Donnie Yen Once Sent 8 Men to the Hospital for Harassing His Girlfriend at a Club - "they harassed actress Joey Meng, his then-girlfriend. The incident was reported by Hong Kong news outlets in the late 1990s. According to the story, Yen and Meng were living it up at a nightclub when a gang of men who took interest in the actress began harassing her for attention in front of Yen."
Fruit Litter From Urban Trees - "Litter from urban trees is a widespread problem, varying in magnitude among trees of many species. Vet, it is often overlooked when a city chooses trees for use along its streets. The city may plant and maintain the trees, but litter is largely a problem for householders who must endure it on their lawns and on the sidewalk and street in front of their homes. Their plight begs for attention. This paper describes typical problems of fruit litter and suggests some possible remedial strategies."
So much for that meme praising urban fruit trees
Hilton Toronto Airport Serves Burger With Food Waiver - "A burger at an airport hotel might not be the most appetizing meal to begin with. But you know what makes it even less appetizing? When the side it’s served with is… a release agreement... the picture shows a release agreement asking the guest to waive rights to any claims against the hotel for “any food-borne illnesses.”"
Comparison of food colour regulations in the EU and the US: a review of current provisions - "Only six colours of synthetic origin are authorised by both jurisdictions. Six food colours are authorised for use in the EU as other food improvement agents or colouring foods. Four colour additives approved in the US are not permitted in the EU: the three synthetic colours, namely Orange B, Citrus Red No. 2 and FD&C Green No. 3 (Fast Green FCF) and toasted partially defatted cooked cottonseed flour. In turn, 16 colour additives authorised in the EU are not allowed in the US, including nine colours of synthetic origin and lutein, vegetable carbon, aluminium, silver and gold, chlorophylls and chlorophyllins and calcium carbonate"
More food colour additives are banned in the US than not in Europe. How horrible. Why don't Europeans care about food safety?! It must be due to corporate lobbying!
RFK Jr. and FDA push to phase out synthetic food dyes
Time to mock him as a brain worm host and a Science Denier, while at the same time condemning the US for allowing things banned in the EU
Meme - "FAT ASS WHITE GIRL TAKES 2 COCKS NEXT TO HER FRIEND GETTING FUCKED TOO
skinwalker spotted on pornhub for a few frames. 3:!7 in. search at your own discretion. what the fuck man"
Annoyingly, this was a bait-and-switch
Meme - "i thought doggy style was kissing while eating spaghetti. you're all so bloody disgusting."
Mother shames Google after son received email saying he could soon turn off parental controls - "McKay explained that the email her son received told him how to remove parental controls and change his account, and blasted the company for 'grooming for data.'"
It's the end of privacy. Do we still care? - "Keenan has been watching these intrusive technologies for decades, having taught Canada’s first computer security course in 1976 and, in 2014, releasing Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy, which predicted much of what has unfolded. The inspiration for the book came when he learned about a smartphone app in 2012 called “Girls Around Me,” that silently linked the users’ Foursquare location app back to the Facebook profiles of the subject. “Back then, few people had done much thinking about how different technology platforms could be melded together,” says Keenan. Someone using the GAM app could know if a nearby woman was single, that she liked the band The Barenaked Ladies, and what her favourite pasta dish was, for instance — personal details that people often put on their Facebook profiles. The GAM user could walk into a bar, find all the women who had checked in on Foursquare, and know just about everything he or she wanted to about them. “That story,” says Keenan, “hit all dimensions of creepiness.” Today, it’s almost like a game of Whack-a-Mole, even for him, trying to keep up with things such as health-tracking smart watches (“they know you had sex at 2:30 a.m.”) to Google’s new Gmail AI assistant, what Keenan calls a “very creepy” new offering in which a bot scans your inbox content to help organize and even compose e-mails. “I thought it would happen linearly but it’s happening exponentially,” says Keenan of technology’s incursions, noting that even developments such as a drop in the price of digital storage