Worth a couple minutes to review these pictures

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-most-powerful-photos-of-2011?sort=posted&z=2NNLJ6

Amazing what some people do with their time

 

Big Berry

The banana fruit is a berry. Berries are identified as being many seeded with a fleshy inner layer. So, technically a banana is a berry. And, believe it or not, bananas don't grow on trees! Originally from Asia, the "banana tree" is really not a tree in the true sense. In fact, banana plants have no wood fiber. The banana plant is the world's largest herb and a member of the lily family. Bananas grow in tropical areas all around the world where the weather is sunny and hot, and there's plenty of rain.

The Voices

 

No, I didn’t make this up.

Parents Sue D.A. for Charging Their 6-Year-Old Son With a Felony After He Played Doctor With a 5-Year-Old Girl

Jacob Sullum | November 23, 2011  Story Link here

Last week the parents of a Wisconsin boy sued Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker for charging their son with first-degree sexual assault, a Class B felony, after he played "butt doctor" with a 5-year-old girl. He was 6 at the time. When the boy's lawyer tried to have the charge dismissed, Riniker replied: "The legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute if it wanted to. The legislature did no such thing."

According to the complaint, the girl is "the daughter of a well-known political figure in Grant County," and her brother, who is the same age, also was involved in playing doctor but was not charged. In addition to Riniker, the lawsuit names as defendants retired Grant County Sheriff's Sgt. James Kopp and Jan Moravits, an investigator with Grant County Social Services "whose regional supervisor...is the political figure's wife's sister-in-law"—i.e., the aunt of the alleged victim.

Although the boy, now 7, is too young to be prosecuted or named in a juvenile delinquency petitition, Madison.com reports, county officials are using the felony charge to force his parents into accepting "protection or services" for him. The lawsuit says that once he turns 18, he will be listed as a sex offender.

Quick! Call the Cops!

I could make a list of of on how many levels this is stupid.

Read here

Disturbing, but it seems: True

Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun

“Talkin’ about my generation”: the Who song once expressed the hope and self confidence of the Baby Boomers as they reached biological if not emotional maturity. It was an attack on the older generation, a defense of the young, but it includes an ominous refrain: “Hope I die before I get old.” Already, perhaps, the shadow of generational failure hung over the twenty something Boomers. Those shadows have darkened considerably as the Boomer sun moves past the meridian and an unmistakable air of twilight infiltrates into the declining hours of the long Boomer day.
Continue reading →

How far we’ve come

Christmas Decoration Creativity

 

What Did I Come In Here For?

Why you forgot what you were just doing

By Maren Kasselik
Men's Health

Have you ever walked into a room and realized you don’t remember what you’re doing there? Yeah, us too. Well thankfully science finally explains why: It’s the doorway’s fault, a new study finds.

“When you go from room to room, your brain identifies each room as a new event and sets a new memory trace to capture the new event,” says study author Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Like a chapter marker, doorways end old episodes and begin new ones, as far as your brain is concerned. This makes it difficult to retrieve older memories because they’ve already been filed away, Radvansky says.

Radvansky suggests physically carrying a reminder of what your intent is: “For example, if you want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack, you may forget why you went to the kitchen when you get there because this is a new event, and you may have been distracted. But, it would be easier to remember if you walked into the kitchen with something to remind yourself of what you wanted, such as a bowl.”

Don’t keep bowls in the living room? That’s OK. Form your hand into a bowl shape when you walk to the kitchen. If you’re going from room to room to fetch a pair of scissors, hold your index and middle fingers in a scissor shape to help the memory stay intact.

Pat Dollard’s War

As I am not an avid reader and may be late the party, I stumbled upon this Vanity Fair article through a blog which I frequent for finding just this kind of thing.  Published in 2007 this is an interesting and compelling story of Hollywood insanity, political extremism and personal demons that, for me, was just to interesting to put down.  Amazing to me that this is all real (Dollard Website) and I don’t think I am one of these guys, but the story is well worth the read.  Very “Hunter S. Thompson”.  Vanity Fair Article here .  Be advised, this will take a while.

Time Lapse Earth Fly Over

 

http://youtu.be/430ykbW1zqA

So much to look forward to

A little weird but just so funny….

Lowes had Christmas stuff out in October!

