Links - 23rd September 2012

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

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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"