"Vous connaissez sa maxime, lorsqu'il veut découvrir un secret quelconque: cherchez la femme; dans ce cas la femme n'a pas été difficile à trouver." "I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died." - Richard Diran***Japan tripDay 8 - 13th June - Nara (Part 2)Nara streetGarden and memorial groveMonk on fountainBento. I don't know why everything was wrapped in leaves."Don't piss the deer off"Yes, just like Magdalen College in Oxford they have deer. However, the deer in Nara wander around a lot more freely than their British counterparts. I don't know how they keep them within the city's confines.DeerChasing a guy with dog deer biscuitsDeer biscuit vendors are everywhere in Nara. It's a cartel - they all charge the same price (Y150) for the same pack of biscuits. Probably they all come from one company with a factory in China. Or maybe all the vendors are secretly Yakuza members and this is the most profitable racket in the prefecture.Five-storied pagoda (Gojunoto), KofukujiTokondoStatues in TokondoIncense plug: "Enjoy Splendid Fragrance. Well-known incense sticks called 'YAKUSHIKOH', the scent of which you are enjoying here in the hall, are on sale at the office near the entrance"Kofukuji panoramaStuff in the cornerFive-storied pagoda (Gojunoto)Schoolgirls and deerDeer"I Love Gaijin"I wonder who started talking to who first. Another schoolgirl saw me taking this picture, and laughed.nw.t: "doesn't really look like lovemore like when you want to take a cool photo with some exotic creaturebut are scared to get too close"Deer in shadeMe and deerKohfukuji plaque (the official website says "Kohfukuji" but there're many more search results for "Kofukuji")Yes, it was under renovation, like half of Japan. This, the Chukondo (Main Golden Hall) was very unimpressive and curiously ungolden."The Chu-kondo (Middle Golden Hall) has burned down on numerous occasions since its 710 construction. The present building is a “temporary” hail from 1819, and it is in such poor repair that it is closed to the public. (It is the building which served as the Nara Prefectural Office after the 1870s confiscation.) Its main image ofSakyamuni as well as a Yakushi image and four Shitenno have thus been placed in the building behind the Chu-kondo, a comparatively recent building which is only open to the public for a brief period in the spring and fail."--- Nara: A Cultural Guide to Japan's Ancient Capital / John Martin, Phyllis G. MartinSouthern Octagonal HallSouthern Octagonal Hall"Don't toll a temple bell"Steps down from KofukujiAnother temple, and altarWorld Heritage stone. They're so special. Other World Heritage sites in Japan have plaques. Nara has stones. Maybe it's so the deer don't eat them.More deer. The deer in Nara seem to have blunted antlers. I doubt the monks go around dulling them, so it must be the breed (maybe in the distant past some monks got gruesomely gored, so the townsfolk feasted on venison while new deer were brought in)Deer biskut vendorEnjo Kosai negotiations in progress?(Faces are obscured for privacy reasons)NB: Enjo Kosai = 'compensated dating' - high school girls prostituting themselves to older jap menNotice the guy poring over a map. They must be discussing which hotels are in the area. I hope he wasn't going for all 3 girls at once.Himuro ShrineLazy PussyShrine pond "I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell." - Harry S Truman***Whatever you might think of the nomination of Sarah Palin as Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, you have to agree that (besides giving Progressives a taste of their own medicine with repeated charges of discrimination, justified or otherwise) it exposes one of the conflations of feminism: of the politics of entitlement and the importance of feminist views (cf. Black Conservatives like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell).If, as feminists claim, it does not matter whether you are male or female, and that males can be feminists too, then as long as there is no discrimination (no, the miasma of "patriarchy" does not count), there is no reason to press for quotas or other action to remedy statistical gender inequalities.Nor should there be reason to cheer for "milestones" like Yuriko Koike, Japan's first potential Prime Minister or some of the faintly more ridiculous ones like "first female jockey to ride in the Kentucky Derby" (seriously). Even if these proves that it is *possible* for women to do such things, it doesn't prove that discrimination of some sort does not exist, so their only value is questionable symbolism (indeed, if strong discrimination persists, these "milestones" are counterproductive, but nevermind).Contrariwise, if the feminists also claim that women deserve representation in higher management, corporate hiring, educational admissions, politics (and other areas) by virtue of their gender, then the views of the women who do get into these posts should not matter.If what they want is people who are both female AND share their views, not only are they feminarchically silencing women who do not agree with them (e.g. Feminists for Life), but what they are saying can be translated very simply as: "Since we're incapable of getting elected/in on our own merits, we will protest until we are parachuted in".And what could be more anti-democratic (though perhaps not anti-feminist) than that? "When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth." - George Bernard Shaw***I have been characterised on more than one occasion as a right winger. I think this is somewhat unfair: I would characterise myself as a Classical Liberal (note: not the same as a Libertarian - I do not believe that Government is Evil, and do not believe in Markets being Supreme, because they do not always clear and cannot replace many governmental functions).True, I do tend to expose the folly of left wing beliefs and stands more often than those of the right wing, but this is because the left wing has greater discursive power than that of the right: educated people and intellectuals tend to be left wing. Sugar-coating many stances as promoting "tolerance", "equality" and "respect", and being against "bigotry" and "discrimination" also goes down well - how could anyone in their right minds be against such ostensibly worthy causes?!As such, the follies of left wing politics are typically not extensively articulated; no, "God says so" is not an adequate response - appeals to religion and tradition do not proper (let alone good) arguments make.Furthermore, wackier left wing ideas are buttressed by a formidable arsenal of arguments, so not only is there more to tear into, it is also more difficult to do so - in tandem, this makes exposing them a lot more attractive.A list of issues (at least those which are easier to explicate stances on):Abortion: While I do not believe a fertilised egg has the same moral status as an infant, the pro-choice position is not unproblematic either, since there's no hard-and-fast rule about when a fetus becomes a person.Third-trimester abortions are iffy because, since the fetus can survive outside the womb with advanced medical technology, there is almost nothing separating a third-trimester fetus from a premature baby.Banning third-trimester abortions except in certain cases (e.g. incest, where the mother's life is in danger) is thus a good benchmark.For those who say a woman has the rights over her own body, here's a thought experiment:You volunteer for an operation to hook yourself up to a famous unconscious violinist who has a fatal kidney ailment, and you alone have the right blood type to help. Theviolinist's circulatory system is plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.One day, just before the violinist is due to be unplugged (because he can now becured), you say "Screw it, I don't want this anymore". If he is unplugged you will kill him. Is it morally incumbent on you to *not* unplug him a day before he can be cured, since you volunteered for this in the first place?Affirmative Action: Bad idea, since it makes things worse, is easily abused and entrenches marginality. (some past posts on the topic)Similar principles apply to gender quotas.Church/State division: Purely secular government. Mixing the two screws up both.Drugs: Some kind of harm reduction principle, at least towards soft drugs, should apply to guide public policy. See: the success of drug policy in the Netherlands.Death Penalty: Life imprisonment, to respect the value of life (that is supposedly so valued), since the evidence for the Death Penalty working is dodgy at best and you might always kill someone accidentally.Equality of Outcome vs Equality of Opportunity: Equality of opportunity, with supply-side measures (e.g. educational subsidies) to help the disadvantaged. See Affirmative Action.Gay Marriage and beyond: There should be no grounds to restrict secular marriages between adult, informed and consenting individuals (as well as what said individuals do in private).More broadly, there is no reason to criminalise incestuous, polygamous and polyamorous relations providing the same 3 criteria are met.Gun Control: Watch "City of God" to find out why Gun Control is a good idea.Stem-cell research: Full steam ahead. A Cell is a Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy. Not.Minimum Wage: The evidence seems to point to minimum wages being a bad thing, creating an insider/outsider dichotomy. Instead, labour markets should be made more flexible to act as a check upon employers.Trade barriers: None. Any set up to protect infant industries should be of a clearly limited time period and transparently implemented.Unions: See Western Europe for why labour unions are a bad idea. Instead, labour markets should be made more flexible to act as a check upon employers.War: "Except for ending slavery, fascism, Nazism, and communism, war has never solved ANYTHING!"; sometimes necessary.Welfare: Some form of welfare should be provided if the individual is unable to work and has no means of survival. Welfare payments should be tied towards the willingness to work, e.g. if you consistently refuse to be matched to a job, there goes the dole. "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election." - Bill Vaughan***S'pore's Attorney-General sues The Wall Street Journal Asia"Singapore's Attorney General is taking The Wall Street Journal Asia and its editors to court for contempt. A statement from the A-G's Chambers said that recent publications in the Journal "impugn the impartiality, integrity and independence of the Singapore judiciary."The relevant articles were two editorials in the newspaper, and the third was a letter by Singapore Democratic Party leader Chee Soon Juan.They were published in June and July this year.The A-G's office said that the case was "not about freedom of expression," but "about the Rule of Law," and added that Singapore's courts play a vital role in good governance."Here we go again!I hope all parties interested in issuing commentary will not make any statements that might impugn the impartiality, integrity and independence of the Singapore judiciary.Which means, in essence, that you shouldn't say anything. At all.I'm just wondering why they aren't taking the International Bar Association's (IBA) Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI), the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and numerous legal academics and scholars to court as well, since they have certainly impugned the impartiality, integrity and independence of the Singapore judiciary.After all, our Founding Father has asserted that "if you don't sue, repetition of the lie [makes it credible]. It will be believed".As such, I hope to see a flurry of lawsuits against these scurrilous individuals and organisations forthwith.What seems to be the relevant law:SUBORDINATE COURTS ACT(CHAPTER 321)Contempt8. —(1) The subordinate courts shall have power to punish for contempt of court where the prevcontemptnext is committed —(a) in the face of the court; or(b) in connection with any proceedings in the subordinate courts.(2) Where contempt of court is committed in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (1), the court may impose imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding $2,000 or both.(3) The court may discharge the offender or remit the punishment if the court thinks it just to do so.(4) In any case where the contempt is punishable as an offence under section 175, 178, 179, 180 or 228 of the Penal Code (Cap. 224), the court may, in lieu of punishing the offender for contempt, refer the matter to the Attorney-General with a view to instituting criminal proceedings against the offender.[Ed: The Penal Code sections don't seem relevant.] "Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed." - Sir Winston Churchill***Baltics tripDay 8 - 23rd May - Riga, Latvia (Part 1)Me and Sara, the homestay house dog. She's very old, and had one ear damaged/injured/infected in the past. YC took her for a walk early every morning. We didn't know how he did it. Must be the good ole OCS training.nw.t and I struck out on our own in the morning, while YC explored the area around the homestay and kindly did our (well, mostly my) laundry. We almost couldn't venture to the city, as a power blackout halted tram service (another reason they suck!)RiverHotel with flagsHotel with statuesAnimals of Bremen, St Peter'sWe ascended the St Peter's tower (with the lift! Woo hoo!)ViewMe. As you can see, the wind was very strong.Hair flipping. "Flip your goddamned hair". Unfortunately I couldn't do it properly because of the wind.NaveCoats of armsVault of the Blue Guards. 