Links - 29th September 2012

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think interior decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." - Anna Quindlen

***

Extra, extra! Your best friends are getting happy divorced - "Divorce Newspapers have been developed in Japan which allow couples to distribute a report of the demise of their marriage to friends and family quickly and easily. It’s also a way for the newly divorced to save the embarrassment of telling each person individually... The “divorce newspaper” is the creating of divorce guru Hiroki Terai, who is also a strong proponent of “divorce ceremonies.” Divorce ceremonies are either fun or solemn events aimed at giving the couple a chance to look back on their time together and part ways with a good feeling. In some cases divorce ceremonies have even led to a cancelling of the divorce"

delanceyplace.com 9/21/12 - obsessing about sex - "Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound 'animalistic'? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only dur­ing widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more 'human' than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more 'animal' than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting 'human,' while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, 'acting like an animal.'"

Thai Group Says Steve Jobs Reincarnated as Warrior-Philosopher - "he has said the reincarnated Mr. Jobs spends much of his time lounging in a glass palace resembling an Apple store. Phra Chaibul also has said the being formerly known as Steve Jobs is attended by 20 servants, who seem to resemble the Apple store 'Geniuses' who help customers set up their iPhones and other devices here on earth."

Japanese Charity Breast-Squeeze! - "All money raised will be donated to STOP!AIDS, a charity aimed at promoting the awareness, treatment, and prevention of AIDS. Oppai momi is particularly popular in Japan, and there are plenty of Japanese style pubs where you can go have a beer and also a squeeze of the waitresses breasts after a hard day in the office. This is the first oppia momi fundraiser we are aware of though."

RTA advertisement (NSW, Australia) - YouTube
"Such a sexist ad says a lot about the people behind it."

Throw like a girl? With some practice, you can do better. - "She believes that men and women aren’t as different as they are often portrayed, and she has mined data on social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors to quantify the gap. After looking at 46 meta-analyses, Hyde found what she defined as a “very large” difference in only two skills: throwing velocity and throwing distance."

Kate Middleton topless photos: When did bare breasts become taboo?

Kate Middleton's Boobs: Why Are We So Obsessed With the Royal Chest? - "Helen of Troy's face may have launched a thousand ships, but it was really her breasts that buoyed the army. Legend has it that sight of them caused Menelaus to drop his sword... It is fitting, as well as quite funny, that the royal couple fled the tata tornado only to land back in time, in the Solomon Islands, where they encountered bare-breasted women at every turn"

"the best part about the treatment is that it is not age biased as it caters to women in their 20s, 30s or 40s" (picture)

Asian Swingers Online dating at asianswingers.net - Front page
Only one out of four people in the picture is Asian. And of course it's a girl

Burger king has no burger, Swensen's has no ice cream & Soup restaurant no soup (image)

If you want to live the American dream, move to Denmark

Sophos Antivirus Detects Itself as Malware, Deletes Key Binaries

Putin muses on the benefits of group sex - "President Vladimir Putin of Russia has mused that group sex is better than one-on-one intercourse because participants can take a break."

An Introduction to Singaporean Food | Serious Eats - "This kind of perfection in simplicity can only come from a place where eating is a way of life unto itself. And where a meal is judged solely by what comes on the plate—fancy restaurants and big name chefs not necessary... As one of the wealthiest countries in Asia, it's drawn workers in from everywhere, and where large populations of immigrant workers go, good food is sure to follow. Singapore feels similar to New York in this way: not only is it a glass-towered metropolis of wealth; it's also a hotbed for a half dozen or so different ethnic groups making—and cooking—their way through the world"
Presumably he hasn't checked out all the food blogs where a meal is judged more by how it looks and where it's served than what comes on the plate

How Hobbies Can Help You Get Hired - At Work - WSJ - "“Reading” by itself is a snooze. But “reading medical mysteries” is a little quirky and shows some intellectual rigor"

Saudi Arabia's Female Olympic Athletes Called 'Prostitutes'

Krugman, Human Weakness, and Desert - "When someone drops out of high school, overeats, or fails to exercise, you tell us that their behavior is only "human." But if a conservative or libertarian objects to paying taxes to help people who make these choices, you get angry. Question: Why are you so forgiving of people with irresponsible lifestyles, but so outraged by people who don't want to pay taxes to help people with irresponsible lifestyles? This seems morally perverse. If you're going to single anyone out for condemnation, it should be the person who behaves irresponsibly in the first place, not the complete stranger who asks, "How is this my fault?""