will make it easier for others to keep images for decades... Keenan answers the “I have nothing to hide” dissenters with a disturbing anecdote he heard from a police officer, about a businessman who parked his car in the same office parkade each morning, not knowing a high-ranking criminal gang member parked in the stall next to his. “He said hello to the man each morning and that was enough to get himself on a police watch list for associating with the Mafia”... Adding to the privacy paradox, governments are turning the tables on citizens, increasingly invoking privacy to keep us from knowing things that we are entitled to know, and that, in many cases, are necessary for public safety. Dean Beeby, a veteran investigative journalist, came up against an egregious incidence of what he calls “Fortress Privacy” while researching his book on Basil Borutski, who murdered three women on the same day in Renfrew County, Ont., in 2015. Even after Borutski died in prison in 2024, government officials repeatedly refused Beeby’s requests for important information on the killer, citing his “privacy” even posthumously. “It wasn’t just my frustration as a journalist who was unable to tell the whole story,” Beeby says. “The targets of his assault were also endangered by those protections.” Beeby points out that before the killing spree, one eventual murder victim couldn’t even find out if Borutski was living in the vicinity, after he had earlier been convicted for assault against her and released from prison. “They wouldn’t tell her where he lived so she could make sure she never crossed paths with him again,” he says. “But he knew where she lived.”... Beeby looks at another issue surrounding government privacy claims: the “abysmal” state of the access-to-information system. In restricting people’s right to know, the government often cites privacy concerns... “In 2019, I asked for some very basic, innocuous stuff from Environment Canada, and I should not still be waiting five and a half years later for an answer,” says Spears, who worked the environment beat for years. One of his requests was for information on himself. Spears, who began his career in 1977, says journalists started noticing an increasing desire in the 1990s among government officials to reject information requests, and to use privacy as a reason. It’s a development that continues and has never been clearly explained."
Former Regina police officer sentenced for using database to date vulnerable women - "Robert Semenchuk... used a police computer system over eight years to contact 33 women. He reached out to them using fake names while pretending he didn’t know who they were... “He said all the right things and my worries melted away,” said one woman, whose name is covered by a publication ban. “I fell into his trap.”"
'Who's protecting us?': Victims react after Regina cop gets community sentence - "Kerry Benjoe reported her abuser to the Regina Police Service. Two weeks later, she received a text from a "wrong number." That text was the catalyst for her relationship with Regina police sergeant Robert Semenchuck. The police officer used a fake name and snooped in the force's database to target her and other vulnerable women."
I wonder if anyone has explored the angle of what this says about women who are victims of crime (a lot of which is presumably domestic abuse)
When we interbred with Neanderthals, they were usually the fathers
Meme - Lukas (computer) @SCHI...: "When younger people tell me about their romantic encounters lately, they're increasingly filled with these little moment-killing interjections "You're not special. This isn't special. I've done this 150x before and I can't even pretend it will work out this time.""
benjamin: "Talking to an avoidant girl and she says out of the blue 'When we stop talking it's gonna be so sad' Like okay I didn't realise you had it all planned out this is some industrialised mental illness"
Meme - Jacob Matson: "Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I never met my wife. I can only see glimpses of it..."
eric curtin: "Just bought 25 Costco hot dogs!"
Mozambique police warn bald men after ritual attack - "Bald men in Mozambique could be targets of ritual attacks, police have warned, after the recent killing of five men for their body parts."
Damn colonialism!
Putin laughs at minister's proposal to export pork to a Muslim-majority country - "Russian president Vladimir Putin could not help laughing when Minister of Agriculture Alexander Tkachov mentioned exporting pork to Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country."
