"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." - Salvador Dali

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Novelties: Personalized Plate Slips by North Carolina DMV - "First in Flight. 2GRL1CUP. North Carolina."

Singapore libel case a test of Murdoch's bona fides - "The Times asked readers recently "Is libel dead?" The number of defamation writs issued in British courts last year was about an eighth of the 457 writs 10 years earlier. The downward trends are similar in other Western jurisdictions such as Australia and North America.. But one place where libel remains a legal growth industry is in a tiny country desperate to become part of the developed world: among the sensitive political and business petals of Singapore... It is not just the media. In 2001 what seemed to many bankers to be a normal tactical paper was prepared by Goldman Sachs on behalf of its local client DBS Bank. Goldman-DBS criticised the merits of a rival bid for a bank DBS was seeking to take over. Target and rival were miffed, complaining to the central bank, and each board soon pocketed $US1 million in damages from DBS, which did not get the deal... But then came Murdoch's successful bid for Dow Jones last year. The management that previously backed the Review's feistier approach to Singapore no longer runs the company, after Murdoch put in a new team... The matter is pregnant with the notion of what constitutes credibility - Singapore's own sense of it and News's in the court of public opinion after the reputational shellacking it received en route to the Dow Jones win... Credibility was at the heart of the Murdoch bid for Dow Jones... With this libel headache now on Murdoch's desk, Singapore faces a media company run by a dominant individual who is an archly pragmatic dealmaker when it suits him. That could mean wiggle room for legal negotiation except that, with libel, the Lees famously are not much for turning. Absolute victory is their goal. It will be fascinating to see how the battle plays out, mindful of the messages it could send around a democratising region where state control of media is evolving and where libel clearly is not yet dead."
It is sad that no one else cares about their reputations anymore. And the reason people lose political libel suits overseas is, of course, because they are unwise and only file frivolous ones. If all your libel suits are serious, there's no reason why you will ever lose one!!!

Nuffnang Singapore | Asia’s First Blog Advertising Community » Exclusive Program - "An exclusive Nuffnang blogger is a blogger that has NO advertisements from any other ad network that originates from South East Asia on his/her blog."
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Despite the outage, I still prefer Advertlets, though, since I've racked up exactly RM$0.00.00 on Nuffnang so far.

Free Koran Request Form - "This free service is provided for non-muslim visitors. If you are already a muslim, please contact your local mosque for a copy of Koran."
It's for Americans only :(

Career Counseling - Weird News Story Archive - "A poll of Russian teenagers has found some interesting career ambitions. The poll, conducted on the Sakhalin Peninsula, found that 25 percent of the girls said they would like to become prostitutes and 27 percent of the boys said they want to be racketeers. Nine percent said they want to be contract killers."
Cock: "how unsurprising. you'd become a psycho too, if: you lived in a bleak, cold, dark, desolate island with high unemployment and few prospects for young people, and the whole island economy has just collapsed due to runaway inflation see russian crisis 1998."

The Princess Bride Movie Review, DVD Release - "It's one of those movies you can watch with your children and not want to gouge out your eyes 20 minutes into it... any movie that can convince you that Andre the Giant should have been an actor instead of a wrestler is an "A" in my book."

Bad vibrations - "What was new in the 20th century was the idea of a continuous vibrato, used on every note. The great Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler seems to have started the fashion, drawing on the style of cafe musicians and Hungarian and Gypsy fiddlers. Yet, listening to Kreisler's recordings, one is struck by the delicacy of his vibrato: much more a gentle shimmer than a forced pitch change... So what are we missing when we hear a modern orchestral tone? When the glamorous makeup falls away, the sound of an orchestra gains in many ways. The texture becomes transparent; you can hear right inside the sound. Discords are more serious and astringent. Because the sound is not glamorised, phrasing becomes more important. Nowadays symphony orchestras tend to rely on sound rather than shape. But music is not about sound. Sound is simply its material (as paint is for painting). Music is about gesture, colour, shape, form and, especially, emotional intensity. In addition, pure tone restores a crucial feature of 19th-century music: its innocence. We tend to think of baroque music as having a monopoly on innocence. Yet it is certainly a feature of Mendelssohn's music, and it is equally important in Brahms and Tchaikovsky."
"There are performers who tremble consistently on each note as if they had the permanent fever" - Leopold Mozart

Outsourced Wombs - Judith Warner - Domestic Disturbances - "What’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.”... our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering. And the transaction is not outsourcing of the basest nature – not modern-day wet-nursing taken to the nth degree – but a good deal for everyone concerned. “There’s nothing wrong in this,” Priyanka Sharma, another surrogate, concluded the Marketplace segment. “We give them a baby and they give us much-needed money. It’s good for them and for us.”"
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Warning or Miracle? Too Much Sugar-Free Gum Could Cause Extreme Weight Loss - "Two German doctors presented case studies today suggesting that chewing too much sugar-free gum could lead to extreme weight loss of up to 20% of a person's normal body weight... As John Clemens, a UCLA professor told WebMD about sorbitol, "The laxative effect is very well documented," he said. "We would not expect the average consumer to consume upwards of 20 sticks of gum a day.""

Early to bed and early to rise: Does it matter? -- Mukamal et al. 175 (12): 1560 -- Canadian Medical Association Journal - Background: Controversy remains about whether early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise (the Ben Franklin hypothesis), or healthy, wealthy and dead (the James Thurber hypothesis)... Results: Hours in bed were inversely associated with number of cups of coffee consumed (age-adjusted Spearman correlation coefficient r –0.07, p = 0.03). The mortality of early-to-bed, early-to-risers did not differ significantly from other groups. There was also no relation between bed habits and local income, nor with educational attainment. Interpretation: Our results refute both the Franklin and Thurber hypotheses. Early to bed and early to rise is not associated with health, wealth or wisdom."