A Superstitious Fund - "The Superstitious Fund Project is a live one year experiment where an uncanny algorithm or SUPERSTITIOUS AUTOMATED ROBOT will trade live on the stock market"

Bill Dickens on Me on Poverty: A Rejoinder, Bryan Caplan - "the American poor had very high rates of employment and high marital stability when the welfare state was smaller... It's still easy for today's white working class to get jobs that would support a family at the income level of the 1950s.  U.S. per-capita income in 1950 was under $10,000 (1990 dollars).  That actually understates the ease of maintaining earlier living standards because modern household technology and family size make it a lot easier for mothers to work... As women's labor market opportunities improved, their interest in low-status men with stable jobs declined. This in turn led many low-status men to either give up on work and women, or try to impress women in other ways. Some of these "other ways," strangely, are self-destructive behavior like non-remunerative crime and substance abuse... How do you, Bill Dickens, respond when your students don't come to class, don't study, fail the final exam, then come crying to you? Whether you tell them or not, I strongly suspect you're thinking, "Your failure is your own damn fault." You don't give them the same assistance or sympathy that you'd give a hard-working student who's struggling with the material. I think such meritocratic moral intuitions are sound, and ought to guide public policy as well as private conscience. If people are poor because they're behaving irresponsibly, they should be far down our queue of people to help - if they belong on the queue at all. That said, I also happen to think that reducing the generosity of the welfare state and making assistance conditional on good behavior will (eventually) reduce bad behavior... if the trade-offs are bone-headedly simple - like "heavy drinking makes you less employable" or "single motherhood is tough" - very very bad decisions are a matter of choice. This in turn seriously undermines efforts to claim "victim" status"

The Post-Employee Economy: Why Sky-High Profits Are Here to Stay - "Robots have come to destroy our way of life, just as we saw in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, though not as we expected. They're taking our jobs, and are forcing us to reexamine how we value ourselves... It's a bit perverse that we cheer the gains in health-care employment while we decry the rise in health-care costs - the two are related. Presumably, technology will cause health-care productivity to soar, reducing the need for health-care workers. Again, great for consumers and capital, bad for displaced workers... Americans continue to define themselves by work when technology continues to reduce the demand for labor... The end of the age of consumption and the decreasing need for labor are intertwined"

Laser Eye Surgery: 10 Years Later - ""Our findings are that both are safe after 10 years," and the visual correction holds for the most part, says researcher Jorge Alio, M.D., Ph.D., an ophthalmologist"

Gabriel Seah's answer to Why do many doctors performing LASIK opt to continue to wear corrective lenses instead of getting the procedure done on themselves? - Quora - "In 2008, 30% of the refractive surgeons surveyed by the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery had had LASIK, PRK or LASEK performed on their own eyes, which was four times the frequency among the general public. Some ophthalmologists do not want to undergo LASIK for specific reasons, like the need to work with a microscope"

Osama bin Laden 'wanted 9/11 follow-up' - "Bothered by altitude sickness, he said, he volunteered to be a suicide bomber but was rejected because he had not undergone enough religious training... he was arrested in Pakistan after leaving the tribal areas because the fighting season was over and he wanted to find a wife."

What are some stereotypes that Asian people have about White people? - Quora

Newsbeast.gr | Ο,ΤΙ ΝΑ 'ΝΑΙ : Η κακόγουστα κάνει πάρτι
Weird nailart

Polar Bear Population Higher than in 20th Century: Is Something Fishy about Extinction Fears? - "If 300 years of study revealed 60-80 cycles of climate changes, the arctic climate would have presumably undergone many more cycles of drastic changes over the past thousands of years. And with a more than 110,000-year history of survival, it doesn't mak sense to believe that polar bears are dying unable to withstand swimming exhaustion due to larger water bodies... If the world is actually feeling threatened that polar bears might cease to exist at some future point of time, why are they still being subjected to legal hunting?"

