Show this 10¢ S'pore coin & get free pizza at 14 Pizza Hut outlets on Jun. 5
Meme - "Me when my phone dies"
"Distraught monkeys mourn death of robotic monkey spying on them"
No more Thai hunks at Tanglin restaurant from May 3 to 5 due to 'rejected entry' into S'pore - "Sathanee Mee Hoi, a popular restaurant in Bangkok, is collaborating with Mr Mookata to open Mr Mookata Plus, a Thai barbecue joint in Singapore. For those who are unfamiliar with Sathanee Mee Hoi, the eatery is known for its hunky and scantily clad male staff. As part of its grand opening, four Thai hunks were slated to appear at the new restaurant from May 3 to 5. Unfortunately, that won't happen anymore. According to a May 2 message from Mr Mookata Plus, the Thai hunks were "rejected entry" into Singapore due to "unforeseen circumstances". As of 3:20pm, the Thai hunks had already taken their flight back to Thailand... Mr Mookata Plus mentioned that there will still be more than 10 "Singapore hunks"."
Thai Hot Guys denied entry into S’pore a day before their new restaurant opens in Phoenix Park - "Why were the four main hunks denied entry into Singapore? After all, they’ve performed in Singapore twice last year at Mr Mookata’s Bugis outlet without incident. The eatery’s distressed manager (who declined to be named) tells 8days.sg over the phone: “I don’t know the details. I’m in the same position [as everyone else], we just found out that they were rejected entry to Singapore”."
Alicia Witt's Parents' Cause of Death Revealed - "The cause of death for Robert Witt, 87, and Diane Witt, 75, was "probable cardiac dysrhythmia" due to the cold... the couple was apparently having problems with their furnace and had been using a space heater. At the time, a neighbor told the local outlet that Robert and Diane were believed to be ill for some time and refused offers from neighbors to help with their home falling in "disrepair." Neighbors did help to mow the Witt lawn and clear snow, the neighbor stated."
Meme - "WE DIDN'T NEED TO BE TOLD "DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME" WHEN WE WERE KIDS, BECAUSE WE WEREN'T FREAKING IDIOTS *Road Runner watching Wile E. Coyote lighting rocket on wheels*"
Study: Sex in Movies Has Declined Sharply - "A study by film data analyst Stephen Follows cited by The Economist that tracked sex and nudity in major live-action films — with each instance ranked on a scale from “none” to “severe” — found the level of sex content in cinema has fallen by almost 40 percent. The number of films with no sexual content at all has risen from 20 percent per year to roughly 50 percent. On the other hand, some of the scenes that are shown in movies nowadays are more graphic than what was permitted in the past. Examples cited include erect penises (in movies like May December) and characters performing oral sex while their partners were menstruating (Saltburn, Fair Play). In case you’re wondering, the research also tracked the amount of drugs, violence and profanity in films. Profanity and drugs have slipped a bit since around 2014 or so, but are still near their previous highs. Violence dropped off a bit around the same time, but in the last few years has rebounded to be as commonplace as ever. A previous casual study conducted last year by a Playboy writer found that the number of films on IMDb since 2010 that contain depictions of sex is the lowest since the 1960s. The research follows a UCLA study last year that found Gen Z wants to see less sex in movies and TV. A slight majority (51 percent of the 1,500 surveyed) said they wanted to see more content about platonic relationships and friendships. While 47.5 percent said sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows and movies, 44 percent felt romance is “overused.” Studies have found Gen Z is having less sex in real life as well"
In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema - "Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries... a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said. Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs". There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said. "The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there." Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us.""
Meme - "Là, j'hésite vraiment à sonner
REICH. 3EME. 0034"
Meme - Andrew Lynch @andrewglynch: "Similarly I set up a family ERP system for our household. Now when my wife wants to spend money, she submits a purchase order approval form. If the proposed spend is above the limit of authority I've delegated to her, it gets escalated to me for approval"
Ben Lang: "My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life. Here's a screenshot of our set-up. I turned this into a template, let me know if you'd like to see it!"
Meme - ">be me
>work as a phone salesman
>95% of calls are old peope
>nobody ever actually buys anything
>get paid per time spent in calls
>most old people are lonely and just want to talk
>talk to old people about how they water their plants for hours
>basically everyone at my job just talks to old people for 12 hours a day
>even have regular callers that know us by names
>supposed to advertise products but actually just talk to grandma Lauren every day for 8 hours about how she used to live back in the day
>she appears to forget what she said, repeats the same thing of times.
