"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin

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The house that Twitters - "Now the house tells its owner when his dinner is ready, if someone is at the door or when a mouse has been caught in a trap. Dr Andy Stanford-Clark has fitted the grade 1 listed cottage with hundreds of sensors, allowing everything from energy usage to the burglar alarm to be relayed by the blogging website."

Veterinarian’s service that really sucks - "The veterinarian had asked the 27-year old woman to place the squirrel inside her blouse to keep it warm given its “erratic body temperature”... the veterinarian then began to demonstrate to her how to massage her breasts. “He then took advantage by groping and sucking the victim’s breasts"... The squirrel died shortly after returning home"

Why are we suddenly so fascinated by our history? - "A people that is no longer making history looks to the past for reasons to feel proud... no health warning is so preposterous that it will not be prominently reported in the British press, which knows how to turn even the tiniest possibility of risk into a major scare... The success of the Daily Mail would seem to be at least partly based on its propensity to spread unease and insecurity among its readers... it is hard to imagine what kind of appearance would satisfy the Mail. If you look wrinkled or podgy, it mocks you; but if you attempt to roll back the years by artificial means, such as plastic surgery, it mocks you even more"

O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult! - "Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly, ''If only someone had thought to shut it.''... the poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, but the fragrance remained in his head... Balzac drank more than 50 cups of coffee a day, and actually died from caffeine poisoning... D. H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees, a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts... Alfred de Musset, George Sand's lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire's actually using his lover's naked back as a writing desk"

YouTube - Chinese Guy LOVES BOOBIES! - "There is three thing you need to do to please your man: Number 1, make a sandwich. Number 2, suck his dick on command. And number 3, don't talk so much"

China schoolgirl aspires to be 'corrupt official':state media - "The young student stated her aspirations in a televised interview that was posted on a southern China website, leading bloggers to describe her comments as "a reflection of social reality"... "A corrupt official because corrupt officials have a lot of things," she replied."

Executive bonus schemes do not work - "It's a wonderful thing, the global economy: it requires us to push up our top salaries in an attempt to match world levels, but at the same time requires wages for ordinary employees to be driven down to the benchmarks set by the lowest-wage economies... bonus schemes often distort performance, diverting attention from the issues that should really be addressed in favour of those which happen to be relevant to the bonus. Because many of the factors that determine a company's performance are beyond the capacity of an individual executive to influence – macro-economic conditions are the most obvious example – they either have to be discounted, or applied even though it is clearly irrational to do so... There is a much better practice, to be found in better-run economies than our own, which we should emulate. Top executives should be paid a proper rate for the job (and I have no objection to high salaries per se) on the assumption that, having been appointed, they will deliver a satisfactory performance. A less than satisfactory performance should be dealt with as a performance issue. An exceptional performance – above and beyond the call of duty – should be rewarded with a genuine, but one-off, bonus."

IN a school photograph taken shortly before her 15th birthday, Semenya stands awkwardly under the blinding African sun. A full head and shoulders above her classmates, she is dressed in men’s pleated trousers and an unflattering shirt. Her friends wear knee socks and skirts. According to Eric Modiba, headmaster at the Nthema secondary school where Semenya was a star pupil, she was “unique” from the start... “I was caught out, too. Caster was always rough and played with the boys. She liked soccer and she wore trousers to school. She never wore a dress. It was only in grade II that I realised she was a girl myself. “The way she looked, so masculine, did cause her some problems but few were brave enough to bully her.”... Unusually for a young woman perhaps, Semenya’s main interest has been WWF wrestling, a sport notable for competitors with extraordinary physiques.

Sexual selection in humans: Mr Muscle | The Economist - "There is another cost to being muscly: men’s immune systems are less effective than those of women (which was known before), and become worse the more muscular the men are (which was not)... The more muscular a man, the more sexual partners he reported, both in the past year and over his lifetime, and the earlier his first sexual experience was likely to have been"

Women, testosterone and finance: Risky business | The Economist - "Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes... The researchers then followed the subjects’ progress after they graduated, to see what sort of careers they entered. As expected, men were more likely than women to choose a risky job in finance. Again, though, the difference was accounted for entirely by their levels of salivary testosterone"
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit

Bermuda Triangle plane mystery 'solved' - "A new examination for a BBC series provides plausible explanations for the disappearance of two British commercial planes in the area, with the loss of 51 passengers and crew."

Maid cafes show no signs of losing popularity - "Pomeranian is “The Chubby Maid Cafe,” where guests can expect their friendly companions to be portly. No one is quite sure how it all came to this. Maid cafes first appeared in 1998 at sales events for the dating simulation game Welcome to Pia Carrot... It turns out the appeal isn’t gender-specific, either—in 2007, some 35% of customers were women, or “mistresses.”... There is still no shortage of good maids, however. About 300 hopefuls apply for every open position that comes open in Akihabara, even though the wage is only about 850 yen an hour. Most do it because they enjoy it, but a lucky few can become cosplay idols. In response to this, a group called Maid Cooperative has fashioned a standardized test to qualify maids. Today, “maids” in the loosest sense of the word cut hair, massage, sing, dance, gamble, cross-dress and so on. Some of the more bizarre offers worth checking out include Nagomi “Little Sister” cafe, Mother cafe in Osaka, St Grace’s Court (a sister nun cafe), B:Lily Rose (“danso,” or females dressing as “beautiful boys”) and Hibari-tei (“joso,” or males dressing as maids)."