"Japanese" Dating

Japanwommendating.asia — Experience Dating with Japanese Girls Number One for International Dating:


"Experience the joy of a Japanese Lady and set your life on fire!"

This must be the first time I've seen "Japanese" ladies with names like Peng, Liling,
Lingyan, Sha, Huabi, Wenhui, Yancen or Ting.

I don't think the photo of a geisha typing on a laptop comes from a stock photo site, so I wonder how much they paid to commission it.

The Next Generation - Weird

"I never get my hopes up so I never get let down." – Eeyore

***


Starhub: Local Server - Ping 31ms, Download Speed 8.53Mbps, Upload Speed 1.08Mbps


MyRepublic: Local Server - Ping 14ms, Download Speed 37.03Mbps, Upload Speed 33.09Mbps


Starhub: US West Coast - Ping 410ms, Download Speed 9.07Mbps, Upload Speed 1.00Mbps


MyRepublic: US West Coast - Ping 196ms, Download Speed 4.48Mbps, Upload Speed 2.45Mbps

Links - 26th September 2012

"When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him." - John Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

***

“New atheists” are privileged racist homophobic imperialists | Butterflies and Wheels - "who says Greta Christina (since she’s the example Scofield chose to illustrate that claim) belongs to a privileged group? Who, in particular, says she does so more than Be Scofield? He has some forms of privilege that she doesn’t have. Why does he get to italicize from their own social location by way of rebuking Greta, as if she loomed over him like the lord of the manor? Why is her reason more tainted by privilege than his? I don’t know; I suspect he’s just posturing."

Bees 'could deter vandals' at Greenfield heritage park

Your Facebook personality is genuine (study)

Storming the Sand Castle | BioWare Blog - "If there’s any criticism I would level, it’s that many fanfiction writers insulate themselves in the safe cocoon of an appreciative audience so that they never receive the criticism required to grow. There’s no harm in that; not everyone needs to grow as a writer– but those who do find that criticism, somewhere, can turn into pretty fantastic writers... They laden their prose with words they fancy because they think it makes their writing more poetic. It doesn’t. It makes your prose heavy, and while there might be some readers who appreciate that, it won’t make you a better writer. Be sparing with your language, and realize there isn’t a sentence so clever it shouldn’t be cut if it doesn’t assist your purpose– which is telling a story"

Mass hysteria in upstate New York: Why Lori Brownell and 13 other teenage girls are showing Tourette’s-like symptoms. - "Victims are often accused of faking it, but more often they are suffering real physical symptoms that are psychological in origin. The phenomenon has been observed for centuries, with the blame shifting to whatever specific anxieties are culturally pervasive at the time. But one theme has remained consistent: The victims are overwhelmingly female... Victims of mass hysteria are so often female that gender imbalance is one clue doctors use to differentiate hysteria from poisoning"

IKEA stores, a wonderland for Chinese freeloaders - "Taking a nap, freeloading on air-conditioning, sipping free coffee, and organizing a speed dating event…It seems that quite a number of Chinese go to IKEA stores for anything but furniture shopping... Last year, IKEA Shanghai experienced a coffee crisis. It told its customers that 30 yuan (US$4.6) spent on a membership card can guarantee them countless free refills of coffee in the cafeteria. The promotion became a near disaster: each Tuesday and Thursday, hundreds of members of a matchmaking club at their middle age and beyond came from all over the city and took up seats for five or six hours while meeting their dates. Each one of them got free coffee from an organizer who flashed her own IKEA membership card to the staff at the cafeteria and then generously extended her privilege to everyone in the club. Bags of creamer, sugar and disposable cups ran out in half an hour"

Bernhard Schlink: being German is a huge burden - ""Germans have a melancholic, a pessimistic streak, which cultural historians trace back to the thirty years' war [a series of wars between 1618 and 1648 that devastated much of Europe including large parts of Germany]. There are these beautiful comparisons of German, English and French soldiers' war songs, and the English and French ones, they're all about hope and victory, and the German soldiers' songs are all about losing comrades, or imminent death. This pessimism I think leads people to ask now: 'Have we had it too good?'""