1743We had some trouble with the church jaga aunty. We'd boughtMemorial to the Latvian so-called GenocideEpitaph of Frants RingenbergWhere the organ should be[Charlemagne's] Roland. I've no idea how or why he was a symbol of the independence and power of the medieval town.Mentzendorff house. Unfortunately it was closed, and the previous day we'd arrived too late, so we couldn't learn about the city's Hanseatic past.The House of the Blackheads was open, but it had very little by way of explanation (even in Latvian) so we didn't get much Hanseatic context.Most of the exhibits were in the cellar (part of the building was still used for municipal functions).Weapons and measuresUnlabelled knight, maybe St George and the DragonSt George and the Dragon (fragment, left over after the Soviets destroyed it)Justice (?)Poseidon and Hermes. I'm trying to identify the goddess in the centre. A nude goddess puts one in the mind of Aphrodite (other goddesses expose one breast at most). The helmet at her feet suggests Athena, but then the other weapons and armour are missing. Meanwhile, the cornucopia points to her being Demeter. The fasces-sans-axe is a puzzle.Fat, nude girl a la VermeerSt George and the Dragon, supervised by a pussyClay pussiesBenchesWe then went upstairs for a few more exhibits.AristocratsThe Black Man descendsCoat of armsStatuettesEquestriansLubeckKnick knacksCeremonijas Prieksmets, 1867 (Letter opener?!)The Black Man, in two guisesDecorative Rose, 2006Silver jewelry: Somina, MacinsI like the chainmail handbag. Maybe it's a Manbag.St Jacob'sChapelFrom pewTomb stone "I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago." - Will Rogers***Random pictures from May till mid-July:Yes! I finally got pictures of people sleeping under the "No Sleeping" sign in the Esplanade.Osim Snake Oil/Mind control device"Econ's Camp Super Tempting And Tremendously Intriguingly Captivating" *facepalm*Interminable PRC queueFrigid Girl waving. Say "Hi, Frigid Girl!"Mommy's Helper - in the Men's toilet (I was waiting 6 hours for my flight to Narita)When I figure out why I took this picture I'll post the reason here"Handshake for Peace... Fall of the Berlin Wall... Suffragettes and the fight to vote... The end of World War II"I love the irony of having exhibitions on Freedom in Singapore. Then again this was in the post-checkin area, so that might say something."Why Men Marry Bitches"The only 2 pictures from the NUS Students' Sports Club noticeboard I'd steal. Okay, I'm not posting them here. Hurr hurr."The Jewel Box. Singapore's Iconic Hilltop Destination. 'Spring' - February to April. 'Summer' - May to July. 'Autumn' - August to October. 'Winter' - November to January"Who are they trying to kid?!"Sensual Massage" at Chinatown. You can't get any more explicit than that without shouting it from the mountaintop.Seal for an envelope containing a wedding invitation. Cute."Unhappy with your job?"Dodgy ad outside Sultan Mosque."Shalom" Yong Tao Foo. I doubt it's Kosher, especially given they have Laksa."Bugis Junction""Family restroom" at Chinatown food centre. There're 2 toilet bowls. As they say, "The family that shits together stays together""Portuguese Tart" for saleJap snake oil - electrocuting yourself for good healthMannikin with breast exposedSlutty Salsa poster"Japanese 'Pasta'" at Shokudo (Japanese Marche). I find the scare quotes very poignant. Incidentally, while the variety there is good, the quality is so-so and it's quite expensive."Murtabak - Real Crab Meat". Given that "Crab" in Singapore means "Crabstick", it's no wonder they have to advertise the veracity of their crab Nicely designed NUS Commencement Dessert and Chocolate box"young young you. 样样有. One Stop For A Younger You."This is very clever "Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear." - Alan Corenk***Japan tripDay 8 - 13th June - Horyu-ji (Part 1)I took a train to Nara, but first I went to Horyu-ji nearby. There was supposed to be a bus from the train station, but it was too early so I walked. It was very walkable with the many signposts and especially with shade, natural or otherwise (my umbrella).Roadside shrine around holy treeRoad leading to Horyu-ji. Presumably the 2 lanterns mean something.Avenue leading to complexThere was a visitors' centre.World Heritage CertificateHelpful map of the area showing the location of a DIY Shop, Convenience Store, Mos Burger, McDonalds and more. This might seem silly but actually is very useful - a McDonalds is very visible.A lot of Jap schoolgirls carry briefcases around.After repeated observation and careful consideration mindful of heuristics, I confirmed my evaluation that schoolgirls were seen more often than schoolboys. One reason why might be that the boys cycle and use backlanes.Entrance to building complexHoryu-ji plaqueOf course, there was the inevitable:"Notice: The Horyuji Kondo (Main Hall), a designated National Treasure, is undergoing a series of preservation-related repairs that are scheduled to last from February until December 2008"Renovation notice. I wasn't exaggerating when I said half of Japan was under renovation.No entryMeDoorwayGardenRoofPhotographic rules were very silly in the ticketed area. Not only was photography not allowed (of the interiors - though this wasn't stated everywhere, making me think it was a blanket ban), sketching was banned too; this is the first place I've seen with such a ridiculous rule. Maybe someone will burn this complex to the ground, like Kinkakuji.Five-Storeyed Pagoda. This is the oldest wooden building in the world (end of 7th century)Main Hall (IIRC)You could donate a tile to the temple roof. Apparently many people misunderstood, as there was a sign: "The tile is not a souvenir to bring home". Hah.Do the schoolkid hordes never end?!KaminomidoWorld Heritage certificate. I've never seen one before. They must be very proud of it.Main Hall. Now I realised the true purpose of the curtains - it was to prevent people from taking pictures!The icons and statues weren't as nice as at Chion-Ji or Narai-ji, but the architecture at Horyu-ji was great.KondoDetail of Dragon wrapped around pillar, KondoShoryoinGardenThey had a treasure hall (fire and earthquake proof!), inside of which photography was naturally forbidden."博院落". Daihozoin, Part of treasure hall. Yes I know the Kanji is wrong. Too bad, who asked them to use script so cursive I can't recognise the character?!They had Indra, Brahma and friends looking East Asian. I guess the Gods can change their forms at will.The treasure hall also had a lot of wooden stuff, some going back to the 7th century (the wonderful thing about Japan: you never need to specify BC or AD!) There were also odds and ends: masks and silk paintings; things which you don't find in the Tokyo National Museum.Some of Japan's "Important Cultural Properties" came from Tang China. Hoho. (Here's another one that came from Korea)There was a refeshments area. A vending machine had Nestle's 'Melon Milk (Hot)'. Uhh... (Actually it appears on Pokka Singapore's website, but I've never seen it here). There was also Framboise Latte, whih sounded scary.Yumedono (Hall of Dreams)I saw a group of Korean kids with nametags ('Team: Grace', 'Team: Hope'). Maybe they were at Horyu-ji to defile it.GardenI doubt you can find better examples of how the Japs put rice plots everywhere. Here, you see a rice plot in Horyuji beside a road and next to... a parking lot, and another next to a house. Well done.I came across another takoyaki place, which was much cheaper (8 for Y240) than the previous day (Y400 for 8 also IIRC). Furthermore, they were making them fresh. However, they didn't understand the concept of "bulk discount" - no matter how many takoyakis you bought, from 8-52, the price per ball was the same.Screwed up packaging. There wasn't much bonito but there was ginger.I wouldn't stayed in the Horyu-ji area longer (there're some other nice temples nearby) but I still had Nara to do! Boss’ Gender Impacts Employee Stress Levels"Worker mental and physical well-being are influenced by gender in the workplace, according to a study that analyzed the impact of supervisor and subordinate gender on health.Using data from a 2005 national survey of working adults in the United States, Scott Schieman and Taralyn McMullen of the University of Toronto reviewed the psychological distress levels and physical symptoms (e.g., headaches, fatigue) of workers who were managed by either two supervisors (one male, one female), one same-sex supervisor or one supervisor of a different sex.The findings revealed that women working under a lone female supervisor reported more distress and physical symptoms than did women working for a male supervisor. Women who reported to a mixed-gender pair of supervisors indicated a higher level of distress and physical symptoms than their counterparts with one male manager.The researchers also found that men working under a single supervisor had similar levels of distress regardless of their boss’ gender. When supervised by two managers, one male and one female, men reported lower distress levels and fewer physical symptoms than men who worked for a lone male supervisor."The abstract notes, further, that "[w]ith a few exceptions, these observations generally hold net of occupation, job sector, and an array of work-related conditions". But at least from the abstract, there's nothing on how men and women react under two supervisors of the same sex, to disentangle the multiple-supervisor effect from the mixed-gender supervisors effect.Also, the last paragraph might be a bit puzzling, so here's an easier way of understanding it:4.8 (men working under a woman) is similar to 5 (men working under a man), but 4.5 (men working under both a man and a woman) is not similar to 5.Likely something similar happened in their hypothesis testing. Having had to use a Mac for a while (video editing), I am now even more well acquainted with the various ways in which it sucks, and have come up with my most extensive list yet (see past "Mac sucks" gripes):Working with files and folders- There is no way to selectively delete files in the Trash. It's either all or nothing- When opening folders in the Dock, there is no way to manipulate them in any way (i.e. dragging them out, calling up a right click context menu) except opening them. You need to open the folder in Finder to do anything useful with it- In Finder, each window can only work with one drive at a time, complicating inter-drive file management (in Windows you can use tree view to copy files from folder foo in C Drive to folder bar in D drive)- When dragging files into folders, you must drop them over the name of the folder. If the folder is expanded and you drag the files onto the list of files in the folder, they won't be copiedUI shortcomings- There is no onmouseover tooltip to get information on files. You need to "Get Info" (Apple + I) which wastes time- Confusingly, there are 2 delete keys which do slightly different things. What's in a name? That which we call a backspace key by any other name would do the same thing- Neither delete key actually *deletes* files [Addendum: I am informed that to do this, press the Apple key at the same time]- There is no easy way to mute the speakers from the GUI - you must slide the volume bar to the end. And yes, I know there's a mute button on the keyboard, but if you want to use this reasoning we should abolish menu and toolbar items for commands that have keyboard shortcuts- Although Expose (what happens when you press F9-F11) is nice, it has some design flaws. For example, when you want to drag files across windows, you'd expect dragging and dropping a file over an Expose thumbnail of the other window (e.g. to move the file into it) to have the same effect as doing the same to the window itself, but doing this just opens the window in question. You need to wait for the window to open after hovering over its thumbnail - which wastes precious seconds- When you select items in a list and want to drag them elsewhere, you must click on either the first or less of the items to be selected, or your selection may be lost and the list item you clicked selectedCrappy applications- The 'Preview' application is horrible. The 'next' and 'previous' buttons don't advance or backtrack among files in the folder in question. Instead, you need to drag the files you want to view into the sidebar (and sometimes they inexplicably refuse to be dragged in)- Safari doesn't search inside text boxesHardware issues- The eject button on the keyboard doesn't always work (eg when the system is slow or has hung), and since there's no hardware override you're screwed if it doesn't work for some reason. I have no idea what happens if you have more than one CD/DVD drive- Even the power cables are proprietary (inexplicable response: "better cool proprietary than plain shit!" - ???)CrashesThe BSOD exists on the Mac too!- The Mac's Grey Screen of Death is only slightly less annoying than the Blue Screen of Death. And as usual, much attention is paid to aesthetics, as the grey curtain slides elegantly down - which just makes the crash more irritating- Mac crashed on me more often than Vista, even though I was using either programs which come with the OS or Final Cut Pro (commercial software from Apple) (i.e. presumably more stable programs), as opposed to freeware from various small companies/open source nightlies on my Vista rigExternal hard drives- If you plug in an NTFS-formatted external hard drive that has not been disconnected from a PC properly, MacOS chokes up and is unable to read it until you use a PC to reconnect and then properly eject the external hard drive. If I need a PC to ensure that I can use my external hard drive with my Mac, why don't I just junk the Mac and use only the PC?