"Give me your hand. Do you feel my breasts? It's not good enough, I need bigger hands"

"Conceit is God's gift to little men." - Bruce Barton

***

Someone: my comments on fb are proportionate to my boobs now
thrice as much

i use to only get like 20 something sometimes not even 10 comments
now look almost 70

Me: *choke*

Someone: crazy
sigh

dont deny the truh


Someone else: I've met many males who find simplicity 'cute'

it's annoying
what's so cute about having a negative IQ

Me: takes 2 hands to clap

Someone else: yah it's everyone's fault
hence I think I read book better
ha ha ha

Me: read smut novel

Someone else: ehh they no fun you know
I read them until early this year, then I realised they were fucking depressing
and badly written

Me: think my sis still reads them
aiyah it's porn for girls

Someone else: well, it's stopped working for me then
I get turned OFF

Me: get a jackrabbit

Someone else: ha ha ha ha
no way
I have neuroses

Me: err

Someone else: no, really.
so yah


Me: teacher can be quite free

Someone: HAHA
right

depends which sch also
indep sch they can sit down cock up legs

Me: no leh
friend relief teaching in RI said everyone worked damn hard

Someone: well
when i was relief teaching in MG they appeared not to do very much work at all

then again most of them are rich tai tais whiling away their time teaching younger ppl how to grow up
and be rich tai tais


Someone else on why she wanted to go there: SAJC has nice short skirts


Someone: france has many unis that specialise in teaching eng lit esp
so many conferences every year on eng lit

it's quite funny

then when you look at the conferences held in america
so many are on french theory

HA HA HA HA HA


MFTTW: most females don't want to engage in deep conversation lah
when they share details of their life they just want mindless encouragement

it's ingrained into their brains liao
it's very annoying

also they are recoiling instinctively from your overly intellectual take on everything ahahahha

Me: haha
is this just singapore?

MFTTW: no here it's even worse

girls here NEVER want any kind of response except mindless affirmation of their opinions

"ooo so cool"
"ooo yes yes"
*coos*

pffffft

Me: why is it worse there

MFTTW: haha maybe it's just equally bad... i have not much sense of how bad it is in sg since i have few sg friends who are girls

Me: hahahahahahaahah
so why do you have US friends who are girls

MFTTW: eh cos i live here

Me: you lived in sg for 18 years

MFTTW: i don't talk to my sg friends much any more
cos they are too busy lah

what what lah

and a lot of them are just caught up in the sg lifestyle.. no time for me liao haha

i chat more with my friends who don't live in sg (even if not in the US) than those in sg

Me: what's the sg lifestyle
haha

MFTTW: busy lor
working lor
hanging out with bf lor
making money lor

being doctors
and even when you get together they just talk about being doctors

wah lau annoying can
nothing to talk about liao

and the rest are just too christian

i hung out with a lot of christians in JC ahaha
before i saw the light

...

ah you see with responses like that it's no wonder your female friends always think you're secretly judging them ahahhaha

Me: hahahahahahahah
then the males?

MFTTW: males are too dense to tell the difference.

also their subtlety meter/suspicious meter/self-doubt meter is broken
whereas for women all of the above are set to hyperdrive


Someone: maybe he's just dysfunctional. I mean, lit grad students
how normal could he be

I'm just assuming it's some form of neurosis acting up which I'm not too familiar with

Me: it's lit lah
look at ***

Someone: yeah if not one form of neurosis another
I've never met an un-neurotic lit person before


Someone on someone else getting upset: she might think u are insinutating that what she ate was not acutlaly XXX
but something else, and she is too ignorant t know the difference

or maybe she is not sure that what she ate is actually in fact XXX
then she just anyhow say

then when u reply as such she feels more insecure?

Me: uhhhh
so complicated one

Someone: ya

Me: ... women

Someone: really what

Me: yah women are really ...

