The most surprising thing about the trend toward blue-hued fragrances for men is that it's so recent, reports David Colman in the New York Times (7/29/10). "We do color association studies all the time, and the idea of blue being steadfast and dependable -- that never changes," says Leatrice Eiseman of the Pantone Color Institute. "But it also brings up all these ideas of sky and water ... So there's this dichotomy between associations of both safety and freedom, but they're both good."

The twist is that blue's popularity may be attributed to something other than the color itself. Some 20 blue-hued fragrances are on the market today, and at least some of them were inspired by Davidoff Cool Water, "a blue-bottled men's fragrance that came out in 1988 and remained in the top 10 sellers for more than a decade." But it was the aroma, and not just the color, that perhaps best explains its success. "What they did was use some aromachemicals used in more functional perfumery," says Paul Austin, a consultant.

Specifically Cool Water's formula included dihydromyrcenol, a fragrance that's "used in soap and detergents to evoke a sense of freshness and cleanliness when you open the package." That gave Cool Water a brightness and pop that was very different from the traditional European ingredients like citrus and lavender. It also incorporated a synthetic compound, calone, with a whiff of saltwater." This not only inspired more blue fragrances, but also more "fresh" and "watery" aromas, which the color blue happens to convey nicely.

A shave or a haircut comes with a cocktail, beer or wine at the Blind Barber in the East Village, reports Frank Bruni in the New York Times (6/25/10). "A barbershop is a hub for culture," says Jeff Laub, a co-owner. "Having a beer to go along with it is a perfect fit." The haircuts ($40) and shaves ($30) aren't cheap, but the accompanying drinks are free, served up from an adjacent lounge. The lounge has its own, separate entrance, in case you just need a drink without the shave or haircut.

Having a drink with a haircut does present its own challenges. Frank said he kept his cocktail -- appropriately a house drink known as the Sweeney Todd -- a safe distance away, to reduce "the chance of shorn little hairs becoming an additional, unintended element of the mixology." The shave was trickier still. By this time Frank was onto a martini and said he was sure to announce his plans to take a sip before doing so.

Unfortunately, says Frank, the martini "was not improved ... by the wisps of shaving cream and the scent of sage-and-basil beard oil that entered the equation." As for the shop's name, the owners say that it "signifies a dual enterprise in which the less visible component is somewhat hidden by the more visible one, so that people turn a blind eye to it." They are promoting it as a "barbershop and lounge mash-up" and "the ultimate experience in multitasking." And, as Frank points out, by the time you've had your drinks, your new haircut will look just fine.

"So guys ... at the moment you are most desired, you are least trusted," writes Nicholas Wade in the New York Times (6/8/10). It seems that just before ovulation, women experience peak production of testosterone, which puts them in the mood but also heightens their distrust. This reality was demonstrated by a team of Dutch researchers who found that women given a drop of testosterone under their tongue "were significantly less inclined to trust a face ... than when they had taken a placebo."

The study also found that women who had tested as more trusting to begin with were most affected by the testosterone dose, perhaps because "natural selection had developed the system for those most in need of protection." Either way, the testosterone-induced skepticism "makes evolutionary sense in scenarios where a father's ongoing support is crucial for the survival of the infant," according to experts at the University of Michigan. Or maybe she's just not that into you.

The flipside of testosterone is "a brain hormone known as oxytocin ... Swiss researchers found in 2005 that a squirt of oxytocin into a person's bloodstream would make players in an investment game more willing to hand over their money to strangers ... It may seem strange that there is a hormonal influence in such a delicate calculation as to whether or not to trust someone. But perhaps trust is so important to society's survival that natural selection has generated a hormonal basis for it."

Of the 1,600 Mother's Day cards Hallmark makes, "there's no card from a child poking fun at how imperfect mom is," reports Stephanie Simon in the Wall Street Journal (5/6/10). Most of the Hallmark cards "share a reverential attitude toward mom -- lots of flowers, hearts and gratitude." (It's a different story for dad, by the way, whom Hallmark routinely mocks for "napping, playing golf or refusing to ask for directions.") It's also a different story when kids are writing the messages.