>my job is basically to register when Lauren made a pause in her speech and say "Very interesting, keep going""
Sorry, UFO Hunters--You Might Just Be Looking at a Spy Balloon | Scientific American - "West: I'm sure you've read the recent UAP report that came out in January where they listed a whole bunch of new UAPs and the vast majority of the ones that they identified were balloons, because it's such a common thing to be in the air. And they're not going to be things like research balloons. They're going to be mostly wind like party balloons.
Bushwick: And in these reports, a lot of the UAPs they investigate turn out to be duh duh duh dah ... balloons!"
I visited Egypt for a 'dream' holiday and it turned out to be the worst trip ever: 'I've never felt so uncomfortable' - "Grace Cheng, better known as @gracietravels, spent a week in northeast Africa visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza and other historical landmarks but felt unsafe the whole time. Her holiday was ruined by 'aggressive' scammers lurking around 'everywhere' in attempt to rid innocent tourists of their money... 'Don't let anyone take a picture of you, don't let anyone put anything in your hand, and don't follow anyone if they have something to show you because they will demand money from you,' Grace continued. She added how she 'didn't even feel safe' even with a tour guide by her side. 'Ours had a lot of friends in the area and they just kept offering us tons and tons of upgrades, like climbing a rock to get a picture with the background,' she said. Gracie said it felt 'scary' when she refused to pay the scammers and they kept demanding money... Gracie also would not recommend travelling to Egypt alone, especially if you're a woman. 'When it comes to men they do stare at you, and it's not even a normal stare, it's one of those really uncomfortable stares where they'll never take their eyes off of you,' she said... Other travellers who have also visited Egypt before said they too never felt safe during their stay. 'I agree. I’ve traveled the world and Egypt has been the only country where I did not feel safe,' one wrote. 'I felt the same way visiting Egypt and Morocco,' another commented. 'I've seen so many videos of people saying Egypt is the worst place to visit. Which makes me sad, cause I want to see it someday,' a third added. Another said: 'I'd love to go to Egypt but I've honestly not heard a good word about it.'"
Clearly they're all racists who are ignorant about how they are scammed and sexually harassed in white countries!
Egypt Travel Nightmare!! Why I’ll Never Go Back!! - YouTube - "This place, there is no system here. There is no step by step. It's pure chaos and hierarchy. Layers and layers of people. Nobody knows what's going on... there is an intense sense of paranoia and control that is wanting to be kept by certain people... they're worried about me talking crap about the country. We came here to make food videos. They've given me a reason to want to talk crap about the country... they started picking out certain pieces of gear that they deemed suspicious based on their complete lack of knowledge of anything. Everyone's taking pictures of it. It's very dehumanizing... What is that? And I was like this what is this. It's a back roller. Why do you need this? Why do I need this? How about go, I go because I exercise and I like to roll up my back... They took our gear and they said that they're gonna hold on to it until we can find a permit... we've been preparing for this trip for 10 weeks. Well before we got here, we applied for our permits. We weren't supposed to be shooting for two more days. The shooting is supposed to start today. Guess what? We finally got our permit yesterday. But now we can't get the police to give us our stuff back. They gave us a receipt. A receipt for the gear, that says that we have a weapon. What's the weapon? A walkie-talkie. That's a weapon. This is what i mean by stone age thinking...after four hours I'm told they cannot give me my equipment because it's been given to a different department and we need to hire some intermediary business to work with customs to get our shit back... A police officer is telling me what to delete. Based on what? On his feelings. Oh but what law did I break? None. Oh but there must be like a rule. Nope. No rule. This is what it's like to shoot in Egypt. And by the way this is somebody with a permit. When we asked our local producer what purpose did the permit have, he said, well, we're not in jail. Lovely country. This is why i have an obligation and a responsibility to tell you guys to not go to Egypt. This country earns 12 percent of its GDP through tourism and they treat tourists like trash. It would be something different if i was going to the Congo. Does Congo advertise themselves as a tourist-friendly destination? No. But Egypt does and they're anything but... In Egypt if you cross a checkpoint and they don't want you to go, they don't need to tell you why. There's no rule, there's no law. You just don't get to go. So we had to circle all the way around adding hours to our trip... and then something happened there which happened a lot in that country. The local people tried to stop us until we gave them money... I have never been so relieved in my life to leave a country... I think a lot of people are naive about Egypt and they think, well it's a tourist country. They have this big massive tourist attraction. They would probably treat me like a tourist or at least be neutral, but these people were actively awful... I've been a travel host professionally for six years. I have filmed in over 25 countries. This is the first time I've ever recommended you not going somewhere"
Damn colonialism!