Keeping in tune with the national curriculum - Muslims and music lessons - "a number of schools have allowed Muslim children to be withdrawn from music lessons by their parents. This is in spite of the fact that the subject is a compulsory part of the national curriculum. Cue a flurry of media reports on the issue, clarifying that parents are only legally permitted to withdraw children from sex and religious education. It is important to assess in our increasingly multi-faith and multi-cultural educational institutions, what unfairly makes music an exception to this rule and why this needs reconsideration. This concern, as presented by various national newspapers, was sparked by a primary Muslim-populated south London school. Eileen Ross, head of Herbert Morrison Primary School in Lambeth, where almost a third of children come from mainly Somali Muslim families, said: “T
here’s been about 18 or 22 children withdrawn from certain sessions, out of music class, but at the moment I just have one child who is withdrawn continually from the music curriculum,” she said. “It’s not part of their belief, they feel it detracts from their faith.” Although Herbert Morrison Primary School is an exception to the general rule, one doesn’t need to look far to find qualms about settling religion in the classroom. The Muslim Council of Britain in turn stated that 10% of Muslims, an obvious minority, would subscribe to the view that music is haraam (forbidden). While there is a plethora of scholarly opinions on this issue, it is extremely telling that Dr Diana Harris, author of the book Music Education and Muslims, told the BBC: “Most of them really didn’t know why they were withdrawing their children. The majority of them were doing it because they had just learned that it wasn’t acceptable and one of the sources giving out that feeling was the Imams, particularly Imams who had come over from Pakistan, didn’t really speak English, and felt threatened. I think they were adhering to very strict lines about what was acceptable.” These parents most probably thought they were doing ‘the right thing’ by removing their children from music lessons, not realising the wider implications for the education of minority communities in Britain.
From 2010
What are the benefits of an orgasm? - "the brains of both genders tended to show similar activity... But there were key differences that emerged after orgasm and these can partly explain why we react so differently after climax. Komisaruk’s scans found evidence that specific areas of the male brain become unresponsive to stimulation of the genitals after orgasm whereas women’s brains remain responsive. “During resolution in males, these brain imaging scans have shown the part of the brain that’s lit up with orgasm goes completely offline and can’t receive more stimulation, making it nigh impossible to have another orgasm,” says Komisaruk. “But in women, that doesn’t happen,” he says. “[Women] will still able to receive more stimulation and can ride those waves to either elongate the orgasm or allow for more to come.” So the idea of a multiple orgasm is indeed real – but only if you’re female... it really can be a case of “use it or lose it”. “We know that pelvic floor muscles and the health of our genitals and the erectile tissues in the clitoris and penis are improved by blood flowing into these tissues on a regular basis, as they do during orgasm,” says Wright... "the opioids sensitise our dopamine and oxytocin receptors, making them more responsive to the trigger to the last orgasm; the person (or thing) that gave us the pleasure,” says Wright. In theory, at least, that means the more sex you have with your partner, the more you will desire them... In a clinical paper from Eastern Kentucky State University comparing the reported sensations of orgasms between the sexes, men gave higher ratings to “shooting” sensations while women gave more emphasis to “rhythmic” sensations, specifically “throbbing” and “spasms”, spreading to other areas of the body... There are also erogenous zones in your neck, the backs of your ears and knees and the insides of your elbows, so for many people, having these stimulated can help bring about orgasm,” says Boyer.
Britney Spears’s downward spiral breaks my heart - "The latest development in Spears’s unravelling – an arrest in California for driving under the influence – constitutes another messy chapter in a story about a woman failed by every person and institution meant to protect her. It is hard to reckon with the reality that the fresh-faced, pigtailed 16-year-old in the …Baby One More Time video grew up to be the wild-eyed, increasingly dishevelled woman we see today in Instagram videos and memoirs (whether it be her own, The Woman in Me, published in 2023, or her ex-husband’s grubby offering from last year in which he alleged she neglected and endangered their two sons)... Leading up to this week’s arrest, Spears’s social media account has been filled with increasingly concerning videos: her dancing half-naked, makeup smudged, dazed behind the eyes, with her visibly filthy home in the background. The 44-year-old was reportedly pulled over by officers in California on Wednesday night and charged with driving under the influence. According to the California Highway Patrol, she was driving erratically for at least an hour before being pulled over and subjected to several sobriety tests. She has since deleted her public Instagram account... The past decade has rendered Spears unrecognisable, a shell of her former shiny, wholesome self. Her last album was 2016’s underwhelming Glory... she hasn’t performed live since 2018 – and, by her own admission, she doesn’t plan to do so again. In December she sold the rights to her entire musical catalogue for almost £150m, a move that some saw as pragmatic, others as a worrying signal that she desperately needed the money after years of legal troubles, not least her custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline. In 2021, Spears freed herself from the conservatorship placed on her by her father, James, in 2008, which had granted him full control of her finances and medical treatments. It felt inevitable. A year before the conservatorship, she had made headlines around the world when she wandered into an LA hair salon, grabbed a pair of clippers and shaved her own head. Every morning seemed to start with new paparazzi shots of Spears falling out of various Hollywood nightclubs, drunk and out of control. Then, early in 2008, she underwent a psychiatric evaluation that led her family to decide they had little choice but to strip away her autonomy. In The Woman in Me, she described the conservatorship as a “deadly” experience that “crushed her soul” and left her feeling like a “child robot”, unable to make decisions about her own life. It was repealed, in part as a result of the viral #FreeBritney movement, led by concerned fans who believed she was being exploited for her money. But five years later, it’s difficult to conclude whether the end of Spears’s conservatorship freed or ruined her. She can now make her own decisions, yes – but she is clearly unwell."
