"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists." - G. K. Chesterton

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The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain - "You are shocked to discover that the company you work for is using your blood to power a portal to another world - they are literally bleeding you dry. There's no other option, you must set out on your own adventure and ultimately face The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain! "The Fighting Fantasy" series of books captured the minds of a generation... Sadly, all of these young adventurers have grown up to find that the real word is a rather a dull place to be. The only dragons they face now are their uppity line managers and they curse their fellow commuters rather than forest-dwelling crones. But help is at hand, however, as "The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain", a hilarious parody of the fantasy adventure genre, opens an office door back into the mystical world of our imaginations. On one hand a skillful comic account of the drudgery of modern life, and on the other a thrilling adventure populated by creatures of myth and legend"

A prison of our own making - "She was crying in my clinic, but refusing admission for her paroxysmal vomiting and headaches. I knew her symptoms were due to brain metastases arising from her breast cancer. This malignancy had already eaten away one breast, leaving behind raw and weeping chest wall... She had declined all conventional treatment involving chemotherapy and hormonal manipulation, instead, preferring to visit me on a regular basis to demand reassurance that her cancer was improving on alternative medications. This was a reassurance that I would have loved to give, but could not... whatever little money she had saved over her ten years as a factory worker here in Singapore evaporated in the quest for a miracle cure. It was a bumpy, and ultimately downhill road, through colon cleansing, vegetarian diets, ozone therapy and more."
Well, at least she’ll win a Darwin Award

Bond Free - "In 2000 I enrolled in the University of Arizona. I did not apply for a scholarship of any kind, but they offered me a bond-free scholarship... there was no bond of any kind. They wrote back, saying they were giving me the scholarship because they believed I could contribute to society after graduation. Not American society. Humankind... Scholarships and bonds... are totally different in nature. The former is crafted with hope and in good faith, the latter carved in the hard letter of the law. The first is a gift, the second a contract. That our students no longer feel beholden when presented a gift of good faith is a failure on our part. We have not taught them gratitude. We haven’t given them many opportunities to learn. Our purely pragmatic perspective of the world doesn’t allow us to give without expecting anything in return. Our bonds are carefully calculated and embedded with repayment clauses to reduce risk because we view these top students as human capital, not humans. After years of conditioning, many of our children have forgotten the beat of their own heart. It is all business, and they take what they can."

How medieval-themed restaurants get it wrong - "Myth No. 1: Medieval food was bland.
Myth No. 2: Medieval chefs were lousy when it came to presentation.
Myth No. 3: Medieval feasts were merely big.
Myth No. 4: Medieval feasters ate off pewter plates.
Myth No. 5: Medieval feasters had atrocious manners.
Myth No. 6: Medieval feasters ate in set courses.
Myth No. 7: Medieval people ate food they couldn't possibly have eaten."

The love lives of the ancient Romans - "This is one of the most puzzling, if not disconcerting, aspects of Pompeii for modern visitors. There are phalluses greeting you in doorways, phalluses above bread ovens, phalluses carved into the surface of the street and plenty more phalluses with bells on and wings... There was plenty of male-with-male sexual activity in the Roman world, but only the very faintest hints that “homosexuality” was seen as an exclusive sexual preference, let alone lifestyle choice... Roman poets, a comfortably-off crowd whatever their protestations of poverty, often waxed lyrical about the wholesome fare of the peasant. Cheap local plonk, they crowed, and some simple bread and cheese, were better than a banquet if the company was right... A tombstone from Rome, put up some time in the first century to an ex-slave Tiberius Claudius Secundus, by his partner Merope, includes the piquant observation: “Wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life - wine, sex and baths”."
This also provides some context for Corinthians, though of course people doggishly ignore context. But why is it under "Women" and "Relationships"?!

Chrysler's in-car phonograph - "These record players--made by Columbia and offered as options on 1956 Chrysler, DeSoto, Dodge, and Plymouth models--could handle 45-speed records as well as 7-inch records in the new 16-2/3 format. The players were installed on a slide-out turntable beneath the dash and hidden behind a drop-down door that could be opened at the push of a button. Way before people were banging on about multimedia convergence, drivers could switch between the radio tuner and the phonograph with the flip of a switch and use the same volume and equalizer controls for both sources."

Taught to spot problem when they're young - "Ms Sarah S, 26, a counsellor from NuLife Care and Counselling Services, said she had seen two primary school boys - one late last year, and one earlier this year - with gender identity issues. She said both liked to dress up, look in the mirror, and stay out of the sun. One of them even carries an umbrella wherever he goes. She said: 'They are both from single-parent families and their fathers are absent. They do not have a male figure at home to be involved in masculine activities with. I think that's the main reason why they behave this way.'... Choices, the counselling division of the Church of Our Saviour, an Anglican church, helps people struggling with gender issues."
Uhhhhhhh... If this qualifies as "gender identity disorder", I don't want to know what they think of transsexuals. And Choices: this is getting from bad to worse.

