Stephen Chow, 59, seen playing water sports with Miss Hong Kong contestant, 17, assistant denies rumours - "One of the women in the group was 17-year-old Ukei Cheung, a Miss Hong Kong 2021 contestant... Apple Daily added that the pair would meet frequently, with Chow treating Cheung especially well. This included sending a private car to pick Cheung up every time they met, having meals and alcohol, and even ordering a suite for her to rest after a night of drinking. They also reportedly took the yacht out to sea almost every week. "
Miss Hong Kong 2021 contestant removes photographs on comedian Stephen Chow’s yacht from social media as demanded - "Miss Hong Kong 2021 contestant Ukei Cheung has confirmed that she has complied with the demand letter issued by Hong Kong comedian Stephen Chow to remove photos taken on his yacht from her social media. Cheung said she communicated with Chow after the demand letter was issued, and confirmed he only wanted to remove the photos, Ming Pao reported. Cheung however said she is still keeping copies of the photos for remembrance."
The military made a robot that can eat organisms for fuel - "“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” is a sentence no one should ever have had to say. That was Harry Schoell, CEO of one of the companies making this robot, after a panic-filled scientific world started rumors of corpse-eating robots... The designers of the phase I engine stressed heavily that the robot is not going to eat the dead. Instead, it runs on “fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings, and wood chips — small, plant-based items.” Cyclone and RTI swear this robot is strictly a vegetarian "
Henry Pryor on Twitter - "‘Had my first jab last week and thought I was hallucinating when I saw the Honey Monster. Then realised it was a woman reading a magazine’ #ThankYouTwitter"
Brutal rejection letter from 1928 is every writer's worst nightmare - "The poet, Frederick Charles Meyer, was shown no mercy after he submitted his work to Angus and Robertson Ltd in Australia. "Dear sir," the letter begins. "No, you may not send us your verses, and we will not give you the name of another publisher. "We hate no rival publisher sufficiently to ask you to inflict them on him. "The specimen poem is simply awful. In fact, we have never seen worse."... However, it seems the harsh words didn't put Mr Meyer off - he went on to publish Jewels of mountains and snowlines of New Zealand in Wellington."
This Portland resident got extremely triggered when he saw a big, scary truck - "Normally, I wouldn't pick on someone random for sharing a dumb tweet, but this person publicly posted the truck owner's state-issued license plate and tagged the police department to dox the owner before the entire world... Ironically, this fine gentlemen has applauded defunding the police he's now tagging on Twitter."
John Withington On History's Assassinations | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It was a Russian who said about the Russian Empire that their method of government was despotism tempered by assassination. But actually, that was far more true of the Roman Empire. The problem with the Roman Empire was that there were no rules of succession really, the, the Roman Empire just kind of appeared. And so they had to kind of make it up as they went along... I looked at the 17 assassinations. 15 of those were carried out by the Emperor’s own bodyguard or by his own troops. And it was Augustus the first Roman emperor who said the most terrible thing is that most people have to be afraid of their enemies, but we, we emperors have to be afraid of our friends and those closest to us.’
‘One thing that I found particularly interesting was there's an… ethics of assassination, which I know it's a bit paradoxical. But there's been various philosophers over the years, who've, you know, they posited this argument that actually assassination, if you're wanting to get rid of a tyrant, is an ethical way of doing it, because you're just, you know, you're killing one person, as opposed to going to war and risking hundreds of 1000s’...
'In the 1950s, the French had rather an interesting approach. So, there are a lot of Russian emigres in France, who left Russia at the time of the revolution, didn't much like the communist regime. So in the 1950s in France, if Soviet dignitaries were visiting, these potential troublemakers among the emigres would be very strongly advised and invited to go and stay in an expensive country hotel at the expense of the French government while the Russian visitors were in the country... Abraham Lincoln, what, the night he was assassinated. His regular bodyguard was off doing another job and he had a standing bodyguard who had already been reprimanded, I think for falling asleep on duty and, and Lincoln let his standing bodyguard go off for a drink and so when, when John Wilkes Booth arrived at the presidential box to shoot him there was no bodyguard to be seen.'...
