Pink Gundam, wow! - "Wow, the Pink Gundam, Cool or stupid? For woman Gundam fans."

Chinese woman boiled man's head to cure daugther's psychiatric problems - "Lin Zongxiu, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years... Lin and her husband decided to enlist the help of a man in December who knocked unconscious a drunk 76-year-old passer-by before beheading him"
Joe Augustin: Sorry. WHO was nuts again?

What Did You Call It? - "There have been at least 1,200 terms for the vagina in the history of the English language, according to Steven Pinker... This is because sexual subjects are always “emotionally fraught,” he said, and each new euphemism eventually “gets contaminated” and prompts “the search for yet another euphemism.” HE calls it “the euphemism treadmill.” Such words arise, he said, “because people want to make it perfectly clear to their listeners that they are not bringing up the topic for prurient reasons.”... “Vajayjay,” he said, “is like your good buddy.” Ultimately, what makes any word catch fire is a mystery, linguists say. “Who could have predicted that the term for bulk e-mail would be spam, from a 1970s Monty Python sketch?” Dr. Pinker said... 'We’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no one blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over'... [the term] doesn’t belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women.”"
Apparently the term 'vajajay' doesn't belong to men.

Coverage of the protests: Twitter 1, CNN 0 - "The much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines."

The Uneven Playing Field - Girls' Sports Injuries - "A national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever... “We need to do everything we can do to prevent injuries. But... it does seem that so little coverage focuses on women’s accomplishments, on their mental toughness and physical courage. There is a disproportionate emphasis on things that are problematic or that are presented as signs of women’s biological difference or inferiority.”... “If your job is to encourage inclusion of more women in sport, maybe you are not going to accentuate the negative. You don’t want to paint women in a negative light and tell a girl that if you play sports, your knees, by the time you are 30 or 35, may be in bad shape."
Another way feminists are hurting women.

Grinning Buddha with 'bulge' withdrawn from sale - "The Marimokkori character, which originated in northern Hokkaido island, is a word play on "marimo," a type of moss ball found in lakes, and "mokkori" which means bulge and is a slang term for an erection."

India plans hot chilli grenades - "Indian defence scientists are planning to put one of the world's hottest chilli powders into hand grenades."

EA's new motto: please pirate our games... er, storefronts - "EA doesn't mind piracy of Sims 3, as retail customers get the whole experience. In fact, please pirate the company's future games. Why? EA is selling a service, not a game. Consider everything that comes on the disc a demo; the real value is online."

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS - "The real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out... most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer... Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings... the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self"

Counselling Pioneer Known for Embracing Homosexuals as People - The headline is the best part of this article on Anthony Yeo.

Mating in a Material World - "Penguins are not the only creatures to exchange sex for a material benefit (aside, of course, from humans). A few other birds trade reproduction favors for food, and many insects have evolved elaborate quid pro quo sexual arrangements... Other animals also prostitute themselves for something valuable to them—usually food... But when it comes to turning tricks, insects have no equal. And their stock-in-trade is food—the deals so common they have a name: nuptial gifts. These range from dead prey—the insect equivalent of a box of chocolates—to food bags attached to females’ bodies during mating... The food seems to represent an early child-support payment for the inch-long hangingflies of North America"