Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel as played for priesthood meeting by a convert aunt of Sally DeFord who played piano for silent movies: link.

“This brief research note aims to estimate the magnitude of the association between general intelligence and physical attractiveness with large nationally representative samples from two nations. In the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points (r = .381), whereas in the United States, the correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is somewhat smaller (r = .126). The association between intelligence and physical attractiveness is stronger among men than among women in both nations.” (link)

Lacking a compensating trade-off between looks and smarts, many of us will have to make do, as Elwood Dowd recommended, with being oh so pleasant. Also, those who selected a looker for a spouse weren’t so shallow after all.

“When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former ‘apprentices’ of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their ‘apprenticeship,’ at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception.

“To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys–and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas.”

(link)