Trick or Treat

His And Her Diary From The Same Day

When I chuckle this hard, I have to post it…

Illusion

Apparently, this is fairly common.

My Next Life

Just Another Fish Story

Some Very Cool but Simple Devices

 

http://imgur.com/a/Ue14Y

New York City’s Façade Begins to Crumble

A truly interesting read.  The second article references the first, so read the first and then ignore the reference in the second. 

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002454-the-demise-of-the-luxury-city

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/23/playground-of-the-rich-collapsing/

Man Ordered to Pay Ex-Wife $14,000 Over Lack of Sex

http://gawker.com/5837378/man-ordered-to-pay-ex+wife-14000-over-lack-of-sex

Thinking Outside the Box

This is awesome.  Read here.

Leaders Helpless As Atlantic Crisis Deepens

Worth the effort to read through.  You may feel you don’t care at the outset, but will feel better toward the end.  Walter Russell Mead seldom fails to analyze complex situations with unbiased skill.  You’ll spend a couple of minutes reading some stupid crap in the paper.  Read this instead; it’s far more significant.

Note: The Blue Social Model is the concept that large mega corporations and a strong regulatory government (as has been active for the past 100 years or so) is the key to social prosperity.  More detail on this is available here.

The Desperation-of-Deprivation Myth

A very interesting (and maddening) read.  Go here.

Eat More Chocolate

Yes, it's true: a new study from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) finds that eating a large amount of chocolate may lead to a 33% lower risk of developing heart disease.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for over a quarter of all adult deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Doctors keep reminding us that much of it can be prevented with lifestyle changes, such as eating a more low- fat, high fiber and heart-healthy diet, quitting smoking and exercising more. So it's been welcome news that recent studies have linked one of our favorite fat-heavy foods--chocolate-- with improving heart health.

These studies have attributed chocolate's benefit to the heart to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which can lower blood pressure and improve insulin resistance. But the new study, which is a review of seven trials involving over 100,000 people, includes the most diverse population yet of those with and without heart disease.

Dr Oscar Franco and his colleagues from the University of Cambridge analyzed studies that examined the association between a chocolate-rich diet and cardiovascular outcomes. Five of these seven studies showed some benefit to eating chocolate. To assess how much benefit chocolate provided, the team separated those with the highest chocolate consumption levels from those with the lowest and found a large discrepancy in their health. Those who ate the most chocolate lowered their risk of heart disease by 37% and their risk of stroke by 29% compared to those who ate the smallest amount.

That's certainly happy news for chocoholics, but the researchers caution that the data does not confirm that eating chocolate necessarily causes, or always leads to a healthier heart: more study is needed to show that it's the chocolate, and not other factors that are common to chocolate lovers, such as, say, a heart healthy diet or higher physical activity levels, that actually causes the reduction in cardiovascular risk.

Plus, the authors note, much of the chocolate available on the market contains large amounts of fat, sugar and calories that can lead to weight gain and an increased risk of diabetes, all of which undermine any benefits that chocolate might have on the heaet. And while the studies didn't differentiate between dark or milk chocolate and included candy bars, cookies and other desserts in the assessment, the researchers suggest that reduced calorie and reduced sugar chocolate may be an important way for people to enjoy the benefits of chocolate without its potentially unhealthy effects.

In addition to being published on bmj.com, the findings will be presented today at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Paris.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/29/enjoy-chocolate-is-good-for-your-heart/#ixzz1WPTNFkdc

Karma

“Louie”: Louis C.K.’s Sublime Anti-Comedy

http://thefastertimes.com/arts/2011/07/29/louie-louis-c-k-s-sublime-anti-comedy/

It's Time to End the War on Salt

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt

The zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science

By Melinda Wenner Moyer | July 8, 2011 |26

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In 1904 French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure—a known risk factor for heart disease—were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the 1970s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day. (Today the average American consumes 3.4 grams of sodium, or 8.5 grams of salt, a day.)

Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit. Nevertheless, in 1977 the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl's work.

Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79. The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials." A 2003 Cochrane review of 57 shorter-term trials similarly concluded that "there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake."

Studies that have explored the direct relationship between salt and heart disease have not fared much better. Among them, a 2006 American Journal of Medicine study compared the reported daily sodium intakes of 78 million Americans to their risk of dying from heart disease over the course of 14 years. It found that the more sodium people ate, the less likely they were to die from heart disease. And a 2007 study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology followed 1,500 older people for five years and found no association between urinary sodium levels and the risk of coronary vascular disease or death. For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not.

