"The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block." - Inigo DeLeon

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Australia's tall poppy syndrome - "The tall poppy syndrome refers to the behavioural trait of Australians to cut down those who are 'superior' to them. It is used to explain why most politicians, some academics, and the occasional millionaire, command a level of community admiration inferior to that of a toilet cleaner."

Ask-Imam.com [17416] - "i understand taking photos is haram but can you please back it up for me with evidence,quotes,hadith and quran."

Police warn of hallucinogenic chocolate bars at Amsterdam airport - ""He ate some and we found him hallucinating", mixing up police uniforms with wedding dresses, police spokesman Rob Stenacker told AFP on Thursday."

Sex Ed Changes At School With 65 Pregnant Teens - "An Ohio school board is expanding sex education following the revelation that 13 percent of one high school's female students were pregnant last year... The new Canton school board program promotes abstinence but also will teach students who decide to have sex how to do so responsibly, bringing the city school district's health curriculum in line with national standards."

Bees build nest in starving dog

New Scientist Short Sharp Science blog: One woman, two souls? - "Don’t you just love it when evidence emerges challenging unprovable religious preconceptions (no pun intended here) espoused by the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, hardline Islamists... The thing they all believe is that at the instant when an embryo is formed by fertilisation of a human egg by a human sperm, an tiny-weeny “soul” gets installed in the entity to make it a true human being.... what happens when a living woman turns out to be a chimera - a combination of tissues from two, separately fertilised eggs, which by chance, fused together in the womb to create a single person composed of two genetically distinct types of tissue?

Breast implants linked to suicide, not cancer - "Though this study could not dig for the reasons, Morrison noted that other studies have found poorer self-esteem and elevated rates of depression and other psychiatric disorders among women who opt for breast augmentation."

Melanin Properties - Afrocentrism and Pseudoscience (Skeptical Inquirer Spring 1992) - "Afrocentric beliefs include a range of tenets. One of the fundamental ideas is that Egypt is the source of civilization and that during its glorious days Egyptians were black. For some, Egypt was the source for European civilization by way of the Greeks, a claim for which there is some evidence. More extreme proponents claim that Egypt was the source of the New World civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes as well as Chinese and Indian civilizations. These are claims for which there is no credible evidence."

SKINNY SIZE ME - "Did you know about Merab Morgan, a construction worker from North Carolina, who lost 37 pounds - eating only McDonald's for 90 days?... Onions are one of the healthiest foods you can eat - medicinally, onions lower blood pressure and increase metabolic rate. Onions have quercetin, which is also found in green apples, black tea and the lining of the red grape - that's why people who drink red wine live longer than people who don't. Quercetin improves immune response - it prevents the oxidation of LDL, it prevents blood vessels from aging, and it protects people from DNA breakdown or cancer.""
Maybe this is why I lost so much weight on my cooking.

Hobbit’s Nonsensical Guide to Health Economics (PDF) - "Fear #2: Supplier-induced demand is Singapore’s second greatest fear in healthcare. That assumes doctors have the free time to induce demand. Try telling this to public sector doctors who don’t have time for lunch to meet their nutritional demands, let alone induce demand – the only time they induce demand is when they are constipated."

Confusing Cause and Effect - "So now teachers are being told to use purple ink instead of red when correcting students’ papers, according to the Boston Globe. Purple is less hostile and threatening than red, apparently... The Binet-Simon scale used to include moron to describe people with IQs from 50 to 69, imbecile for 20-49, and idiot for anyone under 49. These words are all insults today, but they were just clinical terms to begin with, meant, in fact, to refer to these states of intellectual development without being insulting. But moron, imbecile, and idiot are all insults today. So is retarded, which was used after moron etc. came to be seen as offensive, and special, which replaced retarded after people caught on. Today I think the official term is developmentally disabled or mentally handicapped. These probably have too many syllables to really make the jump into common usage, but I still think I can already see these terms’ obsolescence on the horizon."

Math is Bad, Because it isn't Christian! - "His basic argument - the argument that he expects people to take seriously - is that everything is either christian or non-christian. And if it's non-christian, then christians shouldn't look at it, listen to it, or study it. And you can't ever make anything that started out non-christian christian."

Winning 4D with the HELP of DEVINE SPIRIT - Kumantong - "Singapore 4D lottery can be predicted. Some folks use softwares to predict thier numbers. Most folks buy 4D numbers by pure luck. For me, I use the guidance of Kumantong with the Swinging of Pendulum. This blog is created to share my prediction of upcoming 4D draws. Follow my Numbers at your own RISK. Predicted numbers are all for TOP 3 Prizes- 1st , 2nd , 3rd Prizes. All are Singapore 4D draws."
Unsurprisingly, he has a lot of Google ads on the site.

Millenium Falcon sighting
Much better than your average "UFO sighting" tape.

Venice may be first city to charge entrance fee - "Venice may soon become the first city in Italy to charge tourists for the pleasure of visiting it as authorities look to the introduction of an 'entrance charge' to offset the damage done to the unique architecture by hordes of holidaymakers."

Armor of God PJs - Children's Pajamas Inspired by Ephesians 6:10-18 - "As they read the scriptures, they put on each spiritual and powerful piece of the Armor of God to keep them safe and peaceful while they slept."

Death Star Firepower - "Exactly how powerful is the Death Star? With a little bit of physics and a little bit of math, we can determine just how much power you would need in order to blow up a planet."

Are you SURE you want to remove that? - "An Indian businessman born with two penises wants one of them removed surgically as he wants to marry and lead a normal sexual life, a newspaper report said Saturday."
It must be a gift from the gods since "Two fully functional penes is unheard of even in medical literature"

Jeremy Waldron : Boutique Faith - "Abyss-redemption, Peters says, is the argument Milton’s Satan offers to Eve to overcome her reluctance to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. ‘If what is evil/Be real, why not known, since easier shunn’d?’ There is something of it, too, in the argument of St Paul that we cannot know the law without knowing and even tasting the sins that its naming brings to the centre of our consciousness: ‘I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness’ (Romans 7.7-8). (I remember as a boy in Sunday school being very excited to find out that there was something called ‘adultery’ in the Ten Commandments, excited in part by the tight-lipped discretion with which Sunday school teachers responded to my impertinent questions on the matter.) This is an odd sort of tutelage that the law is supposed to provide: it sacrifices our innocence by calling sin to our attention, but it makes us more sophisticated in a grown-up form of virtue."