Someone: hahaa
thats what my perspective is lah

dunno if that is really the case for that woman

every woman is different

Me: Functional men are all alike; every dysfunctional woman is dysfunctional in her own way

Someone: i dont think they are all alike haha


Someone else: from my experience males tend to express their point without hedging

so that makes them sound a lot more assertive
and sometimes it can get intimidating

I just think it's syntactically messy

I think I think that it is possible that...
your sentence just sounds messed up if you hedge too much

[and] sounds clunky


Me: then you wanted him to kiss you for what

Someone: for fun
i like teasing boys that i'm partially interested in

Me: women love to tease

Someone: yes

Me: ah well
the only folly of man...

Someone: yea i've been wielding my newfound powers like nobody's business

Me: newfound meh
hurr hurr

Someone: well now i know how to use them

last time i was like a bomb that covered large area but did little damage

now i know how to concentrate it to maximise damage
hee hee hee

Me: lucky I got kevlar


Someone else: my boss' s name is also kimberly

everytime i see ur msn nick i tink of her
sigh


MFTTW: euro films are teh suck

esp french films
which are like teh suck with lots of sex

hello french sex is disturbing. it's like bad homemade porn. they can't even have sex in a way taht makes you want to have sex.

like when i watched the Dreamers omg
where they are having sex on the dirty kitchen floor adn the brother goes to the stove and fries an egg, like wtf.

...

aha i see your favorite misanthrope is on twitter

1) who twitters german gibberish? 2) she put her initials there 3) she has no empathy

"If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur." - Doug Larson

***

On RT:


Mr Wang: "I do expect soldiers to be fitter than the general population."

So do I. And actually I'm sure they are. Full-time soldiers, that is.

Not people who only put on a military uniform for a total of 1, 2 or 3 weeks a year.

Anon: Easy way to get out of all this IPPT/RT rubbish is migrate. I did that eight years ago, and have never seen the inside of an SAF camp ever since. Good riddance.

Anon: @wenxiu:

So you feel that the will of the individual should be subjugated to that of the system/few running said system?

We've been through that before, and you can see just how well the USSR/Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan turned out.

Anon: I've encountered more Internet hardmen than I've in reality.

If many more people would be equally passionate when it comes to doing their jobs as they are when slamming people for being lazy/not exercising, many of this world's problems will be solved.

Anon: I don't know how you can siam RT/IPPT. But I do know how you can do that for your yet-to-be-born sons - make sure your wife give birth in Canada or USA. Citizenship by Birth! Lots of Taiwanese and Hong Kongers have been doing that for decades. Just read carefully, the next time you come across a news article about such and such an actress giving birth. What can be easier? Just a 12 hour flight will spare your son a life-time of agony. And it is not even more expensive than Singapore.

Oh, there is a bonus in it for you too - your son can apply Canadian/American PR for you when he turns 21. Give a few more years for you to get citizenship, and it's just about time to collect all your CPF money when you relinguish singapore citizenship.

See? At least two birds killed with one stone! Ha!

Anon: >From a female point of view, NS is indeed outdated in SG. Just look at Taiwan, conscription has been reduced from 2 years to 1 year. China is just next door but who cares as they feel 1 year is just rite.

Also, look at France that has abolished conscription way back in the late 1990s, they rely on their Foreign Legion to fight their wars in French colonies in Africa & Carribean islands. They recruit from all over the world, they even have mainland Chinese in Foreign Legion too based on a recent article in International Herald Tribune. Best thing is they are a loyal force to France.

If Spore gahment day in day out keep punching their hands in the air & shouting "Foreigners good lah, come come, you Sinkie citizens better welcome them". My reply to gahment is that you might as well recruit these foreigners into our military to serve as regulars. If France can do it so can you. USA also has a mercenary force operating in Afghanistan & Iraq, if you think those TV images that you see are of true blue Americans, then you are wrong cos these are Pinoys, Hispanics & Caribbeans who do NOT hold US citizenship. Only upon completing their tour of duty would they be given USA citizenship. It was reported in the news recently that the USA could not have done without these mercenaries.

So Spore gahment can simply recruit from
China - since there are so many FTs from this country might as well make it more merry by recruiting shiploads of Chinese peasants from rural areas. They will be eternally grateful to serve Spore for the rest of their lives if you cloth & feed them & their families.

India & Nepal - ditto above for China.

Upset: I faced a different problem: that of doing well in IPPT.

I am a reservist NSman in my mid-20s and still studying in university. I took my IPPT last year and got gold.