- When I tried to copy files from an external hard drive, the operation failed with an extremely informative message: "There is a problem with the file and it cannot be copied". Gee, thanks- When you copy files across drives, it doesn't copy the file dates properly: "date created" is empty and "date modified" and "date last opened" are set to the copy time, rather than that of the original files- When you select files and press Apple + I to get information on them, it doesn't tell you both the size of the files and the size of the files on the disk (I forgot which one it omits), making it hard to work with disks formatted differently (e.g. NTFS and FAT32, or NTFS disks with different cluster sizes)Final Cut Pro- When the program is open and I try to overwrite a closed project, it insists that the project is in use- While Microsoft Office has many quirks and eccentricities seemingly inserted to drive users bonkers, so does Final Cut Pro- The export function is very broken. I tried WMV and only 30s of footage got exported. It couldn't even deal with simple uncompressed AVI, giving me a 11gb unplayable AVI- Estimated time remaining and the progress bar are extremely inaccurate. A task can jump from 52% complete to done.There were a few saving graces (but hardly enough to outweigh the problems):- USB ports on keyboard- Volume control on keyboard- It is easy to eject thumbdrives and the like from the Finder and see when you can take them out from the Desktop- Built-in screenshot-taking Some old photos:Field research trip to Simpang Bedok area (late 2007):Impossibly cheap catering. $150 for the following dishes for 10:"Plain White RiceShark fin Soup with CrabmeatHomemade Yu Char KwayBaby Kailan Beef with Oyster SauceHotplate BeancurdSteamed Seabass Teow Chew StyleFried Chicken with Thai SauceCereal Oatmeal PrawnsDelight Pepper CrabBBQ StingrayFruits PlatterCold Cordial Drink"Don't ask me why Kordial requires a reservation.Internet surfing - at a barber shopFanatical toilet washing hours. They spend 5 hours washing the toilet. Assuming it's open from 7am till 11pm, it's being washed almost 1/3 the time. And why does it take 1 hour to clean the toilet?!Gaming cafe bribing customers to study hardKatong Shopping Centre:"Happy Marriage. Success guaranteed or full refund of money美好婚姻。不成功，不收费""Miss Earth Singapore 2007... 'If beauty can launch a thousand ships, it can certainly influence people to help protect and preserve the environment'"Uhhhhhh...Soft toys riding on dragonFrom Kampong Buangkok expedition day:Saucy stories from Hong Kong'Feng Shui World' magazineHow to arrange your Ba Gua for the lion to dance aroundMagazines on gamblingTestimonials on a computer program to pick winning 4D numbers"That night, true enough 'Tiok Tau Pio' came to visit me. I strike 0416 strike first prize direct and won $50,830.00! Thank you for the 4D SuperEase Professional 2007" - Mdm Tiok Tau Pio" (puncutation is left as is)Dodgy advice to employees at Waraku: "How to be a successful person1) Pray twice a day2) Never gossip about others3) Always think about others4) You must be on a straight path5) You must be always challenging6) Always have your parents blessing7) You must not feel jealous about others8) You must faithful to your life partner9) You must honest to yourself at all time10) You must be a hardworking and patience person10) You must be a hardworking and patience person"My Bukkake UdonMe, My Toy and My Bukkake Udon "I was always taught to respect my elders and I've now reached the age when I don't have anybody to respect." - George Burns***DemotivateUs.com - The Best Demotivational PostersDutch Anti-Defamation League Closes - "Poul VanDerVoort, president of the Dutch Anti-Defamation League of America, announced Monday that his civil rights organization is closing due to a severe lack of defamation against the Dutch. "I guess we did a good job," VanDerVoort told reporters. "This past year there was not a single ethnically motivated crime committed against a person of Dutch descent." Despite a vigilant, constant effort to locate anti-Dutch sentiment, prosecute offenders and initiate a healing process, the league has found no such crises anywhere in the nation throughout its 18-year history. "A couple of months ago we thought someone had been fired from his job for being Dutch," VanDerVoort said. "But we investigated, and it turned out he was showing up drunk.""Almost 11 years later, this showed up as an Onion Radio News article. Now I know how they churn out so many episodes!!!YouTube - The Best Dance Ever.... (Makes You Cry) - "a guy who lost his leg dances with a girl who lost her arm in a car accident. the dance won forst prize in annual dance competetion on CCTV9 international, beijing. THE DANCE SHOWS HOW MUTUAL SUPPORT AND FRIEDSHIP CAN MAKE OUR LIFE EASY AND HAPPY."Uhhhhhhhh....Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture - "It doesn't take a graduate of pop culture studies to notice the mocking of men in popular culture. Most blatantly, it occurs in television commercials. For example, some dopey, but probably lovable, man runs around the house trying to install his computer (fix the television, buy a car - fill in your task of choice) and bungles the job. Meanwhile, the wife calmly makes a phone call to the appropriate people (i.e., whoever the commercial is for) and takes care of it in no time, leaving the husband confused and glad that his woman is smarter than he. Besides, at least now he will have his toy... The authors' believe that today's politically correct culture allows for only one prejudice: misandry. They cite numerous instances to show how androcentricism is being replace by gynocentricism in both popular and elite culture. In this gynocentric world, signs of misogyny are watched for closely, and acts of misogyny are now morally and legally unallowable. However, misandry is allowable, excusable, and not seen as a problem. To put it one way, the authors want us all to get along, and any prejudice of any sex, race, creed, etc. is unacceptable. In point, political correctness and the culture are attempting to change the way people think through monitored language. But in reality, the use of PC argot merely forces people to behave and to respect one another, a far simpler agenda that still, however, has not come to fruition."'We're married, we just don't have sex' - "People wonder why asexuals bother to get together, but Amanda and I have been happily married for nine months now and we're both still virgins. Some people even think asexuality doesn't exist. It's so underrepresented, I can understand why people are skeptical. I was too, even though I was perfectly used to thinking of myself in this way. For years I just thought I was the only person in the world who felt like this."Unholy row as feminist lecturer bars men - "In a dispute which echoes the high tide of radical feminism in the late 1960s, Mary Daly has taken temporary leave of absence from Boston College after refusing a college order to teach the men. She accuses the college of using the dispute to "get rid" of her. The associate professor of philosophy says the presence of the two men on her "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course would be distracting and disruptive to women students, helping to "dumb down" the classes... Fourteen women students have written a letter of support for her stand. "Boston College has wronged me and my students by caving in to rightwing pressure and depriving me of my right to teach freely," Ms Daly said. "This is not about discrimination. This is about levelling the rights of women and minorities.""Making an effort to be sensitive to the needs of women is not unfairly advantaging them; it's just trying to rectify a situation that deprives them of what men get to take for granted, as easy as they breathe, only because of their privilege.Mary Daly: No Man's Land - "Described as both "a prophet" and "the grande dame of feminist theology," Daly has, for more than three decades, committed her every waking breath to a single purpose: seeing, naming and dissecting the structures of patriarchy in order to liberate women's minds, bodies and spirits from its oppression. [She is o]ne of the most revered visionaries of the contemporary women's liberation movement... 'It's true that to be a feminist now absolutely requires being an ecofeminist or what I would call a "Radical Elemental Feminist."... If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore... It's shocking that it would be shocking [to say that]."Hanzi Smatter 一知半解 - "dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture"Get stuffed - "There's a lot we don't understand about the problems of overeating, but Martin Yeomans of Sussex University and Steve French of Sheffield University have set themselves the task of probing the mystery... Variety is the source of strife. Barbara Rolls from Pennsylvania State University has shown that people given four different types of food guzzled 60 per cent more at a sitting than those fed on a single item, even if this single item was their favourite. Astonishingly, if you are given a mixture of three pasta shapes you'll down 15 per cent more calories than if there was just one shape on offer... Proteins are broken down first, then carbohydrate and lastly fat. Which could explain why protein fills you up faster, and fat fills you up least quickly." Baltics tripDay 7 - 22nd May - Riga, Latvia; Selected pictures/videos from HWMNBN and YCOur nice homestay toiletLatvian National OperaFreedom MonumentStreetPowder Tower, Museum of WarGuns in Museum of WarParliament buildingStreetSt Peter's LutheranGun carriageOrgan of Dome CathedralStreetHouse of the BlackheadsSt Peter's Lutheran from House of the Blackheads sideMe outside Occupation MuseumRiflemen monumentSt John's ChurchMedieval RowCat HouseAbout.com: "The black cat house in the photo above is one of the many interesting stories of Riga. The house has two black cats--one on each of its two cupolas. During the height of the Hanseatic League, the owner of the house was not invited to join the Great Guild for Riga's business leaders. The Great Guild headquarters was directly across the street from his home. He was so insulted by the Guild's snub that he turned the two cats so that their rear ends were pointed towards the Guild building. Eventually the owner was invited to join the Guild and the cats were returned to their original position."One of the guild houses (?)Orthodox Cathedral??? StatueMe knocked out by Black Balzams "Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away." - Sir Thomas Beecham***Edge 256 - What makes people vote Republican?Jonathan Haidt"People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world...Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is...A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws...For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner?... I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong...This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare... [Ed: Which is why 'Help! Help! We're/They're being Repressed!' arguments are often rubbish]The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures... the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way...[In India] I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one's role-based duties, were more important... I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment... Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society...Imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as [an inter-connected community] punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups... Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups.A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest...People who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally... Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment...The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity."Response by Michael Shermer:"A famous 2003 paper published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin by the New York University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues, entitled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," in which they argue that conservatives suffer from "uncertainty avoidance," "need for order, structure, closure," and "dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity," all of which leads to "resistance to change" and "endorsement of inequality."It is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the characterizations on which the data were collected. We could just as easily characterize Democrats and liberals as suffering from a host of equally malevolent mental states: a lack of moral compass that leads to an inability to make clear ethical choices, an inordinate lack of certainty about social issues, a pathological fear of clarity that leads to indecisiveness, a naïve belief that all people are equally talented, and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence that culture and environment determine one's lot in society and therefore it is up to the government to remedy all social injustices. As all conservatives know, liberals are a bunch of sandle-wearing, tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, trash-recycling, peaceniks, flip-floppers and bed-wetters...According to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Surveys, 1972-2004, 44 percent of people who reported being "conservative" or "very conservative" said they were "very happy" versus only 25 percent of people who reported being "liberal" or "very liberal." A 2007 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Republicans versus only 38 percent of Democrats said that their mental heath is "excellent." One reason may be that conservatives are so much more generous than liberals, giving 30 percent more money (even when controlled for income), donating more blood, and logging more volunteer hours. And it isn't because conservatives have more expendable income. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income—poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is." [Ed: HWMNBN says this charity data is for the US only.]Response by Sam Harris:"In a recent study of moral reasoning, subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle clues as to the races of the people involved. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed. It turns out that liberals were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred non-whites, but not the other way around, all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking. Observations of this sort are useful in revealing the biasing effect of ideology—even the ideology of fairness."[Ed: In other words, those who scream about "racism" most loudly are also the most racist. I'm quite sure similar results would apply with feminists and normal people deciding between women/men.] "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." - Douglas Adams***A: any of your friends interested? loland pretty girls? lolB: pretty girls into DND ah.gee no girl i know is into DNDC: ohh okayhmm I could ask-? but pretty girls ah, I dunno : xB: the only 1 i know is in ***the other girl i lost touch withotoh you guys can also bring some really cute guys in who like dnd ;)A: pretty girls would add to the incentive manB: i think that should be easier to find since statistically way more guys are into dnd than girls are? :P (theoretically at least)one for one exchange lahu find me a cute guyA: i ahve no incentive to get a stud inB: i try to find u a pretty girlA: oh there comes my incentiveTRY???B: LOL(and mine)A: i don't like that wordlolB: well it depends on alot of thingsmy initiative rollC: hey heydo or do not, -!B: persuasion check;)A: i think you have a lousy modifier for that; not a good trade for melolB: boooo. ***Tim the Great: i was at marmalade pantry yesterdaythink i was a little too loud"this tastes like fuck"Me: good fuck or bad fuckTim the Great: gah, fuck youafter that, bill please. i put $50 and leftwaitress looked scared. :(...Me: singaporeans enjoy overseas food for the same reason overseas tourists enjoy singaporean foodit's about being a touristin a foreign landtrying strange foodTim the Great: was feeling that way since first immersion to francebut i eat out all the time, you can say one restaurant a weekover here, maybe 3x/wk, on averagecannot get rid of bias though, if you want to argue about touristslast time we went sebestien's i thought my food was goodthe bread, never mindi felt that people were oohing about the food [in France]french food in sg sux etc.but of course! you never go to st julien, you shut up lahdidn't say that thoughi just smiledMe: gahTim the Great: then also munch munch, never slow down to tastethere is SO much bad french food in parisi mean, seriouslyanyway!same, italian in italy, if you dunno where to gosomehow thinking about the cock's remarksabout the definitive sachertorte, and whatever elseSomeone: errrrshe just asked me to marry herthat's the second proposition i've received in two weekswtfMe: huhwhoSomeone: [my ex]she made me promise to marry her if she's not attached by the time she's 35Me: wthwhy...*** used to say shit like thatSomeone: i said "do we get to have sex?"she said "no"then i said "fuck off"Me: you mean if you got to have sex you would've said yes mehHURR HURRSomeone: well. *shrugs* i'm a firm believer in insurance.Me: this one got negative payout lehSomeone else: he said [virgins have no right to talk about sex]nobody said anything lahnormally nobody wants to admit to having sex OR being virginMe: I googled "Shirayuki" to get a picture of Hirohito's horse. And got frontal nudity of a porn star.Someone: chances are...u type anything jap, u get some porn I never understood why people are so fond of the argument from etymology (aka the etymological fallacy) - that where a word comes from necessarily tells us something about the word itself, or even its application in a larger context (see: eco-feminists and their rubbish etymology for "gynecology").A deliberately facetious example is the familiar quip: "The word ‘politics’ is derived from the words ‘poly’ meaning many, and the word ‘tics’ meaning blood-sucking parasites."A good counter-example to the argument from etymology is given by Language Log: claiming that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because Arabs are themselves Semites. Yet nowadays "anti-Semitic" does not mean "being against Semites", but "being against Jews".Given that language is a living thing, and that meanings become obsolete and new there are no grounds for using etymology to gouge out hidden meanings or significance from words, beyond it having appeal as a cool party trick. "Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water." - W. C. Fields***danger + opportunity ≠ crisis"There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements that signify "danger" and "opportunity." I first encountered this curious specimen of oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. He was intently studying a bound volume that had adopted this notorious formulation as the basic premise of its method for making increased profits even when the market is falling. At that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint my gullible neighbor who was blissfully imbibing what he assumed were the gems of Far Eastern sagacity enshrined within the pages of his workbook. Now, however, the damage from this kind of pseudo-profundity has reached such gross proportions that I feel obliged, as a responsible Sinologist, to take counteraction.A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation... practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi's Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room...While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean "crisis" and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of "danger," the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify "opportunity."..The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis...A wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America. To confuse a wēijī with a jīhuì is as foolish as to insist that a crisis is the best time to go looking for benefits...Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements meaning "danger" and "opportunity" are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution.Finally, to those who would persist in disseminating the potentially perilous, fundamentally fallacious theory that "crisis" = "danger" + "opportunity," please don't blame it on Chinese!...There is no traditional use of jī that means "opportunity" per se. Jīhuì is a neologism coined to translate the English word "opportunity."To say that jī means "opportunity" is like saying that the zōng of zōngjiào means "religion" (N.B.: jiào here means "doctrine, teaching"). Zōng traditionally means a line of orthodox transmission, or a clan lineage. It is anachronistic to say that zōng by itself means "religion." For numerous examples of such calques and neologisms, many (such as those for "economics" and "society") involving an initial borrowing into Japanese, and then a reborrowing into Chinese with a completely new, Westernized meaning, see Victor H. Mair, "East Asian Round-Trip Words," Sino-Platonic Papers, 34 (October 1992)."Incidentally, the 1992 paper is amusing, because it has the Chinese words written in by hand. "The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it." - William Gibson***Japan tripDay 7 - 12th June - Amanohashidate (Part 5)I was too tired to shout "Yatta!" on reaching the top, so I just admired the view.There was what was presumably another viewing positionSo I gave myself a mild headache againProduct placementI then travelled down the 1km slope much faster than I'd come up it (from the EXIF tags, I only took 4 mins going down)JizoOther tower (opposite the one with the bell)Drying streamI communicated with the bus driver, and he agreed to pick me up at the entrance to the temple complex by the gateway, rather than at the bus stop. I could've walked down, but since the bus was already paid for and the timing was perfect I didn't bother.PagodaMonk statueBack of GatewayDetails of gateway. I don't know if the white animal is a dog or a dragon or a horse or some crossbreed. I don't know if the yellow animal is a housecat or a big cat or some crossbreed.Front of gateway. I'm assuming the rainbow flag isn't a gay symbol.Memorial stoneWhen I got back to the funicular station I wanted to take the chair lift down, but unfortunately it'd stopped by this time. Oh well.View coming downFugu (pufferfish). I think these are real, because they all look subtly different. Except for the one at the top. I asked one shopkeeper "fugu?" and he replied in the affirmative, but then he could have meant "fugu toy".Those at the right are definitely fakeI didn't have time/energy to walk back across the spit, so I took a boat.SpitSpeeding offMeCouple feeding the gulls... with Calbee snacksGullsFun with GullsAs time went on, either they or the seagulls grew more skillful, and some pieces managed to be thrown into the seagulls' mouths.More Fun with GullsSpit and gullsThe turning bridge - actually turning!This shrine seemed to be devoted to underwear. See, one piece even has a smiley face on it!Holy Tree. The rope is a sign of holiness.Pussy. At first I thought the man was sitting on it. Pity.Lonely Planet had recommended a restaurant with Asari Udon (Clam Udon), a local speciality, but the restaurant was closed and I didn't want to get back to Kyoto too late. Anyway it was probably just normal udon with clams, so I settled for takoyaki.These were Kualiti Takoyaki, as the guy had pre-packed them and placed them in a warmer, but they were still better than the Takoyaki made by the hawkers in Singapore who also make cai tao kway okonomiyaki. And the pencil shavings were still moving, so that counts for something.Incidentally, all the Takoyaki I found in Japan were Tako (octopus). There wasn't prawn, ham and cheese, bacon, squid or the other varities you find in Singapore. Personally I'm partial to bacon.Local delights in restaurant windowUn-(local delights) in convenience store. Seriously, french fries?!I was still hungry so I got a 红鮭 onigiri ("Sockeye Salmon").Other sights in the areaWhat to do when a little girl drops her birdI met one ang moh at the Amanohashidate train station. At first I thought he was a tourist and on seeing his luggage I went to ask him what sights could possibly compell one to stay overnight here. It turned out that he was teaching English there. He said he'd been there for 4 years and there wasn't much to do and that it was quiet. He didn't seem very chatty (maybe it was 4 years in the place), so I left him to his reverie (with those words).By the time I reached Kyoto I was very hungry, so I ate at a noodle bar at the station. The concept was interesting:Pick soba or udon - hot, cold with dipping sauce or cold without dipping sauce (?)Translation by JX:"Kake Udon / Fukkake Udon (cold udon) / Zaru UdonKake Soba / Fukkake Soba / Zaru Soba"(We don't know what "Fukkake" is though, and Google is unhelpful)Select garnishings/condiments. This was taken after my meal so they'd cleared some stuff already.Hot Soba, Tempura crumbs, Kitsune (sweet beancurd sheet), Inari sushi with black sesame seeds, potato croquette (with a few pieces of mystery meat). Y580. The Tempura crumbs and spring onion were free. Seaweed was free also (I didn't see it so I only added it later).The first man I'd seen walking around in traditional attire (Yukata).Dog outside the 24 hrs supermarket near the hostelThe previous night I'd seen a rock melon on sale at the supermarket. It was Y150 for either half a small melon or a small wedge. The latter looked very sweet so I got it. However I only ate it this evening. So much for the Vitamin C, but it was still very sweet. How a cash-strapped teacher beat credit crunch by living on £1 a day for a YEAR after drunken bet - "Frugal Kath ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged left-overs from grocery stores and restaurants. She picked fruit from bushes and trees and collected a staggering £117 in loose change dropped in the street - a third of her annual budget. Amazingly, Kath even managed a free holiday, by hitch-hiking to France... She has even found true love, meeting her boyfriend of 18 months while on a volunteering holiday on an organic farm."Heartbroken Italian man holds round-the-clock vigil outside convent for girlfriend-turned-nun - "When Patrizia refused to see him he put up a banner on the convent walls reading: 'I didn't want to take you away, just talk to you, because I love you'. The nuns immediately took the banner down but Daniel has said he will do 'whatever it takes' to get her back - his efforts are supported by local villagers."Tattoo on Man, Sold to Collector, Debuts at Shanghai Art Fair - "A Swiss man with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his back, which was sold to a German art collector, will go on show for the first time next week at Shanghai's SHContemporary fair, said Wim Delvoye, the Belgian artist who created the work... Delvoye is no stranger to controversy. His 2001 ``Euterpe'' resembles from a distance a cathedral window pane composed of tinted glass. The 2-meter work is actually a collage of 36 X-ray pictures, each the photograph of a Delvoye friend having sexual intercourse after being painted in radio-contrast barium sulfate. His 2001 Cloaca machine replicated the human digestive system, producing rinds of feces that sold for 3,000 euros each in vacuum-packed bags. His plan to exhibit eight live pigs, each tattooed with the Walt Disney Co.'s characters and the Louis Vuitton motif, was rejected by SHContemporary's organizer."London | Brothel industry is 