Singapore and Hong Kong men are the most promiscuous in Asia - "Singapore and Hong Kong men are the most promiscuous in Asia, with an average of 16 bed partners in their lifetime, according to a worldwide survey carried out by condom producer Durex. For women, Malaysian women are the most promiscuous in Asia with some 39 percent confessing that they cheated on their partners in the poll, which covered 29,000 women in 36 countries. The Malaysian women came third behind Ghana (62 per cent) and Thailand (59 per cent). In fourth and fifth place were Russia (33 per cent) and Singapore (19 per cent) respectively."

Condom highly sought after as gift for Chinese New Year - "many young men are out making a living by themselves and are reunited with their wives or girlfriends only during the New Year. Condoms that are rarely used throughout the year now sell like hot cakes for people’s quality time."

Material greed of Chinese women turns Chinese men off; Western women become popular - "[He] has found himself more attracted to the traits of the Western female character. He thinks that these women are more independent, straight-forward and less coddled than Chinese women. Being outspoken is what they especially appeal to Li Lei. “If they have something they want, they will tell you directly”... Tony had two relationships with Chinese women, but was angered by having to find out why his girlfriend had mood swing. As a result, he made up his mind two years ago that women from North America or Europe suit him better. Part of the reason why they now prefer Western women is an increasing number of Chinese women are materialist"

Diva - My S'pore boyfriends were not driven, boring dependent, childish - "After she broke up with her Singaporean boyfriend two years ago, Miss Ang had enough of local men. Her ex had called her materialistic after she told him that being content with a future salary of $3,000 a month was not good enough for her. “So I decided I wanted someone different,” Miss Ang said. The 21-year-old set her sights on Caucasian men, and 10 months after she broke up, she got her wish. She met her current German boyfriend, 25, at the smoking area outside a Clarke Quay pub. He approached her and started a conversation. “Normally, Singaporean men would not be so bold,” she said... [She] spoke with a Western accent... “I love my boyfriend because he is very reserved and simple”... “I also want to have beautiful children who are mixed blood, to create diversity in the family”"

Self-confessed ex-SPG: Local men are sensible, responsible gentlemen - ""When I was an SPG, I wanted to explore and thinking these Caucasian men were more adventurous and intelligent -- my thoughts fooled me. I was disappointed dating a few of the most inglorious and ignorant men I've ever met. They always think they are way smarter and able to outsmart me. But when I outsmart them in turn, they feel threatened and hate the feeling of losing to an Asian woman. Thus, they begin to turn nasty... I would describe local men as researchers, humans curious about their planet. When they don't know something, they are eager to learn more about it. They research and gain more knowledge about it unlike Caucasian men, who tend to think they know it all... most of them don't really care how you look, it's just how you sleep with them"

The Sexual Double Standard - "A more lighthearted approach to a sexual double standard was taken in a study done in Texas examining country music lyrics. All of the songs used were sung by female artists. Interestingly, these researchers found that female singers excused infidelity from married women but not married men... A later study by Marks and Fraley investigated why recent empirical results seems to support the lack of a sexual double standard while anecdotal evidence still strongly supports it’s existence. Their findings suggested that the confirmation bias (a tendency to search for information that confirms already held precepts) sustains belief in the sexual double standard (2006: 25)."

YouTube video shows Indian beer thief hiding 20-pound case under skirt - What's On Tianjin

Tapioca pearls in bubble tea contain carcinogens: German study

Virginity cream sparks Indian sex debate - "An Indian company has launched what it claims is the country's first vagina tightening cream, saying it will make women feel "like a virgin" again. The company says it is about empowering women... Ancient India has always been celebrated for its openness and lack of hypocrisy, for its modernity and inclusive attitude; but in one aspect, it has remained rigid: the need for women to be virgins... she has even heard stories of companies which work at night, such as call centres, finding their toilets full of condoms which they cannot flush down, as some couples find it hard to find a place to be alone"

Why top sport stars might have 'more time' on the ball - "an individual's perception of time does seem to slow as they prepare to make a physical action"

Eating less fails to extend monkey lives - "monkeys eating 30 per cent less than control animals did not have longer lives. Dieting monkeys also died from age-related diseases just as often as controls. The results not only conflict with findings from worms, flies, rats and mice, but also with those of a very similar study of rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in 2009."