Part of the problem is that individuals vary in how they respond to salt. "It's tough to nail these associations," admits Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and the chair of the salt committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. One oft-cited 1987 study published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases reported that the number of people who experience drops in blood pressure after eating high-salt diets almost equals the number who experience blood pressure spikes; many stay exactly the same. That is because "the human kidney is made, by design, to vary the accretion of salt based on the amount you take in," explains Michael Alderman, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and former president of the International Society of Hypertension.

Some physicians argue that although tiny blood pressure drops will not have a big effect on individuals—they will not really affect your risk of having a heart attack—they may end up saving lives at the population level, in part because a small percentage of the population, including some African-Americans and elderly individuals, seem to be hypersensitive to salt. For instance, a study published in February 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that cutting salt intake by about 35 percent would save at least 44,000 American lives per year. But such estimates are not evidence, either; they are conjecture. And low-salt diets could have side effects: when salt intake is cut, the body responds by releasing renin and aldosterone, an enzyme and a hormone, respectively, that increase blood pressure.

Rather than create drastic salt policies based on conflicting data, Alderman and his colleague Hillel Cohen propose that the government sponsor a large, controlled clinical trial to see what happens to people who follow low-salt diets over time. Appel responds that such a trial "cannot and will not be done," in part because it would be so expensive. But unless we have clear data, evangelical antisalt campaigns are not just based on shaky science; they are ultimately unfair. "A great number of promises are being made to the public with regard to this enormous benefit and lives saved," Cohen says. But it is "based on wild extrapolations."