Cinephilia & Beyond on X - "Mario Puzo, the author of the Godfather books who’d also adapted them to film, had no idea what he was doing as he’d never written a script before. After winning two Oscars, he decided to buy a book on screenwriting to learn how. In the first chapter, it said “Study Godfather I.”"
Meme - Joe Barnes @Joe_WBarnes: "We stopped buying avocados and expensive coffees one year ago today. And just look at us now! *keys to mansion*"
Anti-Aircraft Dumpling Cannon - "February 1967: Munich resident Helmut G. Winter was sick and tired of the noise of military aircraft flying low over his house. So he built a catapult and started launching Bavarian potato dumplings at the planes. In one week he launched 120 dumplings. He never managed to score a direct hit. But eventually both the West German Luftwaffe and American pilots conceded defeat and agreed to a flight path that avoided his house."
Meme - "Pedobear LV. 69. 100 HP. BASIC.
Rape. Pedo Bear bounds the enemy and proceedsto butt rape him or her
Evade. Pedo Bear is able to evade the police after playing with under aged children
Origin in Japan. When Pedobear found itself onto 4chan as a reference to a pedophile, it popularity exploded and is a constant joke of everyday life."
Meme - Vic @VicVijayakumar: "Messages that you can expect to receive years after leaving a startup"
"Hey buddy. Have a moment to help me out today? It appears your phone is configured for the *** root account and I need to reset the MFA for it to remove your contact information. To reset it Amazon needs to send me code that you would then have to type in or give via a phone call to your number. Once I request the code, I'll have 15 minutes to complete it. So if there's a time today that we could plan to do it, I would appreciate it. This is *** by the way"
"lol"
Meme - "Hoa website now porn
So here's an interesting one. I got a letter and email dated April 17th today (25th), giving me 14 days from the date of the notice to mow the lawn (4 days from now), which was mowed on the 18th. Well, the letter and email had a link to resolve the issue... but looks like the HOA forgot to renew the website. According to the Facebook page, lots of people got these letters today for very minor issues, most of which were already resolved in the last 2 weeks, as things started growing again. You'll all be happy to know that the whisper creek HOA in Florida's website is now redirected to porn, after I bought it for $12.41."
Meme - "ANIME MOM *boyish figure, frumpy clothes*
ANIME STEPMOM *big breasts, midriff baring outfit*
PIXAR MOM *big ass*
DISNEY MOM *dead*"
Meme - "The coffee I got in Bosnia came with a complimentary cigarette."
Thread by @michaelharriot on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " 7 years ago, I wrote a small piece about a man who was falsely accused of a crime. A few days later, I got an anonymous telling me to look up the woman they called “the evilest white woman on earth.” What happened next is the absolute wildest story you’ll ever hear A thread The story begins in 2017, when an editor asked me to fill in for a coworker and do a quick write-up about Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 yrs in prison for a double murder he didn’t commit. I thought it was weird his conviction wasn’t actually overturned... I would discover why this DA Terra Morehead was so evil. She had been making up lies to lock Black men up FOR YEARS. She & a corrupt police detective who ran a human trafficking ring (I’ll come back to that) basically made up the evidence on McIntyre. Then they threatened to take the children away from a 20-year-old Black woman who actually witnessed the double murder unless she fingered McIntyre I found evidence that the woman told the Prosecutor that they had the wrong man MULTIPLE TIMES. They made her do it... I also discovered why Morehead was so successful Y’all, this woman was SLEEPING WITN THE JUDGE. Not just a couple of times. They were in a secret relationship FOR 15 years! But she was as bad at lawyering as she was good as she was at prosecuting Black men. But here’s the thing: There’s not a whole lot judges can (or are willing) to do when a lawyer is corrupt. I found cases where judges essentially said “This bitch be lying” IN THEIR DECISION"
Spoon & Tamago on X - "Tohoku University professor Hiroshi Yoshida estimates that, without an amendment to the law that mandates couples share a surname, by the year 2531 everyone in Japan will be a Sato"
Derren Brown's guide to overcoming awkward situations - "Most of Brown's strategies involve behaving irrationally to disarm the other person...
