Links - 24th February 2011

"Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed." - George Burns

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Hold Your Applause: Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert - "The underlying message of the protocol is, in essence, “Curb your enthusiasm. Don’t get too excited.” Should we be surprised that people aren’t quite as excited about classical music as they used to be?... the classical concert of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was radically different from the rather staid and timid affair of today... The great change began with the onset of the Romantic era... some time around 1900 the concert hall began to take on a peculiar social burden. In America, especially, members of the upper and middle classes embraced the symphony orchestra as a faux-European bastion in a world of vulgar commerce... Charles Rosen has sagely observed, “The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition”"

Valentine’s Day is not Christian, says church group - The Malaysian Insider - "A Muslim preacher called Siti Nor Bahyah Mahamood has also linked Christianity with vices in a sermon on the festival. Siti had said in a television programme aired on TV9 more than a year ago, that “vices,going to discos and to be in remote place with a partner as Christian tradition.” She also called Valentine’s Day a Christian festival, claiming it started as a celebration to commemorate the fall of the Islamic administration in Spain... Jais pointed out today that there were 257,411 births out of wedlock between 2000 and 2008, and blamed Valentine’s Day celebration as one of the causes"
Malaysia Boleh!

Soldier defeats 40 men to save young woman from rape - "Bishnu killed three of the bandits and injured eight others, while the remaining 29 fled for their lives"
Ahh, Gurkhas!

A 'living virgin goddess' comes down to earth in Nepal

Mila Kunis Eats Out Natalie Portman Black Swan Scene (VIDEO) - "Merry Xmas! This was the best scene in the movie. I just saved you 12 bucks!"

Bullying seen as 'instrument for social climbing' - "[The] conclusions countered the belief that bullies tend to be the troubled students in school"

Revenge Rape and Reason is Ty Oliver Mcdowell a Rapist or a Victim - "Posing as the victim, Stripe placed an ad complete with picture on Craig’s list. He stated in the ad that he was the woman and that she wanted to fulfill a sexual fantasy in which she was raped... If McDowell is telling the truth, he saw the ad and emailed the woman, who was stripe posing as the woman, and they communicated by messenger back and forth as she detailed her fantasy and exactly what she would like done. After, discussing the fantasy. McDowell then on December 11, 2009 broke into the woman’s home, tied her to a chair, held a knife to her throat, and raped her. Thus fulfilling what he claims he believed to be the woman’s fantasy"

What’s up Doc? - "PM Lee is quoted as saying, ‘I think everybody will be hoping for bigger hongbao and I’m sure the Finance Minister will know what to do’... Next time your government talks about giving you something, remember that you own the farm. Our sovereign wealth funds have been built up by our people scrimping and saving and going without services that are taken for granted in other rich countries. You never received a proper explanation for how much money was lost in 2008 in Temasek and GIC. No heads rolled and you never found out why Chuck Goodyear resigned. The farm land is surrounded with three lines of razor wire and KEEP OUT signs for Singaporeans. Time that we had a Freedom of Information Act, I think"

Father who imprisoned daughter and had seven children with her beheaded - ""They then raided the cell where inmates charged with rape and paedophilia were being held and killed six of them, four of whom were decapitated"... Zaiban said the inmates agreed to return to their cells after authorities said they would consider some of their demands and transfer 14 prisoners to jails nearer to their homes. The demands included one kilogram of marijuana, a television set, fans to cool the cells and the right to receive home cooked meals, she said. Asked which demands might be met, Zaiban said: "Marijuana won't be one of them.""
Sex offenders are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, and child sex offenders at the bottom of the prison sex offenders' hierarchy.