Free Britney!
Passengers who play loud music to be kicked off flights - "United Airlines will remove passengers who play audio out loud on their phone... Failure to use headphones when listening to podcasts or music, or watching a video, could also result in passengers being blocked from boarding the aircraft... Breaching the contract of carriage can, in some circumstances, see a passenger banned from travelling on the airline for life. It is not clear whether this would apply to those who breach the headphone rule, however."
Pakistan created the Taliban. Now it’s getting its comeuppance - "There is something bitterly ironic about Pakistan declaring “open war” against the Taliban in Afghanistan. South Asia’s escalating bloodshed amounts to a glaring example of a country being driven to destroy the very monster that it strove to create. For decades, Pakistan’s generals and intelligence chiefs nurtured and supported the Taliban, giving them sanctuary from American and Western forces, arming them, funding them and supplying them with a constant flow of fresh recruits. The aim of Pakistan’s supremely cynical policy was to drive America and its allies from Afghanistan – and get thousands of their soldiers killed – while also pocketing billions of pounds of Western aid. This double game, surely one of the most disreputable of all time, achieved its goal in 2021 when the Taliban captured Kabul and America scuttled out of the country in a humiliating evacuation. Imran Khan, then Pakistan’s prime minister, instantly rejoiced in how the Taliban had “broken the shackles of slavery”... the seeds of the confrontation between the Taliban and its Pakistani patrons were sown long ago. During their long struggle against America, the Taliban allied with a host of extremist groups including those dedicated to overthrowing Pakistan’s own government. Pakistan has its own Taliban movement, known as the TTP, responsible for countless atrocities and terrorist attacks on the country’s soil. And the TTP was given a base for these assaults by none other than the Afghan Taliban, its religious and ideological brethren. Those incidents have come thick and fast in recent months, including a suicide bombing of a mosque in Islamabad that claimed at least 30 lives earlier in February. “Our patience has reached its limit,” said Khawaja Asif, the Pakistani defence minister, as he declared war on the Taliban. “Now it is open confrontation.” As if sponsoring terrorism was not enough, the Taliban also have designs on Pakistani territory. They have never accepted the current position of the international frontier, which was drawn in 1893 by a British official, Sir Mortimer Durand, and slices through the homeland of the Pashtun people, from which the Taliban leadership is mainly drawn... Why were Pakistan’s generals so dedicated to helping the Taliban to achieve supremacy in Afghanistan? The answer lies in their obsession with the threat from Pakistan’s oldest enemy, India, and the danger of invasion from the east. As they contemplated how to counter such an onslaught, Pakistan’s strategists concluded that their country was too narrow to allow their army the space to retreat, rearm and then counter-attack. In military parlance, Pakistan lacked “strategic depth”. So the generals who decide foreign and defence policy – the country’s here-today-in-prison-tomorrow civilian prime ministers have no authority over such questions – decided that the answer was to install a friendly government in Kabul that would, in an emergency, allow Pakistan’s army to use Afghan territory to regroup against any Indian invasion... When the Taliban mounted their final offensive to retake Kabul in 2021, Pakistan once again came to their aid. “As Afghan soldiers deserted their posts,” wrote Ahmed Rashid, “thousands of recruits from Pakistani madrassas who had long supported the Taliban now arrived to bolster their ranks and to fight alongside them.”"