Because of that I was hit with a SAF 100 last week telling me to attend weekly training sessions for a running competition.

The sessions are held before 8am every Saturday. I was given a week's notice.

Is this permitted by law?

[Someone on Facebook: haha my friend also kena... he was worse - got Silver for IPPT and got asked to join the ARR (Armour Road Relay).]

Anon: Although I've suffered through all three arms of NS - Police, Army and Civil Defense, as well as reservist in two of them, I'm not giving the following comments along the lines of "I have suffered, then so should the rest of you".

Rather, I'm speaking clinically as a fellow taxpayer.

Yes, as we are all taxpayers, we have to realise that reservist training costs money. Those who go through the regular training go under the regular Defense budget. Those who fail and need extra training would become an extra burden to us, the taxpayers.

In this light, I have to conclude that the $100 is not a punishment/fine, rather it's a small contribution to lessen the burden to the taxpayers. I'm willing to bet that the $100 is actually not enough to cover the true cost of conducting the extra training course plus the second test. (Never mind that SAF itself calls it a fine.)

As a taxpayer, I urge Rob and those like him to look at the $100 as an equitable sharing of cost between him and the rest of us (taxpayers), arising from his failure to pass the required standard.

Now, there are those who will quibble with what is the correct standard, or even if NS itself is right or wrong, but that is outside the scope of my comments. We have to focus on the specific issue and make the proper conclusions before dealing with broader issues.

So, assuming that we small fries are not able to change the test standards, or not able to abolish NS itself, I ask fellow taxpayers what do you prefer? To pay entirely for all the extra training costs of reservists who failed, or to share the extra cost with those who failed?

Anon: going along the lines of those who say "i can pass IPPT, why can't you, you stupid?"

i dont roll over credit card debts every month, why can't you?

i can fix and troubleshoot pc problems, why can't you?

I can cook, why can't you?

I can take care of babies, why can't you?

i know enough not to touch weird investment products like minibonds and high notes way before the whole thing blew up, why can't you?

i can grow my own vegetables instead of buying those from market that're treated (whatever), why can't you?

typical smokescreens to sidetrack from the main issue, which is

"Is there room for improvement in the RT system?"

Anon: I wish to thank myself and all NS men, past & present, for 45 years of peace. Peace to grow this island republic into one great metropolis.

Today our AWAC watches over the island like a hawk, our fighting falcons comb the skies and swoop down at Paya Lebar and our subs snoop the rims of the region.

Our infantry is ever ready with its cutting-edge fighting machines stand ready to defend our mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and our way of life.

Thanks a million our comrades in arms!

Me: Our mothers, wives, sisters, daughters can defend themselves just as well as our fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.

Then again, knowing Singaporean women...

Men lie to other people - 'I love you'.

Women lie to other people AND themselves - 'I love him'


Female Friend 1: Haha so true.

Female Friend 2: oh tat's normal
hahahhaa

gals never mean wat we say

A complaint about Slumdog Millionaire:

"They are not slumdogs. They are the future of India.

So I was at The Cathay to catch the film of the moment. Slumdog Millionaire was initially entertaining and tightly scripted, but on afterthought, a painful experience. Not because the hitherto peaceful cinema has turned into the human highway I've long dreaded it would be, but because Danny Boyle's latest film is a shocking piece of orientalist exploitation.

Prima facie, its rags-to-riches plot uplifts the soul; look deeper, and you will see an archparable that breeds ignorance by combining two favourite Singapore pastimes: striking lottery and cultural ignorance.

It's the sort of film that reprises Crash's (2005) obligation to lazy liberalism by encouraging audiences to pat themselves on the back for their tolerance of Indians/whores/beggars. Except, of course, that they are doing so from the safety of a theatre of people hailing from a social strata as diverse as... Ang Mo Kio and Bishan. Imagine if the couple beside us had a smelly Arvind (the wax-blinded singing kid)-like street urchin as movie company.

And Jamal plunging into a shitpool for a movie star's autograph, and his mum killed by clobbering-drowning? It's cool man, because such horrific ordeals give him the mojo to win big on the India edition of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". Worse, it touts pure luck as a deus ex machina to get the hot chicks and the cold cash.

