"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty." - Sacha Guitry

***

[Ed: Dups removed thanks to Guofeng]

HONG KONG: 'Flash mob rape' message man guilty - "A District Court judge yesterday found a married man guilty of outraging public decency after he posted online invitations to a gang rape, even though he had no real intent to commit the attack. In the first prosecution of its kind, Johnny Chan Sek-ming, 42, was convicted of the offence, which carries a maximum jail term of seven years... The judge ruled that Chan did not intend to gang-rape a woman but said the postings were "outrageous and disgusting". "I cannot ignore the possibility that the defendant is some kind of facetious person," the judge said, adding that a lot of internet users posted messages just to arouse "various fanciful discussions"."

Has the 'SpamThru' Trojan Doubled Spam or Not? - "Richi Jennings is a London-based analyst for Ferris Research, which publishes reports on corporate messaging from its headquarters in San Francisco. "More spam is reaching the inbox," he says, "so naive commentators wrongly assume that a doubling of spam in the inbox equals a doubling of spam on the Internet.""

Jerusalem Syndrome - "The malady called Jerusalem Syndrome is no joke. Afflicted tourists have been found wandering in the Judean desert wrapped in hotel bed sheets or crouched at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, waiting to birth the infant Jesus... We have a little third group, the REAL Jerusalem syndrome. Completely sane persons without psychiatric history, without drugs, and arrive here as normal tourists. Here they develop this specific, imperative psychotic reaction that is the real Jerusalem Syndrome."
They've been touched by the Holy Spirit!

PowerPoint Presentations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - "It can actually impede attention. Military analysts conjecture that recent appropriations from Capitol Hill have stalled because Congress cannot decipher the Army’s complex and tedious slides (WSJ, April 26, 2000)."

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation - "Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:"

United States Patent Application: 0050156873 - "Methods and devices for creating and transferring custom emoticons allow a user to adopt an arbitrary image as an emoticon, which can then be represented by a character sequence in real-time communication."
This is ridiculous (M$ patenting custom emoticons)

Lindows and high-tech trademark troubles - "Among other things, he noted that the press used the word "windows" to describe a graphical user interface for personal computers even before Microsoft launched the first version of its current operating system--and that it continues to use the term generically today. He said that a dictionary definition of "windows" matches the way it is being used by Lindows.com. And he pointed out that hundreds of other products in the computer industry include the word "windows" or variations of it."
Microsoft ended up paying $24 million to Lindows for a suit it brought. Hurr hurr.

Games People Play: NIGYSOB - "Life Game 4: Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch. This can be seen in classic form in poker games. White gets an unbeatable hand, such as four aces. At this point, if he is a NIGYSOB player, he is more interested in the fact that Black is completely at his mercy than he is in good poker or making money."

The Atheist Delusion. a pisspoor presentation - "God is real. And he's unbelievable."
Atheist Delusion 2: Deluded Mailbag is even funnier.

Italy pact to stop skinny models - "Italy's fashion industry and the government have pledged to abide by a voluntary code of conduct which aims to keep unhealthy models from the catwalk. According to the code, models must provide a medical certificate proving they do not suffer eating disorders. The code also bans the use of models aged under 16 and urges the use of larger-sized models... In September, Spain banned models with a body mass index of less than 18 from taking part in Madrid's fashion week."

China Travel Service - China Tour - tailor-made china tour: The UNESCO-World Heritage Tour - Wah, so discerning.

YouTube - LEAKED ACJC Orientation 2007 MASS DANCE - The comments are simply ridiculous. Why can't they just enjoy the video instead of coming up with conspiracy theories? Must be because of the school holidays.

YouTube - Tom Shillue: I'm an Artist - "I'm an artist. I see things you don't see. Because I was born with a superior aura... I'm an artist. I see the world in an artistic way. Because I have a lot of time to think. Because I don't have a job... You see I'm much more misogynistic than any Construction Worker or banker who works on Wall Street, I don't wash my clothes so women assume I'm sensitive"

The purr-fect companion - "Which could go some way to explaining the longstanding male antipathy towards cats. Even in the context of a relationship, there always seems to be an awful lot of moaning about the slightly 'fragrant' litter trays, or 'the murderous way that thing looks at me'. In centuries gone by, they burnt women as witches for liking cats. Now single female cat lovers are simply branded 'on the shelf' as they float by in the supermarket, with their trolleys full of Sheba. Though admittedly, there does tend to be a slight thawing in male-feline relations when actresses such as Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer dress up in tight rubber catsuits (one wonders why)."
I wonder how loud the shrieks and the calls for resignation would be if a guy wrote an article about why some guys prefer dogs to women.