Traveling for a Cuddle, or More, at European Sex Parties - The New York Times
Meta-analysis: on average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average - "According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD = 15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few. Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s... The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year. The students’ IQ also varies substantially across universities and is correlated with the selectivity of universities (measured by average SAT scores of admitted students)."
Too bad people confuse signalling with value added and keep pushing to expand university education
Hildegard von Blingin' - YouTube - "Bardcore for the discerning clergyman, noble, or muck-gathering peasant. I'm a Canadian singer/illustrator who started making Bardcore in 2020. Bardcore is a pastiche genre that takes modern songs and makes them "old-timey" with Medieval and Renaissance inspired instrumentation. This is fantasy music and not historical recreation, as evidenced by my use of Early Modern English rather than Old English. The majority of the instrumentals were created by me, and feature a mix of virtual and real instruments, including the Celtic harp, Irish whistle, and recorder. Several videos feature my brother, known here as Friar Funk. Looking to use my music in a non-profit video, play, podcast, video game mod, etc? Please go ahead and provide proper credit to any of the artists included on the track. Feel free to send me an email to let me know where it's been used! Lastly, I don’t take private commissions, but I am open to collaborating on projects that fit my niche."
Easy Tasks, Real Money? The Hidden Danger Behind Task Scams - "“Want to earn £200 a day from your phone?” That’s the message flooding WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and even TikTok these days. What’s behind the claim? Just a regular ‘task scam’ that promises job seekers quick rewards. They offer users just enough to reel them in. Task scams are fake online gig schemes that:
Promise quick micro-tasks (like “liking” videos, reviewing apps, or sharing content) for easy money
Feature polished dashboards, fake testimonials, contracts and even mock interviews.
Display “early earnings” to build trust."
Instagram - "How to make money while traveling"
Basically, the gig economy. This only works domestically
Instagram - "The 1980s were completely out of control"
"Porky's Meatballs (1986, dir Clifton Ko) *shower scene*"
(Math) Exercise, Dividers Of Theoden - "(We’re taking a calculus final. The TA is a well-known Lord of the Rings fan, and we’ve had running LotR jokes all semester.)"
A medieval remedy for divorce - "It may sound like a nightmare, but records show that this form of marriage counselling in Transylvania was rather effective. Picturesque Biertan, one of Transylvania’s seven Saxon Unesco World Heritage villages, feels frozen in time. Horse-drawn carts are still a part of daily life, and local residents gather to trade their wares in a cobbled village square. At the heart of the village, a 15th-Century fortified church towers over the surrounding structures from its hilltop perch. Inside the church grounds, along one of its fortification walls, is a small building with a room inside barely larger than a pantry. For 300 years, couples whose marriages were on the rocks would find themselves here, locked away for up to six weeks by the local bishop in hope that they would iron out their problems and avert a divorce... “Thanks to this blessed building, in the 300 years that Biertan had the bishop’s seat we only had one divorce,” said Ulf Ziegler, Biertan’s current priest. Today, the small, dark prison is a museum complete with long-suffering mannequins. The room has low ceilings and thick walls, and is sparsely equipped with a table and chair, a storage chest and a traditional Saxon bed that looks small enough to belong to a child. As couples attempted to repair their marriages inside this tiny space, everything had to be shared, from a single pillow and blanket to the lone table setting... “The reason to remain together was probably not love. The reason was to work and to survive,” Ziegler said. “If a couple was locked inside for six weeks, it was very hard for them to have enough food the following year, so there was pressure to get out and to continue to work together.” Ziegler believes that, even today, the concept of a marital prison has potential lessons for any modern marriage. And he’s not the only one: he says that he’s received requests from couples looking to use the prison to repair their own struggling marriages."