It's not that kids intend to make fun of their moms, but rather that the truth has a tendency to come out. One mom says she was insulted when her kid said she was special because her tummy is "soft, like a big pillow." Another was mortified when her child praised her for making hot dogs, wrapped in paper towel, in the microwave. Ironically, such honesty probably would have pleased Anna Jarvis, "who dreamed up Mother's Day a century ago." Anna, who was never married and had no children herself, "envisioned a somber day marked by the wearing of carnations."

But no sooner was the day declared a national holiday, by Woodrow Wilson in 1914, than it became a commercial juggernaut. Anna was so horrified by this she campaigned to have the holiday repealed: "Any mother would rather have a line of the worst scribble from her son or daughter than any fancy greeting card," she once wrote. Maybe so, but "Americans buy some 140 million cards for Mother's Day," making the holiday the " third-most-popular occasion for buying greeting cards (after Christmas and Valentine's Day)."

Evolution may explain why women are so much better at grocery shopping than men, reports The Economist (5/1/10). A study of mushroom gatherers in Mexico during two rainy seasons found that "men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men traveled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy -- 70 percent more than women." They were trying to find spots with lots of mushrooms.

The women, meanwhile "made many more stops, apparently satisfied with, or perhaps better at finding, patches of fewer mushrooms." Scientists believe that the different strategies are linked to the whole hunter-gatherer thing, where men tend to do the hunting and the women the gathering. Men use the same strategy to gather mushrooms that they would to hunt down an animal, "running a long way over a winding route."

Once he had killed his prey, he'd "make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly." But women "would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants." This might help explain why men tend to race all over a supermarket looking for an item, while women "methodically move around the aisles, filling the shopping trolley. He is simply not cut out for the job, evolutionarily speaking."

Where women's relationships are face-to-face, for guys it's more like side-by-side, writes Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal (4/7/10). "Our conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the feeling of things," says Mark Leonard, explaining how he relates to his buddies -- eight guys he grew up with in East Northport, NY. So, where women "talk, cry together, share secrets," for men it's more about going to football games or playing golf together. When they talk it's often about old times, but rarely about their current lives.

"If we use a women's paradigm for friendship, we're making a mistake," says Dr. Geoffrey Greif, author of a 2009 book called "Buddy System." Geoffrey "has studied how 386 men made, kept and nurtured relationships" and "found that men generally resist high-maintenance relationships, whether with spouses, girlfriends or male pals ... A third of the men in his study said they learned positive things from female friendships, but 25 percent had a negative impression of women as friends, citing issues such as 'cattiness' and 'too much drama'."

Research also finds "that men often open up about emotional issues to wives, mothers, sisters and platonic female friends ... partly because they assume male friends will be of little help. It may also be due to fears of seeming effeminate or gay." They also tend to turn to male friends "to momentarily escape from their problems. The buzzword is 'bromance'." It's not like guys never open up to each other, but as Mark Leonard explains, "We'll say, Yes. We understand. It's really hard. Now let's go play some baseball."

With all other problems solved, a team of Dutch researchers are looking into why men prefer a female waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, reports Daniel Bergner in the New York Times (4/12/10). At issue is whether popular culture and "the bombardment of visual media" has influenced male preferences in any way. To test this, Johan Karremans of Radboud University and Sander Arons, a student collaborator, offered both and sighted and sightless men the opportunity to feel the mannequins, one with a ratio of 0.7 and the other at .84, and rate their preferences.

To help ensure an accurate result, the half the sighted men were blindfolded and all of the sightless men were born that way. All of the subjects were Dutch. Johan assumed that the sighted men would have a stronger preference for the slimmer mannequin, and "that visual culture" would make it so." But he was wrong, as "wtih some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more pronounced sweep from waist to hip," although the "slimmer waisted body received especially high scores from men with sight."

This could be because the sightless men had heard that the hourglass figure was preferable, but the sense of smell might have had something to do with it. The mannequins "wore no perfume" but "certain ratios of hormones and their metabolites in the female body are associated with biological advantage, as well as with particular pheromonal scents ... The male begins life wired, through unconscious experience, to connect the cues of smell to the proportions of waist and hip. He makes this connection through sight if he can see and by touch if he can't.