How to handle aggressive situations
This is simply about not engaging with your aggressor at the level they expect. I was coming back from a hotel at about 3am one night and there was a guy in the street with his girlfriend. He was really drunk, clearly looking for a fight and he started kicking off at me. I had a routine ready in my head for this sort of situation and it worked a treat on this occasion. He asked me that typical aggressive rhetorical question — “Do you want a fight?” You can’t say “yes” or “no” — you’ll get hit either way. So, I responded with, “The wall outside my house is four-feet high.” I didn’t engage at the level he was expecting me to, so immediately he was on the back foot. He came back with, “What?” and I repeated my bizarre response. I delivered the line in a completely matter-of-fact tone, as if he was the one who was missing something here. Suddenly, he was confused. All his adrenaline had dropped away, because I’d pulled the rug from under him. It’s the verbal version of a martial-arts technique called an ‘adrenaline dump’, whereby you get the person to relax before you hit them. A punch will have much greater impact if the recipient’s guard is down. I stuck to this surreal conversational thread with my assailant, saying things like, “I lived in Spain for a while and the walls are really huge, but in this country they’re tiny.” After a few of these exchanges, he just went, “Oh f*ck!” and broke down in tears. The guy had all this adrenaline and was on the point of really laying into me — I was seeing myself beaten to a bloody pulp — but these non-threatening nonsense statements broke that aggression down and he genuinely started crying. I ended up sitting next to him on the kerb, comforting him. It’s the same with guys that come up and ask to “have a look at your phone”, and you end up handing over your stuff and hating yourself for doing it — you can use the same approach. My PA had some stuff nicked in a Tube station recently, and I said to him, “If you’d just starting singing, they would have left you alone.”"
If you behave like a crazy person, people will leave you alone
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "A '"European success story" is an ambitious European who moves to America."
Mairead McGuinness @McGuinnessEU: "This morning I met with @collision , President of @stripe – a European success story in payments. Great conversation about the international payments landscape, how we tackle cyber-risks and fraud, and the role of financial education."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Stripe is a U.S. company. It was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 2010. Stripe’s Founder and CEO said he suspects the company couldn’t have been started in Ireland."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Typically, if you want the most bang for your buck: attend a first-tier or flagship public if you want the least bang for your buck: attend a less-selective private if you want to maximize your chance of success: attend an elite"
Matt Bruenig @MattBruenig: "public sector universities really killing it out there"
"Annual cost of attendance / Return on investment"
The surprising health benefits of dirt - "“Most infectious diseases – putting aside Covid – are far less common in the modern world than they were historically, whereas rates of chronic inflammatory disorders such as asthma and Crohn’s disease are rapidly increasing,” says Dr Neil McCarthy, a senior lecturer in immunology at Queen Mary University of London. “This is happening too quickly to be explained by genetics alone, so there must be other factors involved.” Exposure to microbes (minute orgasms such as bacteria, that can’t be seen by the naked eye) are needed in early life to set up our immune system correctly, explains Dr McCarthy. “Otherwise our immune system struggles to tell the difference between the dangerous stuff and the harmless things in your environment. It’s possible that some important microbial signals are missing in today’s modern world, which may help explain some of the health problems we experience.” Here’s how you can increase your exposure to dirt to bolster your health... A healthy, resilient gut involves having a high microbial diversity, i.e. a high number of different species that are evenly spread across your gut microbiome. These various species of gut bacteria serve several important functions such as aiding in digestion, helping with the absorption and production of essential nutrients, and regulating our immune, metabolic and nervous systems. In essence, the more diverse your gut bacteria are, the more potential they have to support all these functions. “Plenty of research shows that wild animals have more diverse microbial communities living on skin and inside their bodies, compared with animals kept in clean indoor environments,” says Dr McCarthy. “Their immune systems work very differently, and more effectively, as a result of that.” He suggests that spending more time in nature could have similar benefits for humans... When you drop food do you employ the so-called “five second rule”, giving you licence to pick it up and eat it anyway? Top marks if so. “Kids are constantly putting dirty stuff in their mouths and that may not be an entirely bad thing,” says Dr McCarthy. “Early life is a critical time for our immune system to learn which microbes are living in the world around us and how best to recognise them. This is about getting the balance right; living in filthy conditions is obviously not sensible but it’s also a bad idea to keep children totally ‘bug free’.” Researchers have found that the likelihood of asthma was reduced in children exposed to endotoxin, a major building block in many bacterial cell walls (i.e. their protective outer coat). These common ‘bits of bugs’ can build up in household dust (the microbes don’t have to be alive as our immune systems can still detect stuff they leave behind in the environment). “Even some unpleasant infections such as measles and chickenpox (or vaccines against them) which make kids feel sick for a while, actually reduce their risk of nasty diseases including certain cancer types as adults,” says Dr McCarthy... Plants live in soil which is rich in diverse microbial species, so any form of interaction with plants is likely to increase your microbial biodiversity... You don’t need to go as far as milking a cow, but walking in fields where there are grazing animals is a good start... During the pandemic, many of us adopted germophobic levels of cleanliness. But curbing the instinct to reach for the disinfectant might be wise."