Sex Facts

During the months of research which have gone into devising our sexual compatibility test, we’ve uncovered some pretty extraordinary facts. We reckon they’re too cool to keep to ourselves.
1. A woman is more likely to want to commit adultery during ovulation than at any other time in her cycle.
2. Telling a convincing lie to someone is much more difficult when you find them sexually attractive.
3. Minute quantities of over 30 elements have been identified in human semen. These include nitrogen, fructose, lactic acid, ascorbic acid, inositol, cholesterol, glutathione, creatine, pyruvic acid, citric acid, sorbitol, urea, uric acid and Vitamin B12, along with various salts and enzymes.
4. Chocolate contains phenylethylamine, the same feel-good chemical responsible for the ecstatic high people experience through sexual attraction and love.
5. Women who have given birth have darker labia minora than women who haven’t.
6. The majority of women experience a peak in libido just before their period.
7. -321°F is the temperature at which sperm banks store donor semen. At this temperature, semen can be stored indefinitely.
8. The point at which the average man reaches his sexual peak is between the ages of 17 and 18.
9. The earth could be re-populated to its current level using the number of sperm that could fit into an aspirin capsule.
10. A chicken egg could accommodate the number of female ova necessary to repopulate the earth to its present numbers.
11. During sexual intercourse, in addition to the genitals and breasts, the inner nose also swells.
12. White women are the most likely to engage in anal sex, particularly if they also have a college degree.
13. During erection, a smaller flaccid penis tends to have a greater percentage increase than a larger flaccid penis.
14. A teaspoon of semen contains approximately 5 calories.
15. Sex burns off an average of about 100 calories per session.
16. On average, from two to five million sperm are released each time a man ejaculates.
17. During any given period, women who read romance novels have a tendency to have twice as many lovers as those who don’t.
18. Almost a third of all women over 80 years of age still have sex with their spouse or boyfriend.
19. For both men and women, the heart rate averages 140 beats per minute at the point of orgasm.
20. The average woman will have sex more than 3,000 times over the course of her reproductive years.
21. Most men under 40 years of age can achieve an erection in less than 10 seconds.
22. Heterosexual anal sex is something 43% of women have experienced.
23. Women consider penis size the ninth most important feature for a man, while men rate it much more highly, in third place.
24. When a man ejaculates, the initial spurt travels at 28 miles per hour – faster than the world record for the 100m sprint, which currently stands at 22.9 miles per hour.
25. In one hour, the average sperm can swim seven inches.
26. With nothing in its path, a penis can shoot semen anywhere from 12 to 24 inches.
27. The longest erect penis on record was 13 inches. The smallest was 1cm.
28. There are 20 male masochists for every female masochist.
29. The average adult testicle contains enough sperm to measure a quarter of a mile laid out end to end.
30. For 75% of men, ejaculation occurs within 3 minutes of penetration.
31. During an average man’s lifetime, he will ejaculate approximately 17 litres of semen, which amounts to about half a trillion sperm.
32. The testes increase in size by 50% when a man is sexually aroused.
33. Australians are the most receptive to the idea of having a threesome – 28% of them claim to have tried it.
34. 1 in 50 people claim to have had sex in an aeroplane.
35. 15% of adults have had sexual intercourse at work.
36. 41% of men would like to have sex more frequently. Only 29% of women share this urge.
37. Greek couples have sex an average of 138 times a year – placing them at the top of the world sex league. Japanese couples have sex just 45 times a year, which puts them in last place.
38. 5% of adults have sex once a day. 20% have sex 3 – 4 times per week.
39. Every time they engage in oral sex with their partner, 30% of women swallow.
40. When sexually aroused, 60% of men get erect nipples.
41. Half of single women have sex by the third date.
42. 80% of men living in the USA have been circumcised.
43. Women over 40 years of age are more likely to masturbate than any other group.
44. There’s a direct link between how often a man has sex and his life expectancy.
45. According to experts, sex is about 10 times more effective as a tranquilliser than Valium.
46. Sex can relieve a headache – it releases the tension, which restricts blood vessels in the brain.
47. 44% of women find it impossible to enjoy sex with a man who is not their intellectual equal. Just 31% of men share this problem.
48. There are about 1,000 recognised euphemisms for ‘vagina’ in the English language.
49. At any given time, 25% of people are daydreaming about sex.
50. Over half of American adults have used the phone, email or text message to have sex.
51. According to studies, the larger a man’s testicles, the more likely he is to stray.
52. 75% of Japanese women own a vibrator. The average worldwide is 47%.
53. It takes two tablespoons of blood to get the average man’s penis erect.
54. During their lifetime, the average driver will have sex in their car six times.
55. Americans spend twice as much money on pornography as they do on biscuits.
56. The clitoris contains twice as many nerve fibres as the penis – a toe-curling 8,000.
57. One in five women living with their boyfriend has more than one sexual partner.
58. Besides humans, bonobos (a type of chimp) and dolphins are the only animals that have sex for pleasure.
59. It tends to be easier for women to orgasm during ovulation than at any other time in their cycle.
60. The size of the vagina decreases by 30% as orgasm becomes imminent.
61. While giving birth, some women have been known to experience orgasm.
62. Inside the female body, sperm cells can survive for up to nine days.
63. For up to 70% of women, simultaneous direct stimulation of the clitoris during intercourse is essential for them to reach orgasm.
64. Over 30% of men suffer from premature ejaculation. 10% of men are affected by erectile dysfunction.
65. It’s possible to relieve depression through masturbation.
66. The longer a man’s ring finger is compared to his index finger, the more testosterone he has.
67. The average aroused vagina is 4 inches long – shorter than the average erect penis, which measures in at 6 inches.
68. The average woman can reach orgasm in about 4 minutes through masturbation, while through intercourse, it can take 10 – 20 minutes.
69. Sneezes, along with orgasms, are the only physiological responses that cannot be voluntarily stopped once they have started.
70. Straight men tend to have smaller penises than gay men.
71. 85% of women are very satisfied with their partner’s penis size.
72. Evidence exists indicating that penis size may be linked to index finger length.
73. In rare cases, menstrual cramps have been known to bring about orgasm.
74. The amount of wet dreams a man is likely to have increases in line with the number of years spent in formal education.
75. Compared to anywhere else, adults are more likely to tell a lie in bed.
76. The majority of women prefer to have sex in the dark.
77. Men find women with enlarged pupils more sexually attractive.
78. When having sex, black women are 50% more likely to reach orgasm than white women.
79. 60% of non-smoking women have had no sexual partners in the past year, while 70% of women who smoke have had more than four lovers over the same timescale.
80. Women who are prone to migraines tend to have a higher sex drive than those who are not.
81. Thirty four per cent of men have told lies in order to have sex. Ten per cent of women have done the same.
82. More than 50% of all cheating wives choose married men as their lovers.
83. About 1% of women can achieve orgasm solely through breast stimulation.
84. Within the week, 22% of women tell at least five friends about their first sexual experience with a partner.
85. 70% of men and women admit to having fantasised about someone else while having sex.
86. Two thirds of runners admit to having thought about sex while running.
87. 68% of men and 59% of women had a sexual liaison with someone in their past, which they have not told their current partner about.

