"The happiest place on earth"

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Thursday, January 12, 2006

The Straight Dope: Can someone be literally scared to death? - "Here the patient was a man in his 70s who'd been diagnosed with incurable cancer and told he had only a few months left. Wanting to live till Christmas, he ate and exercised as directed and walked out of the hospital for the holidays much improved. He was readmitted shortly after New Year's close to death and expired within 24 hours. An autopsy found the cancer diagnosis had been exaggerated; his physical complaints weren't enough to kill him. Instead, he and everyone else were convinced he was going to die, so he did."
You can will yourself to health, and to death too.

Cook's Thesaurus: Vinegars

Memoirs of a Geisha--Mad TV Bobby Lee of Mad TV as Sayuri in The Memoirs of a Geisha - "A story like mine has never been told. That not true. This is just another movie about a poor but beautiful girl turned into a callgirl. This time, she is geisha... 'I can put fist in my mouth. 50 yen I stay all night' '40' '50 firm. I can shoot ping pong balls *whispers*'"

The Official God FAQ

The Christian Paradox - "Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.”... On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up... The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority... But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell."
Sounds like Singapore to me too.

Richard Dawkins: Beyond belief - "What angers Dawkins most is the way religion gets such an easy ride. "We treat it with a politically correct reverence that we don't accord to any other institution," he says. "Even secularists talk about Jewish, Catholic and Muslim children. There's no such thing. Children aren't born with a particular religious gene. What they are is children of Jewish, Catholic and Muslim parents. If you started to talk about monetarist or Marxist children, everyone would consider you abusive.""

Naked-marriage-sex ban - "An Egyptian cleric's controversial fatwa claiming that nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars."

Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds - "Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been talking to people with “nerdy” tattoos — computer logos, video game themes, science, math, and engineering imagery. Below you can read their stories in their own words"

What, If Anything, Is A Byzantine? - "We might better name the Empire at Constantinople with the title of the "Romaion Empire" from the Greek "Basileia Romaion" [Empire of the Romaioi]."
Bah, mere semantics.

There are also battered men - "Men are presumed to be able to take care of themselves because they are generally bigger and stronger; but that advantage can be neutralized by a weapon, a surprise attack, or a man's reluctance to use force against a woman even to fend off her assault. (The most reliable research shows that up to 35 percent of victims injured by violent partners are men.)... male victims often have to deal with attitudes that are considered Neanderthal if expressed toward women - for instance, that they must have done something to provoke the assault... most of these groups espouse a radical feminist ideology that reduces the complex issues of abuse to "women good, men bad" - a secular religion with the patriarchy as the devil."

Singaporean skydiver falls to his death in Perth - "The seasoned Singaporean skydiver had reportedly made 270 jumps before this incident."
Time to ban skydiving!

NKF... And defamation - "It raised a question whether the republic’s defamation law is also – apart from preventing the innocent from any slanderous assault – protecting wrongdoings by the rich and powerful from being discovered... the defamation law became a weapon of the wealthy. You don’t often see a bricklayer suing a property tycoon for libel or defamation, only the other way around... Its frequent use has contributed to the sort of litigious society the government wants to avoid. The law has also rendered whistle-blowing (an insider revealing a grave wrongdoing) either in a government department or in a large corporation a virtually suicidal task. Because of the expenses, Singaporeans simply choose to turn a blind eye when they see something radically wrong, and society is the loser."
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