originating from China" that resulted in the theft of intellectual property, the company would no longer censor