"Didn't call it nothing ... Just go to the junkyard and see what I could get," says 91-year-old Vollis Simpson in a New York Times piece by Scott Shane (4/6/10). What he got was bits and pieces of propellers and other junk that he'd weld together into spectacular, kinetic sculptures. He's just a guy who likes to weld junk but along the way he's created "some of the most recognizable work in the genre of American homemade art by self-taught practitioners, now known as outsider art or visionary art." In fact, one of his pieces now sits outside the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

It's a "55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs" that sits "atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station ... topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels (image)." It incorporates "oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle iron parts, prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms." As one of Vollis's biggest fans says, "You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they're doing and stare and smile and say, 'Oh, my God'."

Vollis is a former farm equipment repairman who has been into welding junk into art at his home in Lucama, N.C., for 25 years now. His first project happened while he was in the army, when he made a "windmill from parts of a junked B-29 bomber to power a giant washing machine for soldiers' clothes." Years later, "he made another windmill to blow woodheated air into his home." But it was too smoky, so he planted the thing in his yard. And then he just started building more windmills and whirligigs. People come from all around to see them, and while he wasn't looking, he "became part of a seriously regarded corner of the art world."

The baseball commissioner thought Jim Bouton's book was "detrimental to baseball," but 40 years later Jim still thinks he simply humanized the game, reports Allen Barra in the Wall Street Journal (4/7/10). "Really, what I felt I did was capture lightning in a bottle," says Jim, whose book, Ball Four, was based on notes he wrote on scraps of paper while pitching for the Seattle Pilots in 1969. Jim had been a hot star with the Yankees, winning a total of 39 games in '63 and '64, plus two World Series victories in '64.

But then he hurt his arm and struggled through four seasons in New York before attempting his comeback with the Pilots (now the Milwaukee Brewers). His book "exposed the everyday behavior" of baseball's players, the "frustrations, depressions, infidelities, alcoholism and drug use ... with honesty and humor." He mostly wrote about marginal players, but he did include reports of Mickey Mantle's "drinking and carousing," which Jim says were "things everyone in baseball knew about but that were never discussed in public."

When the book came out, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn asked Jim "to sign a letter stating that 'Ball Four' was fiction," but Jim refused. "The funny thing is that Bowie was living in such a dream world that I think he thought most of it was fiction," says Jim, now 71. A few years later, Mickey told Jim there were no hard feelings, but 40 years on, the book remains "one of the best-selling and most influential sports books ever written," as well as one of the most controversial. Jim isn't planning any more comebacks, but he remains in demand on the speaking circuit, and "is currently putting the finishing touches on 'Ball Four: The Musical.'"

Louisville Slugger is pretty much a synonym for baseball bats, but boutique bat makers like BWP Bats are now winning some favor in the big leagues, reports Ken Belson in the New York Times (3/24/10). Until relatively recently, BWP, or Brookville Wood Products, simply "sold billets -- the cylinders of wood that are turned into bats -- to Louisville Slugger and other bat makers." For 44 years, the company's main business was making furniture. But as it "lost ground to cheaper competitors in China, the company re-thought its strategy."

BWP actually turned to Louisville Slugger for advice on how to choose the right kind of wood, as well as tips on using lathes and finishing the bats. "It's one thing to know wood and another to know baseball," says Mike Gregory, BWP's vice president of sales. BWP does hold a possible advantage, though, because it owns its "own forest and mills." It also specializes in maple, which, because it is denser, is favored by players including Johnny Damon of the Detroit Tigers and about 250 other major and minor league players.

BWP's 5,000 acre forest actually "includes some of the hardest maple trees in the country." The problem is that maple bats "are more likely to shatter than bats made with ash" -- a problem highlighted by Johnny Damon, who breaks more than his share of maple bats. This has brought greater scrutiny and oversight for quality assurance by Major League Baseball. Some players, like Jason Bay, are switching back to ash bats because of this. But BWP is growing, turning out some 35,000 bats a year. Louisville Slugger meanwhile "controls about half the market for wooden bats."