Cost of staging NDP: $115, spent in 10 years
I'm sure this doesn't assume paying NSFs at market rates

No go for cycling lanes - "On average, 18 cyclists died every year from 2008 to 2011, Parliamentary Secretary for Transport Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim said in Parliament on Monday. Half of the cyclists involved in fatal and injury accidents were partly at fault... Those who don't observe the highway code are also a menace. Cyclists sometimes ride two-abreast in a single lane, blocking vehicles whose drivers end up waiting behind them, said avid cyclist Stephen Choy, 47. Some cyclists in housing estates also ride on pedestrian paths "thinking they have the right of way and then expect drivers to give way at zebra crossings""
""I am really angry. I have seen so many cyclists disobey traffic rules, yet cyclists are always the angels and motorists are the culprits," said the Tampines resident. "We are not against cyclists but they must obey the rules. Motorists are the poor scapegoats.""

How the contraceptive pill messes with women's minds: Rage, despair, low sex drive... - " the Pill affects women’s choice in men. The study showed women taking it tend to choose reliable, caring and steady men, rather than adventurous, dashing and dangerous types... Using a medically respected questionnaire, researchers found Pill takers had an average depression rating of 17.6 compared to 9.8 in non-users... A study of more than 1,000 women at Germany’s University of Heidelberg found the Pill dramatically reduces levels of desire and arousal during sex."
How ironic that it reduces desire

Now THAT is Retarded

"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett

***

From: R-word | Spread the Word to End the Word

"The R-word is the word 'retard(ed)'. Why does it hurt? The R-word hurts because it is exclusive. It’s offensive. It’s derogatory. The R-word is hate speech...

When they were originally introduced, the terms “mental retardation” or “mentally retarded” were medical terms with a specifically clinical connotation; however, the pejorative forms, “retard” and “retarded” have been used widely in today’s society to degrade and insult people with intellectual disabilities. Additionally, when “retard” and “retarded” are used as synonyms for “dumb” or “stupid” by people without disabilities, it only reinforces painful stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities being less valued members of humanity."


Recent pledges:



Default pledge: "I pledge and support the elimination of the derogatory use of the r-word from everyday speech and promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities."

My pledge: "The R Word is pernicious but I find the term "intellectual disabilities" almost as offensive and insulting. I support inclusion of the "Differently-abled"!"

(there is a delay between pledging and having the pledges show up - I'm suspecting it's more due to screening of pledges than server lag, since I didn't see anyone pledging that "this campaign is retarded")


As @lynnylchan comments, "Not allowed to say 'disabled', it's now 'differently abled'... this is pointless."

In other words, the website and campaign are already outdated and offensive.

Moral of the story: Offence is in the Eye of the Offended.


More: Pinker on the Euphemism Treadmill

Ars gratia artis

"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous." - Graffito

***

On the film "Fiesta":

"I should have known my next picture would be trouble as soon as the Mexican tailor demanded that my bosom would have to go. Almost from beginning to end, Fiesta was jinxed…

Before shooting began, I traveled to Mexico City to get fitted for a traje de luces, the beautiful jewel-encrusted suit of lights that every matador wears in the ring. The tailor who was making my suit was very by-the- book — it never registered with him that this was for a movie, or if it did, he didn't care. When I went for my first fitting, he looked at me, took my measurements for the jacket, shook his head, and said,

Imposible, senorita.

He was upset because traditionally the stiff jacket must lie vertically against the chest. Given the measurements he wanted, the only way a woman could wear one "properly" would be if she were constructed like supermodel Kate Moss — perfectly flat. Now I wasn't quite Jane Russell, but I did have a bustline; and this little tailor was just sickened at the sight of me because I was ruining the look of his suit. At that point he refused to do any more work on it unless I agreed to have my bosom surgically removed.