‘Do assassinations work?’...
‘I analyzed 266 assassinations. Now all of them worked in the sense that the victim died. But what I tried also to analyze is whether the assassin would have been happy with the outcome of the assassination. Disraeli, for examples said, after Lincoln, after Lincoln's assassination, that assassination never works. Well, for what it's worth, this is plainly a very subjective decision, isn't it? How, you know, trying to evaluate would a particular assassin have been happy with this particular outcome, but for what it's worth I, I made a judgment in about 215 cases, and I, and the judgment I made was that in about 132, the assassin would have been happy. But in 83, they would not have been happy. There was a study actually that American, an American team did in 2007. This is slightly more precise than the one that I did. They looked at 300 assassination attempts, and they looked at a sort of narrower question than I did, really. And they concluded that killing democratic leaders had very little effect. But that if you killed, if you assassinated an autocrat, that had a 13% greater chance of that country, transitioning to democracy, if the plot succeeded than if it failed...
‘The classic example of unintended consequences was perhaps the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Now, there are arguments about whether that quote caused the First World War or not, but it's certainly was an important factor in kicking off the First World War. So you couldn't have a much more momentous consequence. And although there're, although there are arguments, or some historians will argue, well, the First World War was going to happen anyway. But what we do know is that at least some of the assassins who would kill Franz Ferdinand felt that they were responsible for the First World War, and one of them said, If I'd known what was going to happen, I would have sat down on our bombs and blown myself to bits. So I don't think any I don't think any of those assassins who killed Franz Ferdinand believed this was going to lead to the most dreadful conflict the world had seen up to that point...
The first [assassination] I could find was an Egyptian pharaoh called Teti, who was assassinated about 4300 years ago… an Egyptian, ancient Egyptian historian wrote about it, about 300 BC, so 2000 years after it happened, but possibly drawing on sources that have since been lost to us. And the historian said that Teti was, quote, murdered by his bodyguard...
I think the prize for failed assassinations has to go, to those who tried to kill Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro actually was the subject of a documentary, which is called something like 683 ways to kill Castro. Because that was the number of failed assassination attempts that his security services calculated had been made. And the CIA were behind a lot of those and they, they tried all sorts of things. They tried exploding cigars, radio full of poison gas, a seashell that would explode at his favorite snorkeling spot. And all of them misfired. And on the very day, actually, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, yet another attempt on Fidel Castro's life failed, using a poisoned pen… he said, actually, if there was an Olympic event of beating assassination attempts, I would win the gold medal.’"
Some (presumed) anti-theist was claiming there was no evidence Jesus ever existed, claiming that since the earliest non-Christian sources are from 30 years after his death, they are unreliable. Presumably this master of historiography would think even less of a source 2000 years after the event. I wonder how much of history we'd have to throw out to meet this (ideologically motivated) standard
Rebels, hostages and diplomats: royal women of the crusader states - HistoryExtra - "'What sort of differentiates Outremer from Europe is the fact that because of all the military pressure on the society, across all levels, women are beginning to outlive male rulers. So women who would ordinarily be controlled by their husbands or their fathers for their whole lives are suddenly finding themselves orphaned or widowed, and in unique positions to forge new roles for themselves in the political landscape… the kings of Jerusalem who were actually born in the Holy Land, they had an average life expectancy of 26 years old in the 12th century. Whereas if you compare them to their counterparts in France, and England, the average life expectancy of a native born king is 57, and 56. So you can see that in Outremer, the male rulers just aren't living as long. And that's due to a variety of factors, whether it's them being killed on the battlefield, or, you know, horrible diseases that are less common in Europe such as leprosy… in Europe, because the dynasties and the family groups are so established, having been there for generations, even if one male relative dies, even if there isn't, you know, a brother or a son to succeed, there's generally a convenient cousin living in the next county who can pop over and assume, assume the rule of that region… At this period for the Crusader states to survive, there needs to be absolute unity. And what we begin to see is in the latter half of the 12th century, when the unity between the different Christian rulers in the region begins to deteriorate rapidly, that's when the Crusader states and Outremer begins to crumble. And so it's that they're, they're, they're living in a very delicate balance. They're almost on borrowed time in unfamiliar lands. And so maintaining a stable line of succession is vital. And it's for this reason alone, that women are able to, you know, fight their way up to the top and become Queens Regnant and Princesses Regnant and regents for their children and the like and claim real agency.'"