The man who unboiled an egg - "Over the years, his musings on chemical reactions have led to a number of discoveries. He has worked out how to uncook an egg. He has calculated that you can produce 24 litres of mayonnaise with a single yolk. He has invented a Béarnaise sauce by replacing butter with melted chocolate, as well as 'chocolate chantilly' (a form of whipped chocolate prepared in the same way as crème chantilly). He's baked an egg for an hour at 55°C, managing somehow to leave the yolk 'exceptionally smooth and tender'."

Green light for kosher crossings - "Australia's first kosher pedestrian crossings will feature hi-tech detection sensors, allowing Orthodox Jews to cross busy Sydney streets safely during the Sabbath... Pressing a button on the Sabbath - the period of rest between sunset on Friday and sunset on Saturday - is considered a breach of religious law by Orthodox Jews. This has created safety fears as members of eastern Sydney's large Orthodox community dodge traffic on the way to and from local synagogues... Orthodox teaching bans work during the Sabbath, which would include the use of an electrical device to change a traffic signal. He said the compromise solution's compliance with religious law could depend on whether it worked with infra-red motion sensors or with heat sensors. "
Can they use the toilet on the Sabbath? If an Orthodox Jew becomes a slave in Singapore, he's sure to go DB. This must be why in Israel Ultra-Orthodox Jews are exempted from conscription - it's too much trouble accommodating them. And maybe if a war falls on the Sabbath they'll be gunned down since they can't "work". And it's such a pity. There go potential Darwin Awards. Why doesn't Singapore highlight this in the quest for religious harmony?

YouTube - Puppets Audition for Wizard of Oz - This guy is good.

Climate Control in the Singapore press - "Walls may not have ears in Singapore, but many locals aren't fully convinced they don't. And so they've affected this curious idiosyncrasy, which I call the Singapore Swivel. I've seen it constantly in the two years I've been based here. It happens when discussions graduate from small talk to opinions. The interviewee goes "off-the-record", the voice lowers to a whisper, and the head slowly turns left-right-left-centre, scanning the location, checking who's within earshot. The Swivel speaks to the probably unfounded suspicion that the "wired island" is monitoring your activities... The Government says it is committed to openness and airing contrary views. But the message seems to be taking its time to sink in at the ST... In early 1999, Lee Kuan Yew wished to The Wall Street Journal that someone would invent air-conditioned underwear – because that way "everyone can then work at his optimum temperature and civilisation can spread across all climates". A news editor on a mainstream Australian newspaper might hand the item to a wry columnist. The medical writer might consult some physicians as to whether the nation was in good hands. And the science writer might ring boffins to see if boreal boxers were possible. Not at the ST, which ran it as a straight story on page one. A month later, it published a 1455-word feature quoting local academics and engineers hot for the idea – with an illustration of how a "cold suit" might work."

Maintaining ethno-religious harmony in Singapore - "In a highly critical article, Haas (1989) charged that the Singapore government has confused political freedom with subversion and leftish leanings with Communism, that there was no basis to prove that Cheng and his cohorts were Marxists nor were there any plot to overthrow the government. Haas also argued that the government's theory of "Nip in the bud" was a dangerous way of viewing social events. He said "to analogize politics to the biological determinism of a bud opening into a flower or the growth of cancer is to espouse an organismic theory of politics, long discredited .... (Haas, 1989: 68). He further argued that to wrest without trial under the Internal Security Act goes against the very grain of what the PAP government had fought for in the fifties against the British colonial rule. In 1955 when the British colonial administrators enacted the Internal Security Act, Lee Kuan Yew spoke against it... 'We say we dislike communism because, under that form of government, they have arbitrary powers of arrest and detention without trial.... ... to curtail a fundamental liberty, and the most fundamental of them all -- freedom from arrest and punishment without having violated a specific provision of the law and being convicted for it.. But no man should be deprived of his liberty'"