When I realised he was serious, I crossed my arms over my chest. We were at an impasse – a Mexican standoff”

--- The million dollar mermaid / Esther Williams, Digby Diehl

u r wt u wr - 24th September 2012

"If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like." - Phyllis Diller

***

u r wt u wr:

- 'You can't catch me'
- 'Kiss me. It's trendy'
- 'Cute'
- 'New Menico
US 27
There my they time
What's your name'
- 'a sparkling weekend is coming' (this was worn on a saturday so presumably it was not that weekend)
- 'My boyfriend is a tenant. Were-something-'
- 'Need a hug today'
- 'somewhere sometime it could happen. Love edc'
- 'I'm SMART. That is why I am still SINGLE'
- '*something* *pic if strawberry* it is juicy'
- 'Good cats make u :) naughty cats make u :* but i -something- them all'
- 'Sweet cherries' (7 year old girl)
- 'There's a wild thing inside us all' (Secondary school girl with mother)
- 'You don't forget me. That's why I like you'
- 'Vamp'
- 'coffee chocolate men. All better rich'
- 'Shrink to fit' (I could see her tummy)
- 'Like me to love St.'
- 'Always imitated never duplicated' (Why you would want to, I wouldn't know)
- 'You know you love me too'
- 'remember me'
- 'I haven't met a boy I couldn't beat'
- 'B.U.M college rule #237. Not remembering is the best part'\
- 'I'm not perfect but I'm limited edition' (rationed crap is still crap)
- 'remember me'
- 'nice' (Must've referred to her personality, I'm sure)
- 'Show off' (There wasn't much to show)
- 'player'
- 'more respect less attack'
- 'Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me' (She was maybe in her early 40s. She had quite a lot of pimple craters, had neither figure nor butt, and had early stage female pattern baldness)


Guys:

- 'mark ♥ erwin' (turns out his name was neither)
- 'remember when sex was safe and motorbikes were dangerous'
- 'Love to love' (these were inside a lipstick mark)
- 'Smile if you're gay'

Links - 23rd September 2012

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." - Lucille Ball

***

Australian Brothel complains Church will bring “Wrong Sort of People” - "A North Shore brothel has complained to the local council about plans to build a church in the same street, fearing it will bring the wrong sort of people into the area."

Sexy friends 'deter male advances' - "A team researching how males and females act socially with one another have found that certain female fish who are not in the mood to mate deliberately hang around with "more sexually attractive" female fish in order to deflect attention from randy males"

The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria - "Forty-three years ago, a strange series of events unfolded on the island of Singapore. Hundreds of men rushed to the hospitals of the island with the terrifying belief that their penises were shrinking. Each feared that if his penis shrank away completely, he would die. Some came with lucky red strings tightly wrapped around their penises to prevent the lethal disappearance. Others had clamps holding their wayward organs in place. Most often it was a firm grasp of a hand, their own or a frightened family member's, that prevented the shrinking penis from slipping away and taking their life with it. Oddly enough, about a dozen women also fell victim to the panic. This was the Great Singapore Penis Panic, or what doctors refer to as an epidemic of the psychiatric condition called Koro"

The quintessential SG girl / Drunk on fun. - "I’ve been here in Perth for almost a month, and each day, I learn a little more about this new home of mine and the people inhabiting it. One of the hardest things I had to learn - and it was something I was quite shocked by - was the views on Singaporean girls... the ones most likely to judge you, and form stereotypical views about you, are the Permanent Residents, ABCs (Australian Born Chinese for you noobs) and overseas students who have been here for at least three years. They’re views on Singaporean girls are… to say the least.. not very flattering. In fact, you can almost hear them scoff every time they say, “typical SG girl..”"

Non-Techie Cofounder Learns Code, Builds New Site Feature in 6 Days

Twitter / tastylongwiener - "This made me LOL so hard! A+ for effort though"

How to Make Love Like a Caveman - "So we can look back to six to seven million years and say, that has been six to seven million years of human primate promiscuity, pretty much uninterrupted until we get to 10,000 years ago with agriculture and the advent of monogamy. So that gives you a sense of why it’s so difficult for most people. We’ve been, you know, going down this same path for so long and then suddenly we’re told, no, no, that’s not the way we behave anymore. And in fact, that’s not natural. So if you behave that way or you want to behave that way or you fanaticize about behaving that way or you get off on watching other people behave that way, there’s something wrong with you. You’re sick"