The Elizabethans: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra - "‘How did the Elizabethans remember Henry the Eighth? Was it out of sight and out of mind? Or did they reference him and remember significant days in his life?’
‘Henry had definitely made an impression, and he was remembered throughout the reigns of all of his children. And we know that Elizabeth in particular revered him and his memory. And by her, by the time that she came to reign, he was remembered as great Harry, who had saved England from the folds of the Catholic Church in Rome. So you know, this was really his his legacy and his posterity. But everything else that he'd done, you know, including executing his wives, executing numbers of his subjects. This seemed to have been either completely forgotten or overlooked…
‘I would always have assumed that she would have been a bit antagonistic towards him with the death of her mother.’
‘No, it's interesting. She always identified herself with her father publicly, at least anyway, so say, yeah, at least in public, she was she was keen to be remembered as Great Harry's daughter...
Fruit and vegetables were also available. But interestingly, the rich didn't tend to eat lots of vegetables, it was mostly considered to be a poor man's food. And fruit would often appear baked in pies and tarts, as opposed to eaten raw…
In 1567, there was even an attempt at a lottery. So ticket holders were promised a prize in the form of money and also freedom from arrest for all crimes other than murder, felonies, piracy or treason. But unfortunately, it was something that never took off. More's the pity.’"
The Byzantine Empire: Everything You Wanted To Know - HistoryExtra - "‘Basil I was a very extraordinary figure. He started as a stable boy, he was one of those who made a career by looking after horses. And he became such a famous horse tamer and groom, that he was adopted by the Emperor Michael III, and he became his friend. And then he decided that he'd rather be Emperor in place of his friend. So he had him murdered. That's a very Byzantine story…
‘When you say something is Byzantine, and it implies it’s really complex like, labyrinthine. So where does that idea come from? And does it have any basis in history?’
‘I think there are two ways of looking at this. One is that the Byzantium court in Constantinople was the only medieval court in the Western Hemisphere, apart from China. Was the only major court that had a ceremonial with costumes, with regalia, with ceremonies and processions and amazing set pieces for banquets, and all sorts of activities, which were very highly choreographed and very brilliantly set up with colors, with music, singers. Everything that we associate with a very powerful ruler. And that notion of power expressed symbolically in these very major events that took place frequently on a Christian, Christian, celebrat-, celebrations, particularly at Easter, for example. But nonetheless, that that court was a hub of intrigue, everybody wanting to get ahead, all the different courtiers competing with each other to win the favor of the Emperor or the Empress. And sometimes the children of the Emperor all competing for the same thing. And so it was a center of enormous power. And everybody wanted a slice of the pie. And quite a number of the visitors from the West expressed their jealousy, their envy, their admiration, but it was admiration through gritted teeth. They didn't really want to admire these Greek speaking emperors with all their finery. They didn't really want to admire their churches and their art. They didn't really want to think about how they used Greek and what they knew, because they quoted Homer and all this, Aristotle and Plato. They didn't really want to say, this is a great center of learning. They were jealous, and they went home. And they said to the Bishop of Rome, these people are heretics. They speak Greek. They have all sorts of customs that we would never allow. They have all these eunuchs, castrated men who organize the court. It's a, it's a dreadful place, and the women are too powerful. And so on, and so on. So they gave the Byzantines a very bad name in the West. And although we know perfectly well, that great rulers like Charlemagne admired the Byzantine art and its culture and wanted desperately to learn Greek, and understand what they, what the Byzantines were studying, many lesser rulers were just envious. And so there was a problem for the Byzantines, who are undeniably proud, stuck up people who wanted to show that