About | Amazing Facts | Privacy | Contact
© Lustability 2011

What “Location Based” means

I thought this was a weird article for Discovery News when I saw the headline, but it’s an interesting read (and not very long).  Find it here.

Android Phone Tips and Tricks

Worth the time it takes to read so that you know these things exist.  You may find one or two very useful.  Article here.

New Healthcare Plan

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/19/the-most-important-organization-in-silicon-valley-that-no-one-has-heard-about/

How To Set Up a Brand Page on Facebook Without Needing a Personal Profile

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/06/set-up-facebook-brand-page-without-personal-profile.php

Hard Core

An interesting read about today’s porn.  Long but well done.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/hard-core/8327/

Pictures from Japan

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/06/japan_three_months_after_the_q.html

Tablet Data

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/everything-you-need-to-know-about-tablets-in-15-simple-charts/239647/#slide8

HP Battery Recall

http://www.pcworld.com/article/229105/hps_massive_battery_recall_what_you_need_to_know.html

Actual Recall Notice

Debunking the Salt Myth

This article lays out what I have suspected all along; Salt is an essential human dietary requirement and reducing intake to the extent that lowers blood pressure is unhealthy.  I will provide the finer points of the article in separate quote blocks, but you should read the whole article here.

Like fat, people tend to think of it as an unnecessary additive - something to be avoided by seeking out processed foods that are "free" of it. But also like fat, salt is an essential component of the human diet - one that has been transformed into unhealthy forms by the food industry.

"The problem with reducing sodium enough to change blood pressure [is that it] has other effects - including increasing insulin resistance, increasing sympathetic nerve activity, and activating the renin-angiotensin system and increasing aldosterone secretion. All bad things for the cardiovascular system."

There are no studies based on a diet that draws its sodium from unrefined salt and from foods containing naturally occurring salt (like zucchini, celery, seaweed, oysters, shrimp, beets, spinach, fish, olives, eggs, red meat, and garbanzo beans). Clearer answers would surely emerge with a study like this.

The differences between refined and unrefined salt are significant. (Make sure you use unrefined sea salt, as other sea salts can be just as processed as ordinary table salt.) Unrefined sea salt contains about 82 percent sodium chloride and the rest is comprised of essential minerals including magnesium and calcium; and trace elements, like iodine, potassium, and selenium. Not coincidentally, they help with maintaining fluid balance and replenishing electrolytes.

But what's fascinating about this most recent study is that even in monitoring those on a largely industrial foods diet, consuming what's considered high levels of salt, the results indicate that even this is better than a low-sodium diet.

HOW TO: Start Marketing on Facebook

This looks like an actual How To article.

http://mashable.com/2011/05/25/facebook-marketing-guide/

This Will Fix What’s Wrong

I read this article (you can read it here) about hormone imbalance, that read like one of those self-help books.  Below is the recommendations for repairing insulin imbalance.  Nothing like changing all your eating habits at one time.

Resetting Your Metabolism for Optimal Blood Sugar
My goal is to make your metabolism more efficient, to make your cells more intelligent and cooperative, not resistant. In other words, you will need much less insulin to accomplish the task of balancing your blood sugar.
You can achieve this by resetting your metabolism of sugar and insulin.
To do this you have to eliminate the things that are knocking you out of balance, and provide your body the things it needs to reestablish optimal balance and thrive.
Here is what to do:
- Stop eating flour and sugar products, especially high-fructose corn syrup.
- Don't drink liquid calories in juice and soda. Your body doesn't feel full from them, so you eat more all day.
- Stop consuming all processed, junk, or packaged foods. If it doesn't look like the food your great grandmother ate, stay away.
- Stop eating trans or hydrogenated fats.
- Slow the rate of sugar uptake from the gut by balancing your meals with healthy protein (nuts, seeds, beans, small wild fish, organic chicken), healthy carbs (vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains), and healthy fats (olive oil, nuts and seeds, avocadoes, fish oil).
- Eat plenty of soluble fiber (30 to 50 grams a day).
- Eat smaller, more frequent meals.
- Make your cells smarter by giving them an oil change with omega-3 fats, which help fix cell membranes so that they can more readily receive the messages from insulin.
- Move your body: Exercise improves your cells' ability to work better, respond to insulin better, and burn sugar faster.
- Relax! Stress reduction also helps improve blood sugar control.
- Make your cells more efficient by increasing specific nutrients, such as chromium, vanadium, magnesium, vitamin E, biotin, the B vitamins, zinc, bioflavonoids, and some newer compounds including alpha lipoic acid, arginine, and carnitine.
- Herbs may also be of benefit. These include Panax ginseng, ginkgo biloba, green tea, fenugreek, gymnema sylvestre, bitter melon, and garlic.
Just balancing this one hormone - insulin - can have wide-ranging effects on all your other hormones and brain chemicals and is a great place to start on your path to vibrant health.
Just try these suggestions for 1 week and see how you feel - you may be shocked at how quickly your body can recover.