'spreading' - "Brothels in the city offer sex for as little as £15, and some are charging £10 extra for unprotected intercourse, the Poppy Project in Southwark found... The average age of the women was 21. Several places offered "very, very young girls" but did not admit to having underage girls available."Critics hit out at sex law plan - "The English Collective of Prostitutes attacked Ms Harman's support for the Swedish system and urged her to look at New Zealand's system of legalising brothels instead. Spokeswoman Cari Mitchell said the Swedish system of criminalising men who buy sex had forced prostitution further underground and "made women more vulnerable to violence". Similarly, Sarah Walker, also from the group, said the deaths of five prostitutes killed in Ipswich last December was largely due to young women being forced underground... "Evidence from Sweden in making prostitution illegal has shown that it doesn't help in reducing human trafficking. It, in fact, increases violence against women and makes the practice of prostitution far more risky for all involved." "Outlawing prostitution completely will mean that men will be far less likely to come forward to help with prosecutions for fear of criminalisation themselves.""The Swedish law was probably thanks to their wonderful Feminist politicians, ignorant of the lessons of Prohibition. The further to the Left you go, the closer to the Right you become.A Brave New World - "Just as a reminder, here's what Korean women used to look like – and these are "stewardesses," the cream of the crop of any age, so one can't say I'm unfairly comparing these apples and oranges... Don't these ladies from the 60's and 70's look different? Let's go way, way back and much higher up the beauty food chain, to Miss Korea contestants from 1957... Korea before probably anyone but really, really elite could afford to go under the knife... what you should notice is that Korean women just plain looked different than the people you see coming out in similar entertainment venues today... but Koreans on television and on the streets are actually starting to look like a different race of people. What Korea is really pioneering is an entire new aesthetic, a mixture of European beauty standards and surgical interpretations of them on Korean faces. Seriously. I'm not being facetious (hehe) here. When I came in 1994 and watched Korean TV, I could tell people apart, and they looked more, well...umm...Korean. Now, it's literally like a new race of people I see both on screens and in the streets."Feminism and Freedom - "Pick up a women's studies textbook, visit a college women's center, or look at the websites of leading feminist organizations, and you will likely find the same fixation on intimate anatomy combined with left-wing politics and a poisonous antipathy to men... Contemporary feminism routinely depicts American society as a dangerous patriarchy in which women are under siege... It therefore presents itself as a movement of "liberation," defying the patriarchal oppressor and offering women everywhere the opportunity to make contact with their "real selves."... In a 1975 exchange in the Saturday Review, the feminist pioneer Betty Friedan and the French philosopher and women's rights advocate Simone de Beauvoir discussed the "problem" of stay-at-home mothers. Friedan told Beauvoir that she believed women should have the choice to stay home to raise their children if that is what they wished to do. Beauvoir candidly disagreed: 'No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.' In Beauvoir, we see how starkly the ideology of liberation has come to oppose actual, practical liberty--even "choice.""Music tastes link to personality - "We have always suspected a link between music taste and personality. This is the first time that we've been able to look at it in real detail. No-one has ever done this on this scale before."Islam 'recognizes homosexuality' - "Homosexuals and homosexuality are natural and created by God, thus permissible within Islam, a discussion concluded here Thursday. Moderate Muslim scholars said there were no reasons to reject homosexuals under Islam, and that the condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality by mainstream ulema and many other Muslims was based on narrow-minded interpretations of Islamic teachings."UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH............Pink Browser - "Sometimes living the life on the web seems to be so male-dominating! Do you know that most of the web browsers are made by MEN and only for MEN? There by sending the needs of women out for the backburner. That’s why they seem to be so boring and hectic especially if you are a woman. THANKS GOD – For here's a new browser touching the feminine side of women. Are you ready to be swept by THE PINK REVOLUTION? Here comes PINK BROWSER that will add excitement and thrill in to your day to day browsing activities. This browser is designed keeping in mind the softer nature of women. After installing this browser and using it for few days you will acknowledge the shift in yourself, as your day to day browsing will become easier and joyful."UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH............Church obsessed with gays - Tutu - ""God is weeping" to see such a focus on sexuality and the Church is "quite rightly" seen by many as irrelevant on the issue of poverty, he said... He said he sometimes felt ashamed of his fellow Anglicans as they focussed obsessively on trying to resolve their disagreement about homosexuality while 30,000 people died each day because of poverty.""Death to the Infidels!" has always gone down better than "Love Thy Neighbor"How Rat Meat Becomes a Rarity - "A Reuters article notes that the price of rat meat in Cambodia has quadrupled, even as the overall inflation rate is “only” 37 percent... The rise in price has raised the return to rat catching — so more kids are entering the labor market for rat catchers and are offering rat meat to the market."I KNEW THEY ATE RAT MEAT IN CAMBODIA!!!Sexologists Can Infer A Woman's History of Orgasms By The Way She Walks - "The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. "This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine," the authors note."What Happens to Religion When It Is Biologized? - "Cognitivist Justin Barrett identifies as an evangelical Christian and has been an organizer for the youth ministry Young Life. “Why wouldn’t God,” he speculates in an interview, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” His book Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, a summary of cognitivist research, spends its concluding chapters suggesting that these theories make a naturalist case against atheism: “Belief in God comes naturally. Disbelief requires human intervention.”... The consequences of biologizing are much more complex and difficult to predict than most scientists have been willing to admit. The assumption that a scientific description of religiosity will inevitably counteract it rests on a model of static identity that has been amply refuted by modern experience."I love how contrary evidence is taken as affirmative. Doubtless he'd magically invoke "The Fall" for homosexuality, avarice, lust and other forms of "sin" As companies grow, so does their technical support load.In the case of computer/Internet services and products, technical support load increases disproportionately, because early adopters are more tech-savvy than the mass market, and don't ask stupid questions (even with not-so-stupid questions, they'll often be able to figure out the answer themselves).An easy way to reduce technical support load is to make it harder for customers to get technical support - this is one big reason why caling customer support hotlines these days always gives you ("For English, Press 1. For Chinese, Press 2..."), and to get to speak to a human.The online equivalent is to make one run a gauntlet of help mechanisms. For example, while Google AdSense used to accept email enquiries, now their "Contact Us" doesn't actually let you contact them for most issues. Instead, you're forced to go through a Troubleshooter and even at the end of it, after 8 steps, the link to "contact our customer support team for further assistance" leads to... the start of the same Troubleshooter.Another option is to be kicked to the AdSense Help Forum, where you either get ignored or replied to by people promoting their websites (though at least you get some sort of an answer this way).What they want to do is to filter out questions that are inane/silly/already-answered in the FAQ, but the current approach just pisses customers off. In the short run, Customer Support is happy and they don't have to hire as many support staff, but in the long run it will reduce revenue, and it'll take longer to find genuine problems that occur within the system.This attitude to customer service is surprising, especially considering that AdSense is their [only] cash cow (but then again, the biggest clients probably get their own Moscow-Washington hotline).In contrast, eBay has a Live Help option which lets you chat to a customer representative live. I used it once and was very happy with it. Even Microsoft's Windows Live has a contact form you can access if you don't find what you need in the FAQ, and responses are reasonably quick (even if they don't always read your submission thoroughly and just paste a boilerplate reply even if it isn't relevant - eventually I've always gotten an at least somewhat-decent answer).Maybe Google should change their motto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be worse than Microsoft".(Incidentally, my problem was that despite setting up AdSense for Feeds, they weren't showing in my feed items.In the end I found out that burning a new feed seemed to solve the problem [at least the ad code appeared in feed items], BUT I can't do this because Feedburner* has an error ["Trouble at the mill!"] when I try to change the URL of my old feed to free up the URL for the new one* - Which is now owned by Google and, surprise surprise, has the same sort of unhelpful help system, despite urging you to "contact us directly about the problem you are seeing") Haikus I & a friend wrote during a balmy afternoon haiku fight:investment bankerwearing his pinstriped Boss suitpitchbook tucked 'neath armi am poor like fuck,wishing for a break of lucksex will set me freestudy hard my sonone day you'll be a bankerthen i retirespending nights alonedespondent masturbatingporn is my best friendpenis abrasioncaused by sordid callused handperhaps should use lube?watching index fallnet worth diminished downwardsi chew indo meewatching the rich passi wonder when i can havecash chicks and cristalschatting on the netbalmy hours just breeze pastbetter than living(After mulling over the bucket of KFC I ate with ZS as a macochistic test of manhood)i love ken de jigreasy greasy ken de jioh fuck heart attackdrunken haiku fightwe can't write for fuck, so wesimply make shit uppeople beg, "SHUT UP!"stop spamming us with haikus!friends flee in disgustyes we make shit up,but so does salman rushdieand his wife is hotrushdie got more doughwriting thousand page novelbetter than us lorforty minutes nowwe have managed to squanderliving the life bitchwe are damn sad lorwriting our lame-ass haikuswe need to get laidi get laid each week,but somehow my life still sucksna beh C C BFriend: "haiku is probably the most abused poetic form."We moved on to limericks after this. "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." - Tom Robbins***"Stick to it, gentlemen! It is nothing compared to what you'll have to play in 25 years' time" - Henry Wood to his orchestra in 1912 as they struggled through Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op 16 (1909)"At our "official" czech community forum, I have a signature like:"FAQ is not just an explicit word [it's pronounced like...something explicit in our language x)], Searching is not only for blind ones — and Miranda is NOT for idiots x) — press ALT-F4 and you'll see a magic ;)"You have no idea how many people sent me a IM message or PM telling me why I've advised them to close their browser x)))) There is something on it :) .."The English is quite screwy, but I found it pretty funny when I got it.***Epictetus' Enchiridion shows that motivational bullshit is millennia old.A deceptive piece of popular wisdom is that if everyone hates you, you must be doing something wrong. How come no one applies this to the Jews?The reason why we have such diversity of bloodtypes is that those with A and B blood are vulnerable to malaria. A map of the world shows that malarial regions coincide with regions where there're more people with bloodtype O - the cooler regions have more people with type A and B blood (AB comes from a mix of people with A and B).I was in an MRT carriage and counted 32 Priority seats versus 18 Normal seats. This is retarded. Priority is the new Normal.Even guys who are normally very smart become stupid when intense emotions come into play. Which gives us a clue about female irrationality.