they were very great achievers, and they had a great empire. And they had this extraordinary center of patronage. And they wanted to convert all non Christians to Christianity, and they took it very seriously as a Christian duty. And they spread Roman law and they spread good traditions among people who'd never been part of the Greco-Roman world. So they did a great deal for the rest of Europe and Russia and the Near East, in the same way, as the Chinese emperors did. But there was no, there was nothing else that was quite like it in the West. And I think it meant that people there, were constantly looking to this city. There were rumors, you know that there was so much gold, they didn't know what to do with the gold, they paved the streets with gold. Ridiculous rumors that were not true. But it is correct that in the, in the Byzantine Empire, the gold currency was sustained at a very reliable level. And people continue to pay their taxes in it. And the gold circulated through the Empire, and was very, very much admired in the West where they only had a silver currency. And they could not extract taxation, and arrange a similarly sophisticated type of administration.’"
Jennifer Higgie On Women's Self-Portraits | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I was intrigued to read about how smiling in a portrait could be quite a transgressive act.’... ‘In Holland, it was really common to depict people smiling and laughing… But in France, we've got the French court, which is obviously extremely rigid. And Louis XVI had really rotten teeth. And so it wasn't done, apparently to smile around him, because he was so, so conscious of his teeth, he never smiled. And he didn't want other people showing off their beautiful teeth. And so to even depict yourself in a painting, smiling, was, was seen as insulting the king, because essentially, you were saying that you had a much better set of teeth than than he did. And so it became a sort of mark of seriousness that there was no levity in the paintings, that they were very serious that people would look out at the world in a very sort of serious way. And if if there was even the slightest smile, then you wouldn't show the teeth. So to show the teeth was considered very radical. And then we have this wonderful painter, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun. And she steps in. She was a really remarkable painter. She was Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter. She was very beautiful. By all accounts, she had really great teeth. And she was also a sort of very wily self promoter. And so she very famously depicted herself holding her small daughter, Julie, and smiling broadly. Teeth included. And it was absolutely scandalous. It was, you know, there were, there were editorials written in the papers that she had no shame, that, you know, it was licentious. It was basically, you know, saying that she had no morals, but she knew exactly what she was doing because she knew the rules of the game very well. And of course, she became very famous, and everyone wanted to be painted by her, because her paintings were so charming. And she ended up painting herself smiling over and over again, actually’"
Dr Melanie Giles On Bog Bodies | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I was fascinated by that point in the book you made about the medieval sort of dialogue about saintly, incorruptible bodies and how these, this would be leveried [sp?], bog bodies might, might fit in that dark [sp?]. It's a very interesting line of attack, I think.’ ‘Yes. And I think that was one of those surprises to me that that, you know, you see these glimpses and some of the poems about these marvelous bodies. Of course, they're lost to us now. But they must have been phenomenon that you were trying to understand within the ideology of the day, and the other marvelous bodies you would encounter were the bodies of saints. And your failure to decay was seen as a kind of blessing by God… But other people have very different interactions and ideas about them. Certainly by the historic period, some were appalled, they were aghast at a body that had failed to decay. And that too, was troubling. So some of the ideas around the, the walking dead or the revenant, and probably started haunting some of those other bog bodies by the 17 and 1800s'"
Cleopatra: Unpicking Myth From Reality | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘‘Cleopatra is often described as the last Pharaoh of Egypt. Do you think this is an accurate title of her?’