At its best, Slumdog Millionaire is an melodrama that exploits a city's misery (have you been to a Mumbai slum?) to counterpoint the eventual happily-ever-after fairytale. At its worst, it tells the world that the way to squirm out of grinding hopelessness isn't betterment through education -- but through winning a goddamned Western game show. And where did Jamal pick up his English accent anyway?

The opening scene where kids are chased across the kaleidoscopic ethnic patchwork of Mumbai -- as the energetic soundtrack provides the requisite sanitisation -- and the scene where Jamal's mother is doing her wash is an idyllic, exoticised take of slumbitch life. Boyle's visual style is blind bombast, replete with aerial shots and quick cutaways that minimise an already-materially-comfort

able Singaporean audience's need to confront the grimy truth of life, and death, of one of the world's most destitute slums.

For all you District 10 kids and Maldives veterans, try the real Mumbai. It is a pit, one made all the more shocking by the soaring skyscrapers the majority of its trapped residents will never see. But wow! It's so colourful down there! And the people are so hardy and optimistic! It's almost beautiful.

Have you seen any documentaries of the Mumbai slum recently? Or any Bollywood films? 800 were produced last year -- this one, directed by an Englishman and produced farfaraway in his land of The Forever Imperialists, is what the West has as its telescope on the second-most populated country on the planet. "Poverty porn" anyone?

So it swept 8 Oscars, including Best Picture. So someone flew the Indian kids to L.A. and tailored their suits. So they shared the stage glory with Boyle.

But the AMPAS members must look beyond the emo on-stage group hug -- Azharuddin (Jamal) and gang will be kicked back to the slum as dogs -- and think about the film they voted for (Please do it too, and do it again for that ignorance-about-the-Middle East-breeder Zohan). As with every non-nutritious snack hastily-consumed, the guilty reflection will come in the long hours after.

Read this and other things at http://chuaclarence.blogspot.com/"


My reply:

"Criticise the movie on its artistic (or cinematic) merits, or lack thereof, but the usual tired rhetoric about exploitation and evil imperialism cuts no ice with me.

If I want Real Indian Slum Life, I'll set up a movie camera in the middle of a street in Mumbai and chain it down (so it doesn't get stolen), and push out 24 hours worth of footage, but everyone will be falling asleep or walking out within 10 minutes. For bonus kicks, I'd remove the chairs from the cinema hall and capture the scent of a Mumbai slum and release it in the cinema, but then everyone would run out immediately and I'd be sued by the cinema owner for damaging his property. Hell, I might get a mob with weapons to storm the cinema within the first minute so the audience can experience running for their lives firsthand, but then I'd go to jail for aiding and abetting violence. Face it, Real Life is boring.

People go to movies primarily to be entertained and to escape into another world: to feel good, or feel good about themselves. Sure, you can make a feature which attempt to resolve these supposed contradictions and crusades for social justice, but that belongs in the arthouse, schoolroom or the cutting room floor.

The same allegedly exploitative elements could be found in ANY movie. It's only because this is a movie about:

1) Poor people
2) India (i.e. un-West)

that people complain so much. In other words, it's the usual complaint of "white (and rich) men are evil". If it'd been helmed by an Indian director, I'm very sure the outcry would be at most 10% of what it is now. It's just reflexive post-colonial anti-colonial sentiment.

In any case, claims about "exploitation" usually ring hollow. It is usually better to give people the choice to be "exploited" than let them live in illusory dignity. Those who complain about "exploitation" would seemingly prefer that such "exploitation" not take place, but that usually leaves the parties involved worse off. The only way to justify such actions is by appeal to some nebulous form of dignity. Yet, not only can you not eat dignity, you're dehumanising the very people you seek to defend by not recognising their agency in choosing to be "exploited".

Child labour in a sweatshop may be exploitative, but if Nike closes its factories the children go back to picking through rubbish dumps or begging (as you would've learnt from the movie). Factory work actually makes their lives better, "exploitation" be damned. If you don't want them to be exploited, offer them more alternatives. Which incidentally is what the filmmakers did - they put in money for the kids' education and put some in trusts till they turn 18, since the lump sum they provided the family predictably disappeared. And this ignores the huge sums they were paid (three times an adult's annual slum salary for a month's work).

