"To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World - "Escamoles are the eggs of the giant black Liometopum ant, which makes its home in the root systems of maguey and agave plants. Collecting the eggs is a uniquely unpleasant job, since the ants are highly venomous and have some kind of blood grudge against human orifices. The eggs have the consistency of cottage cheese. The most popular way to eat them is in a taco with guacamole, while being fucking insane."

Japanese Statistics Bureau Home Page/Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities - They have a survey of leisure time?! Strangely it doesn't include AV. In other news Japan's "key statistics" include: Production of paddy rice, disposal of garbage and people killed in road traffic accidents.

Twitter / Presidents_ua - The President of Ukraine is following me on Twitter?!

lossless classics - BOXSET.RU - Woo hoo! But I don't like APE, and my MP3 partition is full.

The BlackBerry Storm ad that might have been - "This, shall we say, confrontational BlackBerry Storm ad by NY ad agency Guava has been making the rounds today, depicting a blackberry "bullet" taking a violent path through a familiar-seeming piece of fruit."

Musopen puts classical recordings, scores in public domain - "One web site has the ambitious goal of doing away with such restrictions, putting both classical recordings and sheet music into the public domain for use by anyone in the world. Musopen has been around for a couple of years but has recently rolled out a new version of its web site, added freely-downloadable sheet music, and raised enough cash to professionally record the entire set of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas and place them in the public"

NUS Faculty of Engineering FAQ - "2) Do all civil engineers work under the hot sun?
4) What is the starting pay for civil engineering graduates?: Despite weak economy in 2003, more than 90% of our CE students were still able to get employment in 6 months upon graduation. The salary does fluctuate from year to year, one important factor being the demand-and-supply situation. In good years, the starting pay of NUS civil engineers was among the highest. In not-so-good years such as 2002 and 2003, the average starting pay of civil engineers was only $100-200 lower than electrical engineers.
6) What does the Asia Tsunami in Dec 2004 and WTC terrorist attack Sep 2001 have to do with Civil Engineering?"
Uhh...

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers - "Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds. Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage."

British attitudes to work | Can't? Or won't? | The Economist - "Researchers ranked 13 countries according to their generosity (measured by comparing typical benefits to those out of work with the average wage of a production worker) and their citizens’ commitment to work (gauged by asking whether they would work if they did not need the cash, and whether they regarded a job as merely a way to earn a living). The more generous a state is, the keener on work its people are, they found (see chart). Britons, whose benefits were the stingiest after those that Americans get, were least keen of all on work."

Gay Porn For Girls - "So many people have tried identify the reasons for why women enjoy gay porn. I don't agree with a lot of the psychobabble, but I have thought about it myself. Firstly, I enjoy the men. The men of the gay porn world are gorgeous, well presented, ripped, hot, sexy... Secondly, and most importantly, gay porn is equal... In gay porn, it isn't the same. A bottom is penetrated, however there is equal opportunity for either man in the coupling to be penetrated in gay sex. They are equal because they are both men and they have the same equipment. The power struggle between players doesn't exist. The history of inequality doesn't exist as it does between a man and a woman because they are both men."
Wth. This also has insights for Yaoi and slash

Europe's language wars | English is coming | The Economist - "European politicians long feared that the use of English in the EU would lead to the dominance of Anglo-Saxon thinking. They were wrong. The example of newspapers is instructive: thanks to English (and the internet), a genuinely pan-European space for political debate is being created. It has never been easier for other Europeans to know what Poles think about the credit crunch, Germans about the Middle East or Danes about nuclear power. English is merely “an instrument”, says Mr Versteegh of NRC Handelsblad, not “a surrender to a dominant culture.”"

all monkeys are french. - MFTTW is trying to figure out if this Amy is male or female.

SINGAPORE ARTS FESTIVAL 2009: The Magic Flute - Impempe Yomlingo (South Africa) - "A life-enhancing and joyous adaptation of Mozart’s beloved opera as you’ve never heard it before – the South African way! An adventure, a fairy story, a comedy and a drama gloriously re-imagined with 35 singers and musicians on marimbas and drums drawn from across South African townships."
Zauberflöte the S.African way? Maybe the Flute becomes a drum, Papageno catches caterpillars and Königin commissions Tamino to rape Sarastro

Spotting Future Gamblers in Kindergarten - "What struck Pagani most was how predictable the identities of the gamblers were. When she referred back to the ratings from kindergarten, she found that every one-unit increase on the impulsivity scale correlated with a 25% jump in the likelihood a child would be gambling by sixth grade. "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual already refers to gambling specifically as an impulse-control disorder," she says, citing the official text that outlines diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. "And then there were our findings showing that.""

Tinyarro.ws - Shortest URLs on Earth - "http://➡.ws/"