"I'm saving people a lot of time today: You don't have to meditate. You don't have to exercise. Just read some books from Art Garfunkel's list."

Things heard recently at Meadhouse.

"I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That�s why I need to carve out just a little more time."

"I think maybe even another five to 10 � how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours? That�s kind of the minimum? I don�t know."

Said Elon Musk. But what do you think: How much time does a woman want a week?

ADDED: Freud asked "What does a woman want?" Elon Musk just wants to know: How much time does a woman want?

The full Freud quote is: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

So the answer to Musk is 30 years is not enough.

That makes me think of the old J.P. Morgan quote: "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."

"I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents� time and children�s outcomes... Nada. Zippo."

Says Melissa Milkie, a sociologist co-author of "the first large-scale longitudinal study of parent time to be published in April in the Journal of Marriage and Family."

The study�s findings shook some parents, many of whom had built their lives around the idea that the more time with children, the better. They quit or cut back on work, downsized their houses or struggled to cram it all in....

Building relationships, seizing quality moments of connection, not quantity, Milkie said, is what emerging research is showing to be most important for both parent and child well-being. �The amount of time doesn�t matter, but these little pieces of time do,� she said. Her advice to parents? �Just don�t worry so much about time.�

What's missing from this analysis, I think, is that a single-earner household can be less stressful and complicated with a division of labor, so that it creates the space in life for those quality things � building relationships and seizing moments and so forth. If you say, I'll go off to work and I'll transport the kids in and out of day care and get everything done including some seized moments, how good will those moments be? I think the real issue here is whether a single earner brings in enough money for the family to live on. But I'm also perceiving the usual encouragement to women to get out there and make careers for themselves. Don't worry about it.

Have we just lost the last person who was alive in the 19th century?

Misao Okawa, born March 5, 1898, has died. She had the distinction of being the oldest person alive, but who is the oldest person now?

Japan identifies a 115-year-old woman as its new oldest person. She was born on March 15, 1900. Perhaps beyond Japan, there is someone older, but it may be that there is suddenly no one left from the 19th century.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am made to regret that I didn't title this post: Have we just lost the last person who was alive in the 1800s?