"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired - "Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He's Got a Computer and a Web Forum"

DailyLit: Read books online by daily email and RSS feed - "DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.") "
I'm finally starting on War and Peace. At the rate of one block a day, I'm going to take... 1 year 10 months to finish it.

Watch The Most Talked-About Moment: Bruno Dropping In On Eminem - "Suspended high above the audience, Brüno flew towards the stage, only to get tangled in wires and dropped squarely in the lap of Marshall Mathers himself, Eminem."

Figures of Speech - Teach a Kid to Argue - "I’ve worked hard at making my kids good at arguing. Absolutely... Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view. I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not."

Cakeshop in Serangoon North fined for drying noodles in the sun - You can't dry food in the sun? No wonder Singaporean food sucks

Regarding My Recent Trip To Kuala Lumpur - "Krispy Kreme has opened an outlet at Berjaya Times Square (another nightmare parking area). It’s RM19.90 for a dozen doughnuts. They don’t taste the same as the Hong Kong Krispy Kreme (ie. they don’t taste good at all) and there are crazy people eating doughnuts with forks and knives inside - I shite you not!"
Malaysia Boleh!

The Lord Justice Hath Ruled: Pringles Are Potato Chips - "Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like “free speech” or “due process” — or potato chip. Nor is either ideological camp wholly strict or wholly activist. Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like “the right to bear arms.” In the end, as Lord Justice Jacob noted, a judge can only look at the relevant factors and draw an overall impression. His common-sense approach was a rebuke not only to Procter & Gamble, but to everyone out there who insists that the only way to read laws correctly is to read them strictly."

The last word on anger - "Anger, bitter and implacable when the only response it gets is anger returned, feeds on its reflection until it becomes insanity... For the Stoics it was an emotion of weakness, to be quelled as part of building self-mastery and detachment. In a sequence of three carefully considered "Moral Essays", Seneca analysed anger, "the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions", and urged the classic Stoic remedy: the restraint of the heroic mind... Rabidly angry men want only to fight; they want to inflict anguish on their enemies, and then obliterate them. It is hard to imagine, even if great-souled people stood up on both sides and agreed peace and a modus vivendi, how such hurt could be assuaged."

China’s Forgotten Revolution - "Two facts have become more apparent. The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a one-time release of the Chinese people’s political passions, later replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the summer of 1989 the incident vanished from the Chinese news media. As a result, few young Chinese know anything about it. But most important of all, I realize now that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words “the people.” Those words have little meaning in China today... In 1989, my 30th year, those words were not just an empty phrase... [In 1989, the students'] audience — whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms — nodded repeatedly and applauded warmly, however immature the students’ faces or naïve their views."

Exclusive: 50cm eel removed from man's rectum - ""On further questioning," says the paper, "the patient admitted an eel was inserted into the rectum in an attempt to relieve constipation. "Emergency laparotomy found a 50cm eel biting the splenic flexure of the colon, and a 3cm perforation was found over the anterior wall of the rectum. "Insertion of a live animal into the rectum causing rectal perforation has never been previously reported. "This may be related to a bizarre healthcare belief, inadvertent sexual behaviour, or criminal assault. However, the true reason may never be known.""