Findings - As External Barriers Disappear, Internal Gender Gaps Widen - "Personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States... [One researcher] suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived. The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America... Dr. Deaner... finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners... it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring “sex difference in competitiveness,” he concludes, “must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis” that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women."

garfield minus garfield - "Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

Suicide is Painless - Weird News Story Archive - "When Douglas Alan Smith, 34, was convicted of murder in Arizona, he ordered his lawyer to seek the death penalty for him, saying he would rather die than spend the rest of his life in prison. “It took me a long time to get OK with it,” said his lawyer, Jamie McAlister. But she realized there was something worse than the death penalty: “What I hate more is to see someone strip people of their right to make their own decisions.” However, the Phoenix, Ariz., murderer was denied his wish and instead sentenced to 62 years in prison. McAlister will appeal the sentence and insist that her client be put to death."

YouTube - Don LaFontaine: The Voice - "750,000 television spots, 5,000 movie trailers, 1 voice, Don LaFontaine has the most recognizable voice in the game right now. Here is the legend's story told by none other than the legend himself."
Too bad I only found out who the guy who does all the voiceovers was after he died.

From flash mob to lynch mob - "In a recent article for TIME magazine, web guru Jaron Lanier wrote, "Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought... We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob." And Lanier thinks it could go further. "What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture?"... This vigilante action might be prompted by understandable moral outrage, but some are concerned that the headline-grabbing witch-hunts have been vastly out of proportion with the original transgressions. Vigilantes have not stopped at reprimanding their quarry: They have shamed them publicly in front of thousands of people; their identities and personal details have been posted for all to see, making them vulnerable to fraud and identity theft; they and their families have been harassed. A director at South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communications, Oh Sang Kyoon told the International Herald Tribune, "Victims cannot live a normal life. They quit jobs and run away from society. They even flee the country. It's like lynching victims in a 'people's court on the Web.'"... Once they're targeted, there's little that people can do to remove details about them online. Information travels fast and can be replicated with ease... The most concerning aspect of mobbing, though, is the way large groups of people can be mobilized to attack a perceived transgressor without their accusers providing any real evidence of their guilt. On the Internet, the mob can be judge and jury... Can mob rule be a viable option for any society? Some argue that virtual lynchings will only turn transgressors into victims. Even online, as the saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right."

Why Do Liberal Men Hate Attractive Conservative Women? - "Many of the attractive liberal women are lesbians, actually men in drag, or so strongly and militantly feminist that they consider men a lesser species of animal life."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Looking at American political blogs, though entertaining, reminds you of why Howard Dean failed.

IPhone Can Take Screenshots of Anything You Do - "If you've got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover... Jonathan Zdziarski explained that the popular handset snaps a screenshot of your most recent action -- regardless of whether it's sending a text message, e-mailing or browsing a web page -- in order to cache it. This is purely for aesthetic purposes: When an iPhone user taps the Home button, the window of the application you have open shrinks and disappears. In order to create that shrinking effect, the iPhone snaps a screenshot, Zdziarski said."
Ah, Apple aesthetics!

Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM - "DRM doesn’t stop people from pirating a game, on the contrary. It only hurts legitimate customers since the DRM is removed from the pirate version. The same is true for music, movies and books. Let’s hope EA and other media moguls will learn their lesson."
The power of the market doesn't always work against workers...

Royal Society's Michael Reiss resigns over creationism row - "Michael Reiss, a biologist and ordained Church of England clergyman, agreed to step down from his position with the national academy of science after its officers decided that his comments had damaged its reputation... The furore came after a speech given by Professor Reiss to the British Association for the Advancement of Science last week, in which he said that teachers should accept that they were unlikely to change the minds of pupils with creationist beliefs."
Nice to know misinterpretation and silencing of someone who hasn't actually done anything wrong is not a stranger in the Sciences too.

Terrorism Risks of Google Earth - "Sometimes I wonder about "security experts." Here's one who thinks Google Earth is a terrorism risk because it allows people to learn the GPS coordinates of soccer stadiums... I have no idea how anyone could print this drivel."
Perfect. That guy can go and work for the SAF!

Dilbert Survey of Economists 09/16/2008 - "Dilbert Survey of Economists Democratic Economists Favor Obama. Republican Economists Favor McCain. Independents Lean Toward Obama."