Cancer Cure

This is here more as an archive item than anything else.  I want to be able to find it for future reference.  Compelling but full of questions.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/228583-Scientists-cure-cancer-but-no-one-takes-notice

What’s the Problem, Officer?

 

The Problem With Autocorrect

 

The worship of female pleasure

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/05/21/slow_sex/index.html

Mortgage Firms Defrauded Taxpayers

Paul Sakuma / AP Photo

Federal investigators have concluded that the nation’s five biggest mortgage lenders defrauded taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-back loans, officials said Monday. The five audits investigated Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally Financial, sources said. The audits found that the banks cheated taxpayers by filing for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that then sold for less than the outstanding loan balance—and filed defective and faulty documents to the Federal Housing Administration to obtain the reimbursement. The internal watchdog group at the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the department that conducted the audit—will now turn the audits over to the Department of Justice, which will then decide whether or not to press charges.

It Can be Hard Keeping a Straight Face as a COURT REPORTER

 

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.
 
ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS:     He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY:  And why did that upset you?
WITNESS:     My name is Susan!
____________________________________________
 

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS:     I forget..
ATTORNEY:  You forget?  Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
___________________________________________
 
 
ATTORNEY:  Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS:  Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS:      He's 20, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS:     Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________
  (My Favorite)
ATTORNEY:  So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS:     Getting laid
____________________________________________
  (Another favorite)
ATTORNEY:  She had three children, right?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  How many were boys?
WITNESS:    None.
ATTORNEY:   Were there any girls?
WITNESS:      Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
____________________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS:     By death…
ATTORNEY:  And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS:     Take a guess.
____________________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS:     He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY:  Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS:     Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_____________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS:  No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS:     All of them... The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS:     Oral...
_________________________________________
 
ATTORNEY:  Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS:     The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY:  And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS:     If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________
 
  
And last:
ATTORNEY:  Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS:     No…
ATTORNEY:  So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS:     Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY:  I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS:     Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Matthew Perry Going Back to Rehab

 

Matthew Perry can’t even announce he is going to rehab without making a joke. The Friends and Mr. Sunshine actor said Thursday he is going to rehab as a pre-emptive measure in his continuing recovery. “I’m making plans to go away for a month to focus on my sobriety and to continue my life in recovery,” Perry said. “Please enjoy making fun of me on the World Wide Web.” Perry has been in rehab twice before, for prescription drug abuse in 1997 and in 2001. Despite a trip to rehab, a source insisted, “There was no relapse,” and said the stay is purely proactive.

Google Explains Live After the Desktop

 

Google announced the availability of two Chromebooks — laptops based on Google’s Chrome OS — at the Google I/O conference Wednesday, but the hardware specifications of those machines are almost completely irrelevant.

According to Google, what makes these laptops interesting is not what they have, it’s what they lack: programs, messy desktops or locally stored documents. A Chromebook is not really a laptop, and it’s not really a computer, Google claims. It’s the web in a “computer-like object” and if you believe Google, “you can do everything on the web.”

Of course, the lack of desktop software does have some benefits, such as a startup time as fast as 8 seconds. Furthermore, the fact that your files are stored in Google’s cloud mean they’re quite safe: You can literally throw your Chromebook into a river and you won’t lose your stuff.