Furthermore, merely digging beneath the surface puts paid to claims that the film glorifies "pure luck" as a way to riches (which he doesn't actually want) and a girl (*A* girl, I stress), but is instead intensely bittersweet. Sure, he gets the girl in the end, as well as riches, but at what cost? A disfigured lover and a dead brother and mother. As a line in the film goes: "I wake up every morning wishing I didn't know the answer to that question. If it wasn't for Ram and Allah, we'd still have a mother."

If you want to problematise away, go look at Bollywood films. The very reason Slumdog wasn't so popular in India was because it wasn't happy-happy and escapist enough, unlike the fantasies their own movie industry churns out.

Instead of railing about rich white men, which couldn't do less to aid the plight of the people they claim to be fighting for, the standard-bearers of cultural imperialism should put their money where their pens and mouths are and donate money for the betterment of the slums, instead of making their lives more miserable by impeding projects that provide them new (and most likely once-in-a-lifetime) opportunities."

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." - Will Rogers

***

Fighting recession is like playing football

Someone: i almost fell off my chair seeing that headline!

In the article:

"Ministers and unionists have said fighting the recession is like playing a football match against a stronger team.

Speaking at the Singapore Tripartite Forum on Sunday, they said Singaporeans will have to go on the offensive and play to win.

Labour chief Lim Swee Say said Singapore should aim to be cheaper and better than its competitors with the help of the SPUR programme and other measures from the resilience package."


I don't understand why we have to keep using competitive metaphors.

The whole world is "fighting" the recession, yet from the way they put it, we are fighting our competitors in a race to the bottom (in wages). The logic of internationalization is that everyone wins, yet we always adopt a beggar-thy-neighbor philosophy.

Yes, that tired canard is thrown out yet again. Our instinctive reaction is to cut wages.

It has been suggested that keeping wages low keeps the proletariat's minds on something other than Revolution. Perhaps there is some truth to that.

"Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings." - George F. Will

***

At the bottom of REACH's ("Reaching Everyone for Active Citizenry at Home" aka the old Feedback Unit) hideous homepage which looks like it's been run over by a truck - which will be a subject for another day and probably someone else, I noticed that they had a Twitter widget.


REACH's Twitter Page: 11 following, 20 followers, 7 updates (most recently: 13th February).

This beats my brother-in-law, at 1 following, 1 follower (no prizes for guessing who this sad sod is) and the last update coming a month ago, but this isn't saying much.

So, this is a good effort on their part (hand-in-glove with their much more successful Facebook effort, which has 1,872 members at present), but they seem to be content to let it spread organically.

Yet, everyone knows that a good Web marketing effort needs a healthy dose of steroids.

What they should do:

1) ANNOUNCE the Twitter account's existence in an official REACH email. I'm on the mailing list and unless something got swallowed by my spam filter I haven't heard anything.
2) Follow prominent Singaporean bloggers on Twitter (preferably those dealing with political issues)
3) @ reply Tweets on Singaporean issues with a link to the relevant REACH forum thread
4) Tweet more often. In the Twitterverse, out of updates (sight), out of mind.
5) Redesign their Twitter page: they need a bio and homepage (they forgot to link back to their homepage?! Goodness). Oh, and the background image is FUBAR.
6) Link their Facebook to their Twitter
7) Hold a giveaway: each week, a random follower will get a REACH goodybag

8) @kelvinq's suggestion: "Actually the worst thing about their effort is their awfully long username! Why not use @reach_sg while it's there?"

Mathia:

"12 years ago, I watched one of the best plays in my life. It was in junior college, those were just theatre students, and a 2-person propless, costumeless act.

The 2 characters marched in the shape of a square, each actor at a corner apart.
Through out the 5 minute act, they smiled happily, and spoke this line, in unison, continuously, rhythmically, in a very happy voice:

Happy! Happy! We are happy because we _SHOULD_ be happy!"