Ozone Generators that are Sold as Air Cleaners | Indoor Air | US EPA - "When inhaled, ozone can damage the lungs... Relatively low amounts can cause chest pain, coughing, shortness of breath, and, throat irritation. Ozone may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and compromise the ability of the body to fight respiratory infections... Available scientific evidence shows that at concentrations that do not exceed public health standards, ozone has little potential to remove indoor air contaminants"

Why books do not prepare us for real love - "Literature's lust for unrequited love leaves us ill prepared for the reality of what love really is... We fell in love and got married. Suddenly, literature ceased to be any useful guide to what to expect. All that my books had prepared me for was an image of continuous perfection... It is surely not coincidental that most great lovers in literature are devoid of a sense of humour... I continue sometimes to feel unhappy about my work, to worry about my future and to be disappointed with myself and with my friends. Except that now, rather than sharing my sorrows, I tend to blame the person who lives beside me for them... as soon as love is reciprocated, you have to be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt yourself"
The claim that literature teaches us about life is false, or at least incomplete
Addendum: keywords - "why literature does not"

25 Disturbing Teddy Bears

Who's your daddy? - "Roughly one in 10 children born within monogamous relationships was fathered by someone besides the man who thinks he's the father. A 2002 article in Nature Reviews Genetics was even more alarming, suggesting that the figure could be as high as 20 percent... a mother's relatives pay much more attention to her children than the father's relatives do... The degree of reduced interest from the father's relatives was what you would expect, if those relatives were assuming a 13 to 20 percent chance the child wasn't related to them"

Auger Loizeau: Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots

YouTube - Misery Bear's Christmas

What to Do When She Says, “I JUST Want to Be Friends.” - "a man NEVER has to offer friendship to a woman. That’s what girl friends are for... you are allowing her to step all over you and use you... If you have any chance of her seeing you romantically, she has to have a chance to miss what you provided her emotionally, and you can only do this if you do not offer her friendship"
This is written by a girl, so people will probably not accuse her of misogyny

Shouting “racism” won’t fix this problem - "WHEN you hear “racist!’ now, you know some coward is once again just trying to shut a debate he fears he can’t win. No one who knows the Opposition’s immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, would dream he’s racist, as so many commentators now imply... The reassurances offered by Muslim leaders are rarely much comfort. Take Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, for many years Mufti of Australia, despite praising suicide bombers as “heroes” and calling the September 11 attacks “God’s work against oppressors”"
Someone suggested calling someone 'racist' was like an extension of Godwin's law. I did not disagree, but noted that there're significantly more racists than Nazis in this world.

Marmite experiment - "Today, Rusty informed me that if I took some Marmite and hit it for a while, it would change colour, going from dark brown all the way through to white"

Why Twitter Should Never Expand Beyond 140 Characters

Breakup Notifier - "Choose the friends you're interested in who are taken. Get an email whenever the relationship status of your chosen friends changes. Yes, it's that easy"

Oral sex linked to cancer risk - "US scientists said Sunday there is strong evidence linking oral sex to cancer, and urged more study of how human papillomaviruses may be to blame for a rise in oral cancer among white men"
This must be another reason why white men are so desired as lovers

Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising

Singapore’s Poor Feel the Squeeze - "A flood of cheap immigrant labor — and stiff competition for manufacturing jobs from Asian neighbors like China and Vietnam — has kept wages stagnant for many and widened the gulf between a very wealthy minority and the island’s poorest. Housing prices have skyrocketed as rapid population growth outstrips supply... From 1998 to 2008, the bottom 20 percent of households saw their income drop an average of 2.7 percent while the salaries of the richest 20 percent rose by more than half... The island also has the world’s highest percentage of millionaires — households with at least $1 million in liquid assets — at 11.4 percent of the country’s 5 million population"
More good years ahead

Why does nobody want to feel like a natural woman anymore? - "Artificially enhanced femininity is on display everywhere. Older women pay to look younger. Young women start altering themselves very early on. One result is a kind of glazed uniformity. You see it in porn. You see it in all those late-30s, Botoxed faces that look neither old nor young, just done"
This is an interesting mirror of economic inequality and illustrates why chasing positional goods is a futile endeavor

Sixty Years after the Magic Carpet Ride: The Long-Run Effect of the Early Childhood Environment on Social and Economic Outcomes - "This paper estimates the effect of the early childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years. To do this, we exploit variation in the living conditions experienced by Yemenite children after being airlifted to Israel in 1949... these effects are found mainly for women, and not for men."