Letter to Singapore « youdonthavetoagree - "In London, I can be a saint or a sinner. I can be City boy, goth girl, punk kid; I can be in with the media, in with the cool kids, I can drop rhymes in East End ghettos and I can drop cash in Mahiki on cocktails. I can be posh, p oor, upmarket, downmarket, chav, toff, hippie, indie. I can be gay or straight, man or woman. I can make myself up, make myself down. And London will still embrace me, and I will always find somewhere that will take me in, and raise no eyebrows should I wear hoop skirts and pierce my lip and call myself Bettie Page. I’m not sure you could ever do that, Singapore. You say you celebrate diversity, but really you only grudgingly tolerate it"

Power Ranger Lego Intro - YouTube

It's fatuous to deny race link in child sex-grooming case, says equality chief Trevor Phillips - "He was asked on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show whether the case illustrated a cultural problem in part of the Pakistani Muslim community about the way men regard white women as ‘fair game’... ‘I think anybody who says that the fact that most of the men are Asian and most of the children are white is not relevant, I mean that’s just fatuous’"

SUPER SEXY HIV AWARENESS MUSIC VIDEO (HD version) - YouTube

Gillette’s worst nightmare? Possibly. « The Grooming Guru

The true story of how McDonald's started (picture)

Feel The Pride - YouTube
Comments: "I feel something, but I'm not sure it's pride.."
"Nasa scientist. Captain America. Marry Bieber. Basically, they all dream of leaving Singapore. Niiiice~"
"as a comedy, its a gem. The way the absurdist-humor element digs into our own anti-nationalism (lol just scroll and read the comments), irony at its best. Brilliant script. I'm amazed the authorities couldn't see the allusion to actual singaporean-bashing by singaporeans in the overly dramatic second-half of the video."
At first I thought this was a spoof video

Watch the Simpsons' amazing Game of Thrones intro

Before and After Marriage (picture)

Remake / Submissions

Bride's 'Cold Feet' May Predict Divorce - "While men seemed more likely to have cold feet, their wives' reservations better predicted future problems"

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - "Have you even heard of Pacman?... Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story"

Japanese Porn Star Tries, Fails, to Repair Japanese-Chinese Tensions

David Briggs: The Complicated Connection Between Religion and the Paranormal - "both individuals with no religious beliefs and the most committed individuals -- those who attend services weekly -- are among the least likely to hold paranormal beliefs. Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God are also highly unlikely to hold paranormal beliefs"

Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan

What Is the Koran? - "Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God... "To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community"... The orthodox Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal, and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning than "a trinket ... a talisman ... or an ornament""

The dark side of Dubai - "All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars. "The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship"... "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path"... It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police... "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex"... "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world""

Office romance still frowned upon in Singapore

BLACKFIVE: Another View of the Syrian “Revolt” - "The Syrian Christians to a man told me that the “freedom fighters” where nothing more than Sunni Jihadists looking to take advantage of the various “Arab Spring” movements that had been successfully overthrowing stable dictatorships throughout the region in favor of radicalized Muslim groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. They told me at that time that these groups were not only the main aggressors in the conflict, but that they were specifically targeting Christians for both religious persecution and for political retaliation. Several told me that in Homs the graffiti left by the insurgents often stated, “Alawites to the grave, Christians to the cross”... The once vibrant and always peaceful Iraqi Christian community was systematically hunted down and killed by both al Qaeda and JAM with the bulk of the survivors fleeing to…Syria"

Study of the Day: Why That Last Piece of Chocolate Tastes the Best - "If you think something is the last, you'll tend to like it the best"

What 'Rock n Roll' means

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." - Woody Allen

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"The music from which rock ‘n’ roll was born throbbed with more libidinous content and performance than anything coming out of white America at the time. Even the name was salacious. ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’, according to the cultural historian Michael Ventura,

was a term from the juke joints of the South, long in use by the forties, when a music started being heard that had no name, wasn’t jazz and wasn’t simply blues and wasn’t Cajun, but had all those elements and could not be ignored. In those juke joints ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ hadn’t meant the name of a music. it
meant ‘to fuck’.

When the music crossed over to white middle-class radio, so many songs involved rocking and rolling that radio deejays — possibly naively, perhaps cunningly — called it rock n roll.

From its very birth, rock sizzled with sex. Elvis was such a sex bomb that his FBI file apparently declared him a ‘definite danger to the security of the United States’, and it only got more dangerous from there."

--- Sex, Genes and Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World / Rob Brooks