‘It's not technically correct, because she was a co ruler with her son Caesarion. And he actually outlived her by a few days. So technically, no, she's not the last Pharaoh of Egypt. But to all intents and purposes, she was, because with her suicide in 30 BC, that was really the end, I would say, of the dynastic period, because that's when Egypt becomes absorbed by, well it becomes absorbed by Octavian actually, it becomes part of his personal holdings, but essentially, it's absorbed by Rome. And everything changes at that point’
To what extent was she connected to the ironic era?’...
‘It depends how you define the Pharaonic era. If you define it as having a pharaoh on the throne, then she is definitely. A lot of people would cut off at the arrival of Alexander the Great. But, when Alexander arrives in Egypt, he, to all intents and purposes, and he's not there very long, but he behaves as a traditional Pharaoh. We have images of him dressed as a traditional Pharaoh doing traditional Pharaonic things. And the Egyptian people, they've always accepted that once someone is crowned king or Pharaoh, and if they behave in the traditional way, and they look like a traditional Pharaoh, they are the Pharaoh. So this is probably a very astute move on Alexander's part to to get the people of Egypt on his side. He fulfills this need that they have that they do need a pharaoh because they need somebody who will connect them to the gods, because only the pharaoh or the king can communicate properly with the gods, and he's a sort of conduit between people and gods. So Alexander does that and other foreigners who have come to Egypt and ruled Egypt have done exactly the same thing. When Alexander dies, there's a bit of a gap but then his general Ptolemy takes over his role in Egypt. And again, he does exactly the same things... So I think Cleopatra would very much have seen herself as a pharaoh’…
‘How unusual was it for a woman to rule or even be a co ruler of Egypt at this point?’
‘Looking at the dynastic age as a whole, it is unusual for a woman to rule Egypt… There have been some females who have ruled Egypt, the most notable one I would say being Hatshepsut who ruled for over 20 years. But it's rare. But when you get to the Ptolemies, it changes slightly, and they develop the tradition of brother sister marriage, which hasn't happened for some time. In the dynastic royal family, and you get brothers and sisters ruling together. So it becomes less rare than it has been, you get these four, four women who are ruling alongside men. Cleopatra herself never actually rules alone. She always has a co ruler. She's either with one of her brothers, she has two brothers and one, one after the other. And then her son Caesarion, so she's not actually alone. But because there's always a massive age gap. I mean, her elder brother is still about 10 years younger than her. And then she she is associated with and possibly maries a younger brother, and then she's associated with Caesarion being a baby. So she is always the dominant ruler, although technically, maybe she shouldn't be. But she was always going to be because obviously, if you're co ruling with a baby, you're obviously going to be in charge of that baby. And if you're that baby's mother, you're even more likely to be in charge of things for quite some time, I would say’"
Stephen Walker On Yuri Gagarin, First Man In Space | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘This man represents everything that the Soviet Union both is and can be to a divided world come back to what I was saying at the beginning. He represents everything. So he's got to be perfect. He's got to look the part. He's got to be the part. He's got to be the poster child for communism worldwide at a time when this was where history was. History is, Khrushchev, the leader at the time said is on our side, right? Remember this is just before the Vietnam War, okay, it's right there. I mean, Titov himself subsequently went to space, as the second Soviet in space. And a few days after he came back, the Berlin Wall was put up so it, right in that center that absolutely kind of epicenter if you like, ground zero of the Cold War, that's where we are. Okay. So it's really important, absolutely critical that the guy they choose is right. So the guy has the background, he's got the face, he has this dazzling smile. Everybody goes on about Gagarin's smile. And that was all part of it. He interacted well with people. He was somebody who could be, who could look good. And Titov was also actually very handsome, fit sort of guy. But at the same time he had, he had a darkness about him that people spotted, he was not easy to get on with, he could be quite arrogant. He could