"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things." - Herman Melville

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Born-again virgins claim to rewrite the past - "The idea of a recreated virginity is actually much older. During the early Middle Ages, Christians were taught that while sex in marriage was not a sin, it was not as holy a state as complete abstinence from sex. (This is still the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II declared that believing parents should “devote special attention and care to education in virginity or celibacy as the supreme form of that self-giving that constitutes the very meaning of human sexuality.”)... If the idea of virginity as a state of mind sounds like the language of actors coming out rehab, it’s no coincidence, says Carpenter... “To some people, remakability is precisely what cheapens the thing in first place," Carpenter says. "Virginity is not special if you can be a virgin again.”"

Vilnius, a city that outlives its names | Contested city | The Economist - "It tried and failed to persuade Lithuania’s great pagan ruler, Gediminas, to adopt Christianity. He showed no desire to forsake Perkunas the thunder god, berating his visitors for their intolerance. “Why do you always talk about Christian love?” he asked the pope’s men. “Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?”"

Are humans cruel to be kind? - "Simply, it seems that niceness needs nastiness. Our sense of fairness and our willingness to inflict damage on one another combine to encourage contributions to the common good and deter people from cheating. Researchers call this altruistic punishment. "But at the end of the day, it's still spite,"... Accusations of witchcraft, which are often levelled against the successful, are a classic case in point, he says. If we can't raise ourselves up, we might find dragging someone else down just as good."

Last Day Dream on Vimeo

Pigs Are Gone…And Garbage And The Unemployment... - "At the time the Council of Ministers decided on the continued process to get rid of all the pigs in Egypt the garbage pickers' crisis grew, as most of them stopped working, pending the satisfactory solution to the swine flu. Isaac Mikhail head of the garbage pickers said the number of workers in garbage is up to 400,000 in Greater Cairo - as he put it - working in 7 areas."

Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness - "If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale... Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever... I listened to this argument at least five times and at the end still had absolutely no idea what the hell Eagleton was talking about. I thought at first he might be saying that faith does not require certainty, but then again nobody who wanted to say that would bother with all that extra verbiage. Anyway this is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables... The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”"

Office workers out in front in demand for men's bras - "The few male customers who had called his Tokyo-based company, WishRoom, inquiring about bras did not seem interested in making their pectoral muscles look bigger, or improving their posture. "They said wearing a bra just made them feel more calm, relaxed and revived," Tsuchiya said. From a man's perspective, it turned out, the sole and sufficient purpose of a bra was psychological... "One customer said when he wears a bra he feels he can 'reset' his feelings. If something bad happens he puts on a bra and feels he can come back and fight another day," he continued."
Evidently he didn't know they do the same for women too

Man Fired, Returns Home To Find House Burning - "Gonzalez said he worked as an emergency department social worker, helping people deal with traumatic situations like fires. His past work with emergency situations is helping him to deal with the situation."

YouTube - Whack-A-Kitty - "It's time to play Whack-A-Kitty! We had a lot of fun making this video and so did the kittens."