***While the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment is revealing, I daresay that a similar experiment, where you told a group that they were being discriminated against (but subsequently did not discriminate against them), would reveal that those told they were being discriminated against thought they were (when in reality they weren't). Ditto for outside observers. (That's what happens when you're obsessed with suffering, rather than with doing or objective reality, even)I wonder if anyone claims that social conventions about which side of the road to drive on discriminate against either left-handers (no one cares about right-handers, because they are a majority).While putting less pressure on people to conform to social expectations and norms is a good thing, totally demolishing these expectations and norms is not. Social expections should be a guide rather than a prison. Of course, this is a tough line to draw, but it is better than the alternative, I think.Humans are socially-embedded beings, and some form of social framework and structure is needed to orient and ground them so they can find identity and belonging and partake in social intercourse.For example, gender identity is one thing that virtually all people of both genders cling to, and I daresay abolishing gender norms will lead to much anomie (gender norms are part of gender identity; saying "I am a man" means nothing if there're no norms attached to "being a man"). There is a reason second- or third-generation immigrants often reflexively fall back on their ethnic or religious identities, and cherish and perform them a lot more faithfully than their parents. "Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits." - Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith", 1992***Search Referrals:topless girls on houseboatsALD parents considering BMT honest - They seem to stand for "Adrenoleukodystrophy" and "Bone Marrow Transplant"Glucose "scrotal infusion"www.sammyboy.com.mymycenae kolizeras boston university - What could a restaurant in Greece have to do with a US college?!verifying human age scienctificallyfounder of jack and jill potato chipsunemployed "stir crazy" mathematicianrebonded ponytailstampines and lift molest case photo blogspotworld war 2 poster...gee i wish i were a man analysiswhere to buy ladycare for menopause in leeds 11"ancient chinese porn"sara mavinkurve naked - This is some woman involved in coral.Teachings of the Catholic Church for musterbatingchikan wmv+how to make soya pattya&w supply the pill window cleaning tablets - What an awful use of A&W.tharman tallperodua-mission statement - Surprisingly (or maybe not) I'm the only hit on Google for this.PROSHAN AUNTY STORY"own time own target" theatre review - I was on the last page of Google search results for this even though I was one of the most relevant results. 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It is a fallacy to assume that those who speak loudest are most representative (a problem you find in religion as well), but then those who do not speak are presumably non-existent.Someone suggested that they wouldn't label themselves that way. Maybe because they're moderate they don't see a point kicking up a fuss and screaming about "oppression", or see it as such an integral part of their identity. Thus, paradoxically, they might be those who think/behave in a feminist way but do not associate with the term.I was also asked to define a moderate feminist. An easy definition would be that they aren't blinded by ideology and (disguised) misandry, but that's hard to operationalise.I'm tempted to suggest that moderate feminists aren't so blinded by alleged victim blinding that they are willing to at least consider the role of victims in rape, but I've a feeling this is not the case.So maybe we can look at other things, like their accepting that women can be paid less than men because they don't work as hard, or that men and women are fundamentally different and that this results in the statistical inequalities we see in the world, or aiming for equal opportunity rather than equal results.Or perhaps even someone who doesn't consider advertising a form of "oppression", just as normal people do not consider the Laws of Gravity to be a form of "oppression".Non-Sequitur strip:"I find Geography to be VERY offensive... While learning the stupid State capitals, I noticed there's a BOISE, IDAHO, but there's not a GIRLSIE anywhere in the country!!" Baltics tripDay 7 - 22nd May - Riga, Latvia (Part 6)[Orthodox] Nativity Cathedral, RigaIt looks better from the frontWe then went to the Skyline Bar, on Level 27 of Reval Hotel.View (not from the bar, but maybe halfway up)We were also there to sample Black Balzams, a traditional liqueur which had cured Catherine the Great of an illness.It was the most potent thing I'd ever tasted. Worse than Ouzo, even. Made me coo for half a minute.nw.t: It's not that bad... It's bad, but it's not the worst thng I've ever had... Even 74% Bacardi 151 doesn't taste as bad as this.nw.t said there were 2 things worse than this: Vietnamese Starfruit Brandy, which tasted like alcoholic bonjela, and Sambuca.It's probably good for health because it puts you off alcoholic drinks. And there's a good reason why it's remained a local drink.The Mojito was much better, in comparison.The second (red sun) best characterises the light, as this was at 9pmWe then took the tram back.I don't know what this isStreet from tramLatvia seemed to be in keeping with the venerable European tradition of fare avoidance, as we were accosted by a very cunningly disguised inspector. The inspector was totally incognito, and kept his photo ID hidden under his coat and buttoned away, displaying it only to the person whose ticket he was inspecting (i.e. if you boarded the tram you might not know the person talking to someone else in the corner was a tram inspector inspecting tickets, raising your chances of being caught if you were a fare cheat).Speaking of fare avoidance, there was a sign on the tram warning against it. Notice how, apparently, the only person on the tram who is caught for fare avoidance is not only black in colour but has an afro. Hurr hurr.The design of the tram windows was very smart: you could only open them on one side - the one where sticking your head out of the window would not get it chopped off bya tram traveling in the opposite direction.Nelson Mandela and Me. He also bit my toes, confirming my hypothesis that pussies were evil, so I stopped playing with him. Once I donned house slippers, though, he lost interest. Moral of the story: it's very important to use protection when playing with pussies.HWMNBN demonstrating the German DoorQuotes:I have taken a vow of celibacy [for this trip] [Me: What's your definition of celibacy?] I want to preserve my 阳气 [Yang2 Qi4 - Male Energy]. [Me: So if we get someone to blow you until just before you come, it's okay] I shall have to consult with higher theological authorities on this one. "In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from." - Peter Ustinov***"PrefaceLike many women in our society, I have experienced what is now labeled "sexual harassment"—on the street, in school, and at work. In Paris, a man once grabbed my breast as he walked by me... In a crowded subway in Rio de Janeiro, a man behind me masturbated while pressing up against me. In New York, a man whispered as he passed mc, "Boy, would I like to eat that!" Before graduate school, when I worked as a secretary, one of my bosses was constantly irritated with me because I refused to date him. I finally complained to his superior, who rebuked us both: my immediate boss for pestering me, and me for being flirtatious. In another job. a boss said to me, “You must be horrible in bed—you're so efficient!”...These episodes were not pleasant, but neither were they devastating. Least of all were they typical of my interactions with other human beings. Unlike many present-day commentators on the subject, I would feel exceedingly foolish if I were to refer to myself as a "survivor," or even a “victim,” of sexual harassment. None of these experiences did me any real harm. But even if they had—and even if I grant that other women might react differently or have more disturbing experiences—I would have to weigh and measure the benefits of being spared this sort of behavior against the costs of preventing it. Certainly I cannot join forces with those activists who want to see all such events—even the pettiest street harassment that is not (yet) actionable in most places— become illegal.There is, moreover, another side of the coin, which must also be acknowledged... when I was a student, I did indeed aggressively pursue professors who interested me. So did many of my female friends. I used to find excuses to go to their offices and lead the conversation to personal subjects. Sometimes my girlinends and I would follow a "favored" professor around in a car. Once I even trailed a man on foot for a block or two because his aftershave left an enticing fragrance in the air. (Was this “stalking”?)...From these incidents I take a simple lesson: that the experience of sexual interest and sexual play (which can indeed be obnoxious at times) is an ordinary part of human life, manifest in different ways in different societies but predictably present in one way or another, as it must have been since the Garden of Eden. It seems to me that except for egregious offenses such as assault, bribery, or extortion (whether sexual or not)—for which legal remedies have existed for many years— the petty annoyance of occasional misplaced sexual attentions or sexist putdowns has to be tolerated. Why? Because the type of vigilance necessary to inhibit it would create a social climate so unpleasant, and ultimately so repressive, that the cure would be much worse than the disease.Would we really want to live in a sanitized world in which each of us is fully protected from any offensive or otherwise unwanted word or gesture? In which every interaction must be scrutinized for possible sexual implications or slights based on gender? In which a kind of paranoia poisons the very idea of sexual expression between people in situations containing that supposedly fatal element, a "power imbalance"). I don’t think so... Yet from the very beginning, the subject of sexual harassment has been marked by definitions rooted in feminist assumptions about the relations between men and women, assumptions that are long overdue for questioning.... Teachers who are most devoted to their classroom work, who are most ready to chat with students and to demystify the boundaries between teacher and student (as recommended by feminist pedagogy), are most often the ones who find themselves caught in the web of sexual harassment charges.Consider the case of Michael Bullock, a popular forty-nine-year-old high school math instructor known for his devotion to teaching. A female student poked playfully at Bullock, in front of the class, commenting on his corpulence by saying that his chest was big. He replied that hers was small. This response led to his suspension from teaching. While waiting to hear whether he was to be reprimanded or transferred to an administrative job, Bullock killed himself. Now his students say, “He cared too much. That’s what got him.” In the emotional confusion that followed this event, a school spokeswoman defended the girl who had made the charge, expressing concern—and this is the most telling detail of the case—that the suicide would have the effect of discouraging other students from filing complaints...In the supposedly more adult universe of higher education, rational people are devising their own measures for warding off trouble. I have spoken to many colleagues who now say that they will not close their doors after a student enters their office. They watch their words and wonder whether it is wise to discuss “sensitive” issues in class, however germane these may be to their subject. Up and down the academic ranks, people are acutely aware of the dangers of doing something, however innocuous, however inadvertent, that another person. espe. ciallv a subordinate, might possibly consider offensive or inappropriate. Lawsuis about matters that would have seemed ludicrous just a few years ago have now become commonplace. An offhand remark or misperceived gesture can threaten an entire career. A professor’s encouraging words or practical help can be retroactively interpreted as “grooming” for sexual demands at a later time. On the other hand, criticism of students’ classwork or disagreement with their ideas can be construed as contributing to an environment that impedes their full participation in academic life... These are not hypothetical situations. They are drawn from actual cases in recent years...Introduction: Redefining the WorldIn late February 1998, I attended a conference on sexual harassment held at Yale University to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Catharine MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women. To me, what was most interesting about this event was what was not said at any of the sessions, by any of the participants...At no time during those days did any of them acknowledge, much less address, a different prejudice that quite openly underlay the panel discussions of case after case of males harassing females. Not even a hint was given that the great success of sexual harassment law might be stimulating what I call “heterophobia,” meaning fear of, and antagonism toward, the Other—in the present context men in general—and toward heterosexuality in particular. Not a word was uttered about false, frivobus, or opportunistic accusations.The MacKinnonite orthodoxy was in hill swing. Disagreements were minor and limited to opinions on what sort of approach would he most useflul in curtailing sexual harassment: Was prevention the key? Isn’t the conflict between equality and freedom overdrawn? What is “unwelcomeness”? Why not require men to prove that they knew their advances were welcome? Should personal liability be recognized, along with employer liability? Would this be a good way to address “street harassment”? Should sexual harassment liability be an insurable risk? Should certain words automatically be considered evidence of sexual harassment? Where do bisexuals fit in?...At no time throughout these proceedings was any divergence of opinion expressed—much less discussed—about basic definitions and principles of the problem of harassment. The one notable exception was a paper by Professor Kingsley Browne, who argued that sexual harassment law restricts workplace speech and is a form of censorship aimed at reshaping conduct...At the conference’s opening session, Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist, her voice heavy with emotion, informed an audience of several hundred people that the “backlash” began when white middle-class men saw that sexual harassment law was going to affect them. This reaction, Dworkin thoughtfully suggested, showed us that “millions of men wanted to have a young woman at work to suck their cock.” Did anyone rise to contest such outrageous slander directed at all or most men? On the contrary...HeterophobiaSomething very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Heterosexuality went from being the norm to being on the defensive. By calling this phenomenon “hecerophobia” I am not speaking abstractly. Rather, I am referring to a distinct current within feminism over the past thirty years, a current that has been “theorized” explicitly by feminist scholars and agitators alike as they attack men and heterosexuality. Such writings, as we shall see later in this chapter, bear all the hallmarks of what has been called a “manic” theory—that is, one that does not know its own limitations.’ Not wishing to be guilty of precisely the same offense, I readily affirm that the attitudes I criticize are not held by all women, not even, perhaps, by many women, though certainly they are found among many feminist women. In their everyday form, they occur as “male bashing.” As Karen DeCrow, former president of the National Organization for Women, has stated, “God knows, in the last twenty-five years, man as ‘the enemy’ has certainly emerged” within feminism...[Sally Miller] Gearhart’s confident vision of the feminist future is pointedly countered by another contribution to the volume in which her essay appears. This is Rachel Bedard’s account of her experiences in all-female groups. Following a failed marriage and a feminist awakening, Bedard moved into a lesbian separatist house “with tremendous expectations of feminist support and nurturance. But within weeks [the women] were divided over everything from dinner hour to cats to who owned which soap in the bathroom.” When the household broke up before long, Bedard accompanied a woman friend to New Zealand. There she met a peaceful, caring, vegetarian man who grew his own food and tried to live in harmony with the planet. His example made her wonder whether such a way of life might not be more useful than lesbians marching and screaming obscenities. She became involved with him, all the while tormented by the thought that she was “betraying all women” by being “in complicity.”” Still, knowing now that women too have what she calls “human” problems, she “could begin to move back to the personal from the political,” which for her included marriage to a man. Predictably, she was ostracized for this by former friends. Tolerance has never been a notable characteristic of feminism—the “nurturing” quality of women notwithstanding. Bedard’s account of these experiences is entitled, appropriately, “Re-entering Complexity.”...Ordinary men these days fear to challenge feminist perspectives. As psychotherapist Laurie Ingraham comments, “The ‘in thing’ is to totally support women no matter what.”’ Many men do this only passively, through failure to challenge feminist assertions and aspersions, like the men Ingraham describes at a professional meeting of therapists: They sat quietly while demeaning comments about men, made by the women running the event, were greeted with much laughter by the predominantly female audience, the kind of reaction I, too, observed at the Yale conference described in the introduction, above...One might retort that there really is little cause for alarm. Heterophobes today are not generally in positions of authority. They do not occupy posts that let them enforce their ideas. In one sense, this is obviously true. No leading politicians have run on a platform of heterophobia. But consider the kinds of prominence actually achieved by feminist ideas. These ideas are now repeated and assented to by people who certainly do not regard themselves as feminist extremists, and who perhaps do not even realize where their rhetoric originates, so successful has it been in mainstreaming itself as reasonable and warranted protection of women.Sexual harassment legislation and regulations, in school and in the workplace, are clear demonstrations of the real power feminist theorizing has acquired in daily life. The relations between men and women have indeed become “problematized,” so much so that any word, any gesture, may these days give offense to women. If in the old days women’s complaints against men’s abusive behavior were seldom taken seriously, today things have moved 180 degrees. Nor is this just a matter of a turnabout in social norms, or a change in office etiquette. As we have seen in part II, people have lost their jobs because of flimsy or entirely false allegations of sexual harassment. In many instances, men (and some women) are being deprived of due process. And there are feminists who quite explicitly and seriously consider that this is a justified course. In their view, due process is one of the patriarchy’s power tools, like freedom of speech.Feminism has in fact been remarkably successful in creating a climate in which men’s words and gestures are suspect, and in which it is now women’s charges that are given prompt credibility, or at least the benefit of the doubt. Tell a man such as Leroy Young, who lost his university position because of a barely investigated charge of sexual harassment, that feminists do not possess power.Heterophobia (despite its apparent relationship to the long tradition of sexual repression in America) should not be mistaken for a nostalgic return to Victorianism. On the contrary, its best fit is with the dismaying history of twentieth-century totalitarianisms. A tendency toward totalizing pronouncements and an absence of respect for the political process—the heart of which, after all, is compromise—are blatant among feminist extremists.But at the moment, the dominant trend within feminism seems still remarkably resilient to any self-criticism. When in May 1996, I sent the Women’s Studies E-Mail List a message relating to my heterophobia project, inviting reactions, scores of hostile replies poured in. Women told me that my project was dangerous, ill conceived, and methodologically flawed; they seemed about evenly split between those who denied there was any heterophobia within feminism and those who said men deserved it. Quite a few objected to the term “heterophobia” itself (evidently unaware that the “radical feminist” Robin Morgan herself used the term, and at times deplored the tendency, in a 1982 book).’...By contrast, most of the handful of supportive responses were sent to me privately, not to the entire list. These led to some fruitful exchanges. Some women observed that their heterosexual women’s studies professors seemed to be the most heterophobic of all. This is the phenomenon of “male bashing” familiar to many who have taken women’s studies courses but ardently denied by defenders of the faith, who insist it is merely an invention of those promoting the “backlash” against feminism."--- Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism / Daphne PataiAnother interesting read:Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta KoertgeTable of Contents:Part One: Cautionary Tales From The Strange World Of Women's Studies1. Introduction to the World of Women’s Studies2. Cautionary Tales from Women Who Walked AwayStudents Who Stomp in Seminars. Political Purity and Hostile Colleagues ♥ "Women’s Studies Can Be Harmful" ♥ "The Chickens Come Home to Roost" ♥ "Who Owns Women’s Studies?" ♥ Scholarship in a Sea of Propaganda3. Ideology and Identity: Playing the Oppression SweepstakesUnraveling the Web of Feminist Discontents ♥ IDPOL: Identity Politics and Ideological Policing ♥ The Amazon Laughed: "Tell Your Brothers" ♥ Sleeping with the Enemy ♥ Dismantling White Women's Studies ♥ Patriarchy and Pigs at the Trough ♥ The Price of Oppressive Privilege4. Proselytizing and Policing in the Feminist ClassroomSurviving Women’s Studies: Students’ Perspectives ♥ Training the Cadres ♥ Fulmination and Ferment ♥ Propaganda and Resistance ♥ Confusion and Condemnation ♥ Feeling Good versus Becoming Competent ♥ Feminist Pedagogy: A Midterm Report5. Semantic Sorcery: Rhetoric Overtakes RealityThrowing Away the Master’s Tools: Playing TOTAL REJ ♥ WORDMAGIC and Other Language Games ♥ Phony Philology ♥ Metaphor Madness ♥ Linguistic Litmus Tests ♥ Accordion Concepts ♥ The Power of Naming6. Biodenial and Other Subversive StratagemsSocially Constructing the Birds and the Bees ♥ Is the Mind the Only Sex Organ? ♥ GENDERAGENDA: Cleansing the Curriculum of Phallic Phantasms ♥ How "Feminine" Tunes are "Brutally Quahsed" ♥ "Logic... Is Insane" ♥ Opposition to Exact Science7. "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall": Feminist Self-ScrutinyAssessing Women’s Studies ♥ "Women’s Ways of Knowing" ♥ The Mission of Women’s Studies ♥ Connected Knowing and the "Believing Game" ♥ Critical Thinking, Feminist Style ♥ "Quality Control": Big Sister Is Watching You8. Cults, Communes, and ClicksTrue Believers All ♥ Problems in the Promised Land ♥ Arrested Development ♥ "For Fear of Finding Something Worse"9. From Dogma to Dialogue: The Importance of Liberal ValuesPart Two: Women’s Studies In The New Millennium10. Rhetoric and Reality in Women's StudiesUnmentionables ♥ Hierarchy is a "Guy" Thing ♥ Where's the Patriarchy? ♥ Dissenting Voices ♥ Recruiting Adherents11. Policing the AcademyFeminist Pedagogy Redux ♥ "Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment" ♥ Why Not a Feminist Overhaul of Higher Education? ♥ Protecting Some Speech ♥ Going "Bolivarian" with a Feminist Twist ♥ New Sexual Orthodoxies 12. Feminists Take on Science: Tilting at the Evil EmpireFeminist Incursions into Science Pedagogy ♥ The Empire Fights Back: Gross, Levitt, and Sokal ♥ Three Exemplars of Post-Science Wars Writings: Schiebinger, Potter, and Fausto-Sterling ♥ The Chilly Climate within Women's Studies for Science Students ♥ Women's Studies vis-a-vis Science Studies? Comments on Sikhism on Ridzwan.Com: Halal Food: Unites or Divides? (yes, people are still commenting regularly after 6 months):silau: the argument that other religions do not forbid consumption of Halal food is a fallacy. Sikhism forbids consumption of halal or kosher foods. The implementation of any halal-only policy nationwide will discriminate against the Sikhs.Jai: To the anonymous who posted all the links with regards to the langgar.Just googling about Sikhism suddenly makes you an expert at Sikhism? I suggest you read the things you have posted very carefully. The prohibitions on where and when we can eat meat in right there in your posts.It's a good thing you chose to remain anonymous. You would have humiliated yourself greatly.But thanks, I really had a good laugh looking at you trying to advice me on my religion. I have forwarded this post to my friends to spread the humour.Why don't you come down this Sunday to Branksome Road and "enlighten" the rest of us about our religion? If you are serious in getting to know the religions better, you would take up my offer instead of making up excuses. Don't worry, we accept everyone on Sundays and there is free vegetarian food also.Sikh: Hi,Just happened to chance on this blog and noticed Jai's comment about halal meat being ok for Sikhs and the rebuttals thereafter.I'm a practicing Sikh and would like to add that there are today two factions of Sikhs; one forbids the eating of halal/kosher meat (i.e. the relatively new "pro-Jhatka" group), and the other (traditional) forbids meat, fish, eggs. I'm a vegetarian btw, and would like Jai and anyone else who's interested to read why Sikhs are instructed to be vegetarians: http://sikhiwiki.com/index.php/SGGS_on_meat (the verses further down that page).As for Sikhs who do not observe dietary restrictions...well, I know scores of Muslims who drink liquor or consume non-halal food, and Catholics who do not observe the 10 commandments, and Hindus who take beef, etc etc. Doesn't make it ok, but that's the way people are.Anonymous: Hi,I'm a Sikh. My parents have brought me up only teaching me that I cant eat beef. But that has nothing to do with my religion. I have decided to understand my religion myself. And its two things:1) you are either a pure vegan.2)or you eat meat but not the halal meat.Sikhs, like the Jews are a minority. I know MANY Sikhs who dont eat Halal food. Before the Halal Sign was imposed almost everywhere, I could eat chicken from Old Changkee. (just an example). But now, I have almost become a vegetarian. I love my seafood and occassionaly i do miss eating chicken. But I dont kick a fuss. I have dinner once or twice at my good friends place. She's muslim and if she has cooked chicken, she simply doesnt offer me to eat. If there is fish, she gets really excited, and we eat together.From what ive read so far....we singaporeans are "multi-racial", but we havent got a clue about other religions. And Im not just talking about Islam. There are other religions in this world, besides Islam. Like Sikhism. Its really upsetting though that we haven't gone around plastering non-halal signs, but instead we just sit here and slowly watch all the food outlets and restaurants get labelled "halal".As for why Sikhs can't eat halal, its got nothing to do with Pork. Google it.Reet: Jai,Its sad that you call yourself a Sikh, for you don't even know that the gurdwara(sikh temple) is on Wilkinson Road and Not Branksome Road. Instead of being girlish and gossiping abt the 'anonymous' who had to teach you about our religion... Please, for Waheguru's sake, stop embarrassing us(Sikhs) and attend some Sikh classes at Silat Road Temple. It will do you good.I seriously have no idea, where you are getting your information from, but you seem rather lost.Sikh: Anonymous mentioned after my earlier post that:"1) you are either a pure vegan."Vegans forsake even dairy products and the use of leather, etc. Remember that the ingredients for the "prasad" (sacremantal food given in the Sikh temple / Gurdwara after a service) was formulated by the Guru (prophet) and includes ghee (from milk). So vegetarian Sikhs are actually not usually vegans. I'm near vegan as I'm lactose intolerant - and so only take a little more than a pinch of prasad for this reason.Religion came about for the betterment of mankind if one takes the spiritual path. But little minds take it to a neurotic degree, miss the essence of the underlying teachings, and become intolerant of others.There're also tons of nonsense comments which are good for a laugh (and many sighs about the future of Singapore). When a rape case should not go to court, by Helen Mirren - "Dame Helen Mirren was engulfed in controversy over the prosecution of date-rapists last night. In an interview, the actress said women who are raped after willingly going to bed with a man cannot expect their attackers to be charged... She said that if a woman voluntarily ended up in a man's bedroom, took her clothes off and engaged in sexual activity, she still had the right to say 'no' at the last second. If the man ignored her, Dame Helen said, that was rape. But she continued: 'I don't think she can have that man into court under those circumstances. I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men-women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them.'