be quite standoffish. And it's subsequently when he went on a tour of the United States after he became famous when he flew, that tour was a complete disaster. Because everybody gets to him. And the American press loathed him. And so, in a way, the choice of Gagarin was the right choice. Here was somebody that was destined not just to represent the Soviet Union, but actually for immortality. We're talking about him today, 60 years later. And the only reason why not more people are talking about him today is because subsequently we had the lunar landing. And so Neil Armstrong has kind of taken that mantle. But before Neil Armstrong, before the first man on the moon, there was a first man in space... The first time his family discovered that their son was actually in space. When they heard it on the radio. His mother… hears it on the radio… She thinks her son is flying fighter jet somewhere. She has no idea what's going on. And she thinks at first as does her husband, it's impossible that my, that this is not the same person, different Gagarin… Her first reaction is, how could he be so incredibly irresponsible. He's got two small children. And she gets so angry about it that she gets on a train and goes straight to Moscow to be with Gagarin's wife and her two little children… underneath each of their mattresses, the doctors have put strain gauges, in order to measure every movement each of those two men make in bed through the night. So that if they're moving too much, they're not sleeping. So by moving too much, Gagarin could have actually lost his place to be the first human being in space. He must have sensed that. He had to pretend he didn't know about the strain gauges, but he knew he had to looke like he'd slept. So he lay still, he said this later, he lay absolutely still all night and pretended he'd had a beautiful refreshing night when in fact, he hadn't slept a wink. So we know he was terrified. There was less than a 50% chance of that mission being successful. And no human being had ever sat on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and lit the fuse. Particularly the biggest in the world’"
Meme - "Hello, I'm a new employee and I'd like to change my username. How am I supposed to sell our software using this address?
Lorenzo Servantez
loser@somesoftwarecorp.com"
"Mr. Servantez,
Unfortunately, all email addresses are automatically generated by the system and cannot be changed. Please, believe me.
Regards,
Biron Tchaikovsky
bitch@somesoftwarecorp.com"
Elizabeth Marvel on Twitter - "The tiny parchment notes my 3rd grader is passing to friends at school, sealed with the wax from her baybel cheese."
Cr Ryan Murphy on Twitter - "Dear kid who graffitied some cool Ray Bans and a mustache on me. I'm not even mad."
Mike Primavera on Twitter - "My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying."
Terry Pratchett's Fantasy As Social Commentary - "Perhaps the most famous piece of Pratchett's social commentary is what is known as the Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness, from Men at Arms... Pratchett's writing is full of such musings, explicitly confronting the kind of political and social issues which fantasy books often seem to shy away from. His books cover topics such as gender relations (Equal Rites), economic theory (Making Money), organized religion (Small Gods), and religious fundamentalism (Thud!)"
Someone who approvingly quoted the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness", when confronted with numerous counterexamples showing how price wasn't a good indicator of quality, pivoted and claimed that Terry Pratchett was only talking about "essential technologies at a medieval level". But it's clear that Pratchett intended this as contemporary social commentary and anyway lots of people online quote this passage approvingly as contemporary social commentary
Robot vacuum cleaner becomes internet hero after giving up work at Travelodge and running away
Mislabeled TikTok convinces Florida woman to go to Gastonia - "Gastonia and Switzerland don’t have much in common. But a viral TikTok video influenced a Florida woman to go visit what she thought was a small pastoral village surrounded by snowy mountains in North Carolina. Olivia Garcia road tripped with her family to the Carolinas from Jupiter, Florida, to check out the snow during Winter Storm Izzy last week. While driving to Angel Oak Park in Charleston, S.C., the 26-year-old found a TikTok video labeled “Gastonia, NC.” Mesmerized by the mountains in the video, she convinced her family to make a detour... What Garcia did not know is that the TikTok was actually a video of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, not Gastonia, west of Charlotte."