Comics - 22nd February 2009

"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time." - Norman Ford

***


"Ugly Barmaid Wanted"
"Why would you want an ugly barmaid?"
"When they start to hit on her, she knows to cut them off"


"I'm having woman problems."
"A lot of people have trouble with Romance."
"Actually, I'm retaining water and I have a craving for chocolate."




"Success is the happy feeling you get between the time you do something and the time you tell a woman what you did."



"Well if i'm the red ship, why am i killing the red guys? Why am i killing off my own people? Shouldn't I be killing the blue guys? They are trying to kill me, after all. What's the deal with that?
I mean, imagine if it were a little white guy and a black guy, and the white guy is only allowed to kill white people, and the black guy is only allowed to kill black people.
What's the message here? That genocide is only okay as long as it isn't also a hate crime? And why are they trying to eradicate life of all colours anyway?
Why are we playing as little racist ships?"
"Wow, your head is going to EXPLODE when I show you the Resident Evil 5 demo."


"Happy African American Month!"
"I thought it was called Black History Month"
"Black is a term from the past. We've made progress since those days."
"How about real progress? Just call it February."


"Whoa! Be careful. That's a pitbull."
"You and your animal stereotypes. Not all pitbulls are vicious killers. Clearly this one is..."
*Chomp!* *Scratch!* *Rend!*
"One of those."
"Just... a little... rough play."
Addendum: This is from Secret Asian Man, which is no longer available online


"[On Othello] Papa, let's play! You be African American and I'll be of European Descent."
"*Wonder what overly sensitive weenie he learned that from?*"



Rat: Dude, what's that smell?
Pig: Oh, it's probably me. There's a drought, so I've stopped showering.
Rat: So what are you gonna do - just go aroudn smelling awful?!
Pig: Oh, no. No, silly. Every fifteen minutes, I rub 'Speed Stick' all over my face.
Rat: Dude.
Pig: Mmmmmmmm Feels goooooood.


Rat: I've decided to find all my enemies and tell them I forgive them.
Pig: Good for you, Rat... Why'd you decide to do that?
Rat: To give my vengeance the element of surprise.

"When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice." - Marquis de la Grange

***

Soul Searching - "I believe, that in order for Singapore to endure, the country has got to stand for something more than efficient processes and non-corrupt governing. Because there will come day when processes will fail and people in power found corrupt. Realistically speaking, a “dose of bad government” is an inescapable probability as evidenced by all manners of civilisation since man’s infancy. Will Singaporeans have anything to hold on to when that happens? Are we staying only because Singapore affords us shelter, and will we leave when the winds change?"

The future of journalism in a post-newspaper world - "In the United States, there is growing interest in the idea of foundation/endowment-backed journalism. This makes eminent sense. Call it a Civic Journalism Service (CJS), made up of 50-100 full-time professional journalists focusing exclusively on those genres of journalism that are clear cases of market failure: public affairs reporting, in particular. You will hear knee-jerk criticisms of such a model, mainly from commercial news media: how to ensure that a CJS isn’t influenced by its funders, for example. The truth is that there are enough best practices to learn from worldwide; it’s just that it has never been in the interest of the mainstream profession to highlight models that put their own to shame. Positive examples include the Guardian in the UK, published by a trust; the public-funded BBC; and the foundation-owned St Petersburg Times. They show that it is possible to institutionalise editorial independence far more effectively than most commercial publishers have been willing to."

Holding Lee Kuan Yew accountable – Part 1 - "There's nothing wrong, of course, about making bad predictions. Let's be fair, everyone at some point has made calls that have turned out embarrassingly wrong. Mr Lee has made, and will make, his fair share. The difference with the MM's words is that they drive policy formulation which involves spending of billions of dollars of public monies. Once spoken, these words precipitate PAP groupthink; few dare to tell the Mr Lee that he is wrong, let alone hold him accountable for his errors in judgement which have catastrophic consequences. Oracle of the East he is not but you wouldn't know that if you spoke to the servants with whom the MM surrounds himself and on whom he lavishes made-in-heaven salaries. These highly intelligent individuals apparently go into a synaptic short-circuit when they are in his presence and suspend all form of independent thinking."

Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act (Singapore) - "It must be realised that if you abolish the powers of arrest and detention and insist on trial in open court in accordance with the strict laws of evidence of a criminal trial, then law and order becomes without the slightest exaggeration utterly impossible, because whilst you may still nominally have law and order, the wherewithal to enforce it would have disappeared. The choice in many of these cases is either to go through the motions of a trial and let a guilty man off to continue his damage to society or to keep him confined without trial"

Chair Kills Boy by Anal Penetration - "A fourteen-year-old boy was killed after the chair he was sitting on exploded, propelling sharp chair parts into his rectum, causing extensive bleeding, which he succumbed to before medical attention could stem the flow."

The gospel according to Darwin - "If evolution is an unfalsified hypothesis, then so is every fact about the real world; so is the very existence of a real world. This kind of conversation is swiftly and rightly sidelined. Evolution is true in whatever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we conduct our day-to-day conversations? Or fill in a census form: “What is your sex?” “The hypothesis that I am male has not so far been falsified, but let me just check again”. As Douglas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well. Yet the philosophy that imposes such scruples on science has no basis for absolving everyday facts from the same circumlocution."
I now have something to tell the people in Science Studies and Agnostics...

China tycoon's mistress contest ends in tragedy: report - "A married Chinese tycoon who could no longer afford to support his five mistresses during the economic slowdown held a contest to decide which one to keep, local media reported Tuesday. The contest took a tragic turn when one of the mistresses, who was eliminated based on her looks, drove her former lover and the four other women off a mountain road in an apparent fit of anger, the Shanghai Daily reported."
HWMNBN: Moral of the story - never let women drive

YouTube - Nutella - "Difference between German and French Nutella explained... "As you can see, there is here a obvious incompatibility between French bread and German Nutella""

Comprehensive study of 'time twins' debunks astrology - "Scientists have once and for all debunked astrology's central claim -- that our human characteristics are molded by the influence of the sun, moon and planets at the time of our birth -- in the most thorough scientific study ever conducted on the subject. For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people -- most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subjects should have had very similar traits."

Which drink do you drink? - "A recent magazine survey, interviewed fifty bartenders and they were asked if they could identify a customer’s personality on what drinks they ordered? Although interviewed separately, they concurred on almost all counts...
If Women Drink... Water
Personality: Pretentious and is looking for a serious relationship.
Approach: Don’t...
If Men Drink... Bacardi Breezer, Red Square, Archers Cooler, Smirnoff Ice, etc
He’s gay (blatantly) - don’t turn your back or pick up any dropped change."

Does the Tip of a Snapped Towel Travel Faster Than Sound?

Peranakans – Going the way of the Dodo? - "Felix Chia, well-known author the book, The Babas, notes that the Peranakans are a dwindling minority race which will become extinct in a matter of time. He says:”The Baba, a product of an accident of history, is a time traveler; he has come, and he must go.”"

Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose - "urban, liberal, feminist, latte-drinking, overeducated, intellectual, unapologetically p.c. american patriots"
The person who sent this to me called this "fat chick blog". My take on it: "fat chicks blame everyone else for their problems and yet bizarrely have un-fat avatars, which provides bountiful fodder for deconstruction"

Iran acid victim seeks eye for an eye - ""I don't want to blind him for revenge," Bahrami said in her Tehran apartment. "I'm doing this to prevent it from happening to someone else.""
Right.

Places That We Have Come To Leave The Most

"Last weekend I found myself on the rooftop of a van watching a traditional khushti/pehlwan Indian/Pakistani/Afghani/Persian wrestling match, atop a circle of 500 or so South Asian workers. I then had dinner in a little back alley, eating Afghani kebabs so large and so delicious they looked like they roasted a goat alive. This weekend I'm thinking of going to Bombay to celebrate the birthday of one of my best friends, recently returned from months in Rwanda, Mozambique and Uganda documenting HIV and other important things like that. In Singapore I'm quite likely to rave about my weekend in some deserted island in Satun, Thailand, that took two days to reach by train, or about how I found some amazing secret restaurant in the red light district."

Most Singaporean girls would run away screaming, yelping "But I'm a girl" at the vaguest suggestion that they do 10% of any of these things.

Okay, probably more the Chinese, but still.