... She recalled: 'I was [date-raped], yes. A couple of times. Not with excessive violence, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will. It's such a tricky area, isn't it? Especially if there is no violence. 'I mean, look at Mike Tyson [the boxer jailed for raping beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel room]. I don't think he was a rapist.'"Luckily she isn't a man, or she'd be lynched.Roman Empire 'raised HIV threat' - "The spread of the Roman Empire through Europe could help explain why those living in its former colonies are more vulnerable to HIV."Rich Man’s Burden - "Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do... At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel)... even with the same work hours and household duties, women with higher incomes report feeling more stressed than women with lower incomes... not only does more money not solve our problems at home, it may even make things worse... the better off you are in absolute terms, the more relatively deprived you may feel. In fact, a poll of New Yorkers found that those who earned more than $200,000 a year were the most likely of any income group to agree that “seeing other people with money” makes them feel poor... Rising inequality causes us to work more to keep up in an economy increasingly dominated by status goods. That further widens income differences."Internet Explorer - "Internet Explorer does not support MathML (used here for equations) and has severely broken support for other Web Standards like CSS2 and XHTML. Most Web designers have bent over backwards to shelter you from the failings of this wretched browser. I have not. Aside from the equations, many things on these pages will render poorly or not at all in IE. If they do, I'm sorry, but I ain't gonna “fix it.” MathML support can be obtained with the aid of a new plugin. For the rest, you need to get yourself a Standards-Compliant browser, like Mozilla."Thinking People Eat Too Much: Intellectual Work Found To Induce Excessive Calorie Intake - "Despite the low energy cost of mental work, the students spontaneously consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests. This represents a 23.6% and 29.4 % increase, respectively, compared with the rest period. Blood samples taken before, during, and after each session revealed that intellectual work causes much bigger fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels than rest periods."Ravi Zacharias on the Reason Driven Podcast, and an analysis of all his nonsense. Among them: Dishonestly misrepresenting Peter Singer as claiming a child with Down's Syndrome is worse than a big, claiming that if Sartre is right we should kill ourselves, making theism the default position to fall back to, bait and switching (changing the problem of Hell to that of Evil), the Euthyphro problem, "God is Holy" being unintelligible due to the lack of a falsifier; anyhow even if we accepted this fallacies, it'd commit us to deism at the most (such is the weakness of defending Christianity purely on philosophical grounds).Where Everybody Knows Your Name - "If you don’t read Korean you’ll be surprised that the above photo is advertising a bar called “Hitler,” or “Hitler House,” as in the photo below. Hitler bars are growing rare in Korea, but they still exist... 'The owner of the just-opened Hitler’s Cross restaurant in Mumbai claims he’s not “trying to promote Hitler here.” Instead, Punit Sabhlok tells the Mumbai Mirror, the Nazi dictator “wanted to conquor the world by using force and I would like to do that by the food and service I provide.”'... I’m sure the person who owns this bar would say something similar. And, likewise I’m sure they’d be rightly pissed if someone opened a bar called Hirohito House."My comment: Some would consider Che Guevara T-shirts to be offensive too.Civilization IV: Colonization... Wow that looks offensive - "Goddamit, am I the only one who think it's morally disturbing to make a game that celebrates COLONIZATION?... It's entirely possible, even likely, that you can finish the game without killing any Native Americans. And I'm sure there are no options to give the Native Americans smallpox or send them on a death march. But that's irrelevant. A game about colonization that's entirely about controlling the settlers can either force the player to do horrific things or let him avoid doing it and whitewash some of the worst events of human history. Either option is offensive... Even more disturbing, though, is that colonization was and is a racist process. The colonizing people ALWAYS thought they were superior by dint of their ethnicity or nationality"*FACEPALM*Someone: "In Civilization I can take control of a european civilization and crush a non-european civilization. This must mean Civilization is a racist game, right? Of course, I could also crush the europeans as the noble but tough leader of a non-european civilization, which for some reason wouldn't be racist.In Europa Universalis, I can trade in: *pause* SLAVES! Racist beyond belief!In Heroes of Might and Magic I can use gather an army and kill countless numbers of creatures of other races. That would also be a racist game...In Championship Manager I can choose to buy a player who in the real world is caucasian and leave a less pale player unemployed. I wouldn't know their colour unless they were very famous, and I don't think there's much chance of it influencing my decision, but in theory I could act in a racist way. This makes this game racist as well.In Arcade Pool I can use a white ball to hit a black one and force it into a hole. Another racist game...In summary every game I've ever played could be considered racist, with a bit of imagination... Making a game that deals with history without using a narrow-minded anti-european approach isn't racist. In my opinion, thoughtlessly crying racism at every opportunity *is*"Someone else: "a game reporter/reviewer who's never heard of Colonization?"Floridians like it raw - "The other day it was a maid cafe in Culver City, now we get word that naked sushi has made its way to Clearwater, Florida... 'Officials with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which licenses restaurants, say Keir hasn’t violated health requirements. Even Mayor Frank Hibbard, who convinced Hooters’ owners in 2006 to reword a sexually suggestive billboard, says he’s letting this one go. He says little about the event other than, “I wouldn’t eat sushi off anyone’s body.”... “Every time Picasso had a girl pose nude in one of his paintings, was that demeaning? No, I don’t think it was,” he says. Inside the Dirty Martini, the patrons, half of them women, agree.'"Japan's new professional seducers - "She is one of Japan’s new breed of professional seducers, hired by embittered spouses to entrap their straying partners. And she’ll stop at nothing to get the desired results... Kyoko finished school three years ago. She had seen TV programmes about girls who worked as temptresses and thought that might be a job for her... “It’s fun. I like seeing the underside of life,” she says, “and the money’s very good. I meet different targets every day. I’m not so keen on the old ones and I sometimes get to like the young ones. I sleep with all of them.” As for Mr A, “He’s not so bad. He’s bald, that’s all.”... “It’s much easier to seduce a man than a woman,”... Men are not suspicious when a lovely young girl starts chatting to them. Even a bald 40-year-old salesman in a crumpled suit with a cheap briefcase assumes he’s irresistible to women... “Around 27 women start to enjoy sex. I specialise in women in their late twenties who enjoy sex.”"This is not so different from what you might read in WaiWai. No surprise. Damn Japs. "No one gossips about other people's secret virtues." - Bertrand Russell***Me: interesting how your logic is:"when a singaporean bashes malaysia/malaysians, he is showing that singaporeans are rude, ungrateful, nasty scum of the earthwhen a malaysian bashes singapore/singaporeans, he is right"HWMNBN: i have no issue with you bashing malaysia and malaysians for the right reasonsjust that you don't *simply*Me: "singaporeans are degenerate, illiterate fucks" - youHWMNBN: *smiles* there is no defense against truth.Me: QED.Someone: i met the ceo of airasia too. that guys is GOOD stuff.Me: yahone of the few good things to come out of malaysiaSomeone: hahai tell you... the way the govt is killing the people there is actually good for them.the bumiputra policy.no social welfare, crappy govt/mnc pay -> forces people to take ownership of their life -> forces people to start business -> high control over property/money -> high initiative/sharing/community-social-support-networks -> active civil societyMe: so bad government is good for the peopleso why do we need good governmentSomeone: we need a small govt.Me: malaysia government very small mehwell, ethiopia's government is quite smallSomeone: big + bad = smallMe: errrrSomeone: ok... close.Me: in that case africa should be utopiaSomeone: haha. i'm pushing it.but... you know, that's really what's happening there.the govt shit their people. the people take charge of their own lives.that's it. that's the magic.Me: so if that's the case why are malaysians rushing down to singaporebut not vice versaSomeone: well, those are the people that would not have started a biz with/without a shit govt.i'm talking about the co-opting of bright people into the govt/mnc.a shit govt liberates them from the co-optMe: but overall which country would you say is better offSomeone: singapore for a clueless person, malaysia for a clueful one.Me: singapore has more millionaires per capita than malaysiaSomeone: those are imports lah dude.and i bet half of them are govt officials.Me: even if they're government officialsstill better off rightour standard of living is also higherSomeone: ehhh... i think it's far better to be poor in MY than poor in SG.Me: what social welfare is there for the poor in MYSomeone: things are cheaper. you can "run away" from more "cost of living" items.and it's infinitely easier to start a biz there.Me: what, grow rice from the soil?errI think it's easy to start a biz hereunless you mean there you just bribe someoneSomeone: haha. you can start a char kway teow stall in Malaysia with just RM200. try that in SG.Me: it's not hard to set up a roadside stall thereif that's starting a biz... well technically it's truebut how well off are all these smalltime hawkersSomeone: at least... you earn a living. and there's a chance of making it big.you know what? it's about POSSIBILITIES. there are more of them for the poor there.and, for the capable, a repressive govt forces you to startup on your own.for those in the middle, it won't matter anyway.Me: then you might as well buy lottery ticketseven though the expected return is negative, there's the possibility of making it bigSomeone: *damn* you don't get it - do you?my fault.do make a trip up north when you've the time.talk to people there. visit students. visit businesses.talk to biz people.you will know.Me: right.I don't think I'll get to do that anytime soon thoughSomeone: ok.but, i guesss, it's the same in most fucked-but-not-that-fucked places,Me: where else would fall into that categorySomeone: vietnam, indon, chinaMe: I don't think the clueless/clued dichotomy is helpfulit's like saying if you support the PAP you must be a sheepanyway some people prefer the Wild West oddsbut though you may strike it rich, you are more likely to get shotyou see a lot of successful peopleand people think there's a chance of successbut the failures are not seen. so it's selection biasit's the same in the world of entertainment and the world of sportfor every michelle pfeiffer or serena williams there's 1,000 girls doing part-time waitressingand 1,000 girls without college degrees who spent their time on the varsity teamSomeone: you're right.sure sure. i think we're