The question, however, is whether the world is ready to completely move into the cloud? According to Google’s own notice on the official Chromebooks features page, “when you do not have network access, functionality that depends on it will not be available.”

 

And here’s another story on the subject by someone who has played with the device.

40 Belief-Shaking Remarks From a Ruthless Nonconformist

 

nietzsche

If there’s one thing Friedrich Nietzsche did well, it’s obliterate feel-good beliefs people have about themselves. He has been criticized for being a misanthrope, a subvert, a cynic and a pessimist, but I think these assessments are off the mark. I believe he only wanted human beings to be more honest with themselves.

He did have a remarkable gift for aphorism — he once declared, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” A hundred years after his death, Nietzsche retains his disturbing talent for turning a person’s worldview upside-down with one jarring remark.

Even today his words remain controversial. They hit nerves. Most of his views are completely at odds with the status quo.

Here are 40 unsympathetic statements from the man himself. Many you’ll agree with. Others you will resist, but these are the ones to pay the most attention to — your beliefs are being challenged. It’s either an opportunity to grow, or to insist that you already know better. If any of them hit a nerve in you, ask yourself why.

***

1. People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

2. He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

3. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

4. There are no facts, only interpretations.

5. Morality is but the herd-instinct in the individual.

6. No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any.

7. Without music, life would be a mistake.

8. Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn’t.

9. In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

10. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

11. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

12. We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

13. No victor believes in chance.

14. Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

15. Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

16. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

17. The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

18. The future influences the present just as much as the past.

19. The most common lie is that which one tells himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

20. I counsel you, my friends: Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

21. Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, is what makes someone a friend.

22. God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

23. Success has always been a great liar.

24. Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

25. What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

26. Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

27. When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

28. When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

29. Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

30. All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

31. What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

32. Fear is the mother of morality.

33. A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

34. Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.

35. There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

36. The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

37. The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart — not something that comes upon the earth or after death.

38. What is the mark of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

39. Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

40. We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Ashton Kutcher to Replace Charlie Sheen on ‘Two and Half Men’: Report

 

Ashton Kutcher is set to replace Charlie Sheen on CBS’ Two and Half Men, two sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. The former star of That '70s Show is reportedly putting the final touches on a contract that will net him a “huge payday,” though no specific number has been revealed. Since Sheen’s public-relations fiasco got him axed from the successful sitcom, CBS has been looking for a big-name replacement to keep the show, a cash cow, running, and reportedly considered Hugh Grant as well. Executive Producer Chuck Lorre, who publicly feuded with Sheen, is said to be “really happy” with the Kutcher deal. Ashton himself has remained mum, cryptically tweeting, “I'm starting to become convinced that people put my name in articles just to improve their SEO or hoping I'll tweet it.”

The 50 Most Important Landmarks of the World

http://www.pxleyes.com/blog/2011/05/the-50-most-important-landmarks-of-the-world/

Zooey to Fox

The New Girl (Fox)

Image: Evan Agostini / AP Photo

Zooey Deschanel, sitcom star? The feature film actress and She & Him mainstay will be joining her sister Emily (Bones) on the Fox schedule with The New Girl, a single-camera comedy written by Liz Meriwether (No Strings Attached) and directed by Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). Deschanel plays Jessica Day, a perky fourth grade teacher, with a penchant for borrowing clothes from the lost and found, who comes home to learn that her live-in boyfriend is cheating on her... and promptly moves in with three very messy, very horny, and very single guys, who teach her more than a few things about the opposite sex. The project, which began life with the far more colorful title Chicks and Dicks, also stars Max Greenfield, Jake M. Johnson, Hannah Simone, and Damon Wayans Jr. Given Meriwether's background in the raunchy humor of the recent No Strings Attached, Deschanel's delightful presence, and direction from Kasdan—who as the son of producer Lawrence Kasdan and the director of The TV Set—knows a thing or two about television, this is one to keep an eye on. Sample line of dialogue: "Pink wine makes me slutty. One sip of pink and I'm like Fergie in the Black-Eyed Peas. I'm like the Incredible Slut."

Status of TV Shows 05/12/11

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-10/tv-upfronts-2011-abc-nbc-cbs-fox-cw-to-announce-schedules/

I KNEW This stuff was EVIL!

The Dark Side of Soy

The Story That Won’t Go Away

Crystal Mangum, the woman who once accused three Duke University student-athletes of rape, was charged Monday with murder, North Carolina law-enforcement officials said. Mangum is accused of stabbing her boyfriend, Reginald Daye, to death during an argument. Police said Mangum stabbed the 46-year-old man in the torso during an argument on April 3, and officials also charged Mangum with two felony counts of larceny. Mangum made national headlines in 2006 when she accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape while she performed as a stripper at a team party—dividing the community. The attorney general’s office later found no evidence of an attack, but the scandal caused the team’s coach to resign and the Durham County district attorney to be disbarred.

ALERTS TO YEAR 2011: THREATS IN EUROPE

by John Cleese

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved."

Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out.

Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let's get the Bastards." They don't have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels in France are "Surrender" and "Collaborate". The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France 's white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher levels: "Invade a Neighbor" and "Lose."

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels .

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia , meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She'll be alright, Mate." Two more escalation levels remain: "Crikey! I think we'll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!" and "The barbie is canceled." So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.

-- John Cleese - British writer, actor and tall person

25 Bubble Shows — Which Will Survive?

 

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Bubble-Shows-Chuck-CSINY-1031976.aspx?rss=breakingnews

More Government “Help”

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/264663/libertarian-paternalism-twisted-jeff-stier

Now You’re Talking

If you've got an Android phone, try this: Hit the microphone icon on the home screen, then ask, "How many angstroms in a mile?" Use your normal speaking voice—don't speak slowly or strain to over-pronounce "angstrom." So long as you have a good Internet connection, the phone shouldn't take more than a second to recognize your question and shoot back a reply: 1.609344 × 10¹³.

This works with all kinds of queries. Say "what's 10 times 10 divided by 5 billion" and the phone will do math for you. Say "directions to McDonald's" or read out an address—even a vague one like "33^rd and Sixth, NYC"—and Android will pull up a map showing where you want to go. It works for other languages, too: Android's Translate app (also available for the iPhone) will not only convert your English into spoken French (among several other languages) but also has a "conversation mode" that will translate the French waiter's response back into English. And if that's not enough, Android lets you dictate your e-mail and text messages, too.

If you've tried speech-recognition software in the past, you may be skeptical of Android's capabilities. Older speech software required you to talk in a stilted manner, and it was so prone to error that it was usually easier just to give up and type. Today's top-of-the-line systems—like software made by Dragon—don't ask you to talk funny, but they tend to be slow and use up a lot of your computer's power when deciphering your words. Google's system, on the other hand, offloads its processing to the Internet cloud. Everything you say to Android goes back to Google's data centers, where powerful servers apply statistical modeling to determine what you're saying. The process is fast, can be done from anywhere, and is uncannily accurate. You can speak normally (though if you want punctuation in your email, you've got to say "period" and "comma"), you can speak for as long as you'd like, and you can use the biggest words you can think of. It even works if you've got an accent.

http://www.slate.com/id/2290516

Tsunami Pictures and Video

Just Amazing….

 

Japan tsunami videos Footage you have to see to believe  ZDNet

 

Japan disaster 30 powerful images of the earthquake and tsunami - Telegraph

Charlie Sheen Is Winning

by Bret Easton Ellis
complete article here.

With his tweets, his manic interviews, his insurgent campaign against the entertainment world, Sheen is giving America exactly what it wants out of a modern celebrity. In this week’s Newsweek, Bret Easton Ellis explains how you are completely missing the point if you think Sheen’s meltdown is about drugs.

“Drugs” is the first word Charlie Sheen utters in his only scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a cinematic relic from 1986. It takes place in a police station where Jeannie Bueller (Jennifer Grey), waiting to get bailed out by her mom and fuming about brother Ferris’s charmingly anarchic ways (he breaks all the rules and is happy; she follows all the rules and is unhappy), realizes she’s sitting next to a gorgeous (he was!) sullen-eyed dude in a leather jacket who looks like he’s been up for days on a drug binge. But he’s not manic, just tired and sexily calm, his face so pale it’s almost violet-hued. Annoyed, Jeannie asks, “Why are you here?” and Charlie, deadpan, replies, without regret: “Drugs.” And then he slowly disarms her bitchiness with his outrageously sexy insouciance, transforming her annoyance into delight (they end up making out).

That’s when we first really noticed Sheen, and it’s the key moment in his movie career (it now sums up everything that followed). He hasn’