Little by little, the Government is seizing control of our great universities - "Our founders would be shocked to see the all-encompassing regulations emerging from the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England which took over university regulation in 2018. There are 25 sets of regulations covering an enormous range of topics, including its current major foci, equality of opportunity and quality. A private university like Buckingham, which doesn’t receive any direct government funding, has to satisfy all but three of these 25 sets of regulations – known as “Conditions of Registration” – even though ostensibly the regulations are to ensure taxpayer value for money. If a university is found to be in breach of any of these conditions, then the OfS has a variety of sanctions at its disposal, including removal of a university’s title and status, even if these were awarded through a venerable Royal Charter. Take one of the “quality” conditions: The OfS will not be satisfied if a university is providing courses whose content or teaching methods are “not representative of current thinking and practices.” Isn’t that what universities are here to interrogate, discuss, and, where necessary, challenge? The OfS, “would expect to draw on expert academic judgement, including from subject experts, before reaching a view that the condition was not satisfied”. This is hardly consoling. In case after case, whether it be that of the University of Sussex’s Kathleen Stock or the Open University’s Jo Phoenix, independently minded professors have gone against the prevailing “expert academic judgement” to question accepted wisdom, which is surely justifiable whether one agrees with the conclusions or not. The regulator’s approach is a profound attack on the very nature of the growth of knowledge. How has science itself developed, if not through cussed individuals putting forward theories that completely went against the taken-for-granted status quo? Or what about ensuring “a high quality academic experience”? The OfS seems clear that a faculty with only a few members having teaching qualifications, “is not likely to be appropriately qualified”. Yet until very recently, our greatest universities managed perfectly well recruiting academics without any teaching qualifications. It’s odd to think of the OfS unfavourably comparing Oxbridge or Imperial with a handful of post-1992 universities which, nationally, have the highest proportion of “qualified” staff. What business of the regulator is it to get involved in these areas? Private universities like Buckingham are exempt from one major area of regulation: other universities have to submit and implement an “Access and Participation Plan” which effectively sets out how they will increase the proportions of “underrepresented groups”. The OfS points out that social inequalities start well before university – but instead of drawing the conclusion that therefore universities are limited in what they can do about it, the regulator doubles down on its insistence that universities should intervene in schools. Of course, universities can and should perform a whole range of outreach functions across local and global communities. This is part of their mission. But it is nonsensical and misguided for government to encourage its regulator to dictate the form that mission should take, and set about penalising them for failing to solve inequalities its own policies have failed to solve for generations. The University of Cambridge, for instance, following the regulator’s demands, succeeded in reducing the proportion of privately educated undergraduates in favour of those who went to state schools. Some readers may consider this a good outcome. But wouldn’t it be better if a university of Cambridge’s global standing could decide something like that for itself? But it is even worse than this. As the Higher Education and Research Bill passed through the House of Lords in 2016/17, members from across the political spectrum argued that the greatness of our universities in large part is because of their “institutional autonomy”. Unlike our European counterparts, where faculty are civil servants and government calls the tune, all universities in England, not just those like Buckingham, are legally autonomous. The Lords’ amendments sought to protect that autonomy"