The Strongest Predictor of Men’s Well-Being Isn’t Family or Health - "The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success"
Nearly half of Britain’s cats are obese and need to go on a diet, vets warn - "Nearly half of Britain’s pet cats are obese with more than 50,000 suffering from diabetes, vets have warned, as they called for owners to enrol their fat felines in trials to reverse the condition... Feline obesity in Britain has risen alongside trends to keep domestic cats indoors, with almost half of owners saying they do not let their pets outside, particularly those living in cities. A study by Nottingham Trent University found that owners were particularly concerned about protecting their pets from traffic, people and other wildlife, even though an indoor lifestyle can be bad for their physical and mental health... Owners are being asked to sign up for a 12-month programme that would involve a special diet, and regular glucose monitoring. They will even be provided with glucose monitoring cat litter."
More like wildlife needs to be protected from cats in terms of their literal physical existence
BMT Recruits Use Mats For Exercises, Older S'poreans Envy Better Life In The Army - "food served at the numerous cookhouses has improved tremendously — soldiers can now look forward to meals like kimchi stew and turkey puff during festive occasions. Recently, a picture uploaded by the Basic Military Traning Centre (BMTC) caught the eyes of Facebook users, in particular, those who have regained their ICs. The picture shows recruits on all fours, with their hands resting on what appears to be foam mats, which protected them from the rough concrete ground."
Singaporeans' "strong support for national service" is really just a sadistic urge to make other people suffer
This guy has eaten nearly all of his meals at Six Flags for the past seven years. It only cost him $150 a year. - "He got the idea after an internship landed him in Valencia, California, where he could see the roller coasters at Six Flags Magic Mountain from the window in his office...
'for a one-time fee of $150, he could eat two meals a day, every day at the park for an entire year. Since his office was just a five-minute drive away, it was a no-brainer... After just seven years of daily meals at the theme park, Dylan paid down his student loans, got married and bought a house.'... the first year was kind of rough, as the park only provided items like "a burger and fries, or a pizza and breadsticks, or this pathetic sandwich and a refillable soda cup." However, the menu has evolved over the years to where he can now get "stuff like tri-tip sandwiches and vegan options like black bean burgers and meatless meatball subs."... It's encouraging that Dylan drew the line at walking around the waterpark in his business attire. You gotta draw that line somewhere."
Disappointed father in China drinks pesticide as son still unmarried at nearly 30 years old - "Netizens suggested that perhaps the father was exasperated not just by his son's bachelorhood but lack of success in Shanghai and reliance on his parents to finance his search for a girlfriend."
Can the PAP catch its own tigers? - "Although China is a one-party state, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) checks itself by having different government departments check each other. If the PAP is to effectively check itself, it must be as ruthless as the CCP in catching its own tigers. Beyond having different government departments check each other, the CCP fosters internal competition. This is explained by Xu Chenggang, a former professor at Hong Kong University. According to Xu, Chinese officials are assessed by their superiors on how well they performed in administering the cities or provinces under their control. The Chinese officials who performed best would be promoted. In this way, Chinese officials competed against each other in an internal tournament. This was one of the reasons China prospered, and the CCP did so well in governing China even though China is not a democracy, explained Xu when I attended his lectures while studying for a Master’s of Economics at Hong Kong University."
Of course, they also fake a lot of data, which is why even the CCP doesn't trust Chinese statistics
A South African Couple Has Turned Elephant Dung Into Award-Winning Gin - "Liquor stores and restaurants across South Africa and now Europe are selling out of their Indlovu Gin, Zulu for “elephant.” Skeptics may pooh-pooh what comes across as a novelty item, but tasters far and wide are praising a uniquely smoky, woody, earthy flavor that comes from the unlikeliest of ingredients. The idea came to co-founder Paula Ansley after visiting Botlierskop Game Reserve, home to a herd of majestic African elephants. There, the couple learned that only about 30 percent of the animals’ bush diet of fruits, nuts, flowers, leaves, and bark is actually digested. The animals leave behind an undigested mass of flavorful botanicals in their giant clods of poop... A perhaps less obviously unique facet of Indlovu comes from the fact that, given the variation in elephants’ regional and seasonal diets, no two batches will taste exactly the same. As such, each bottle will be labelled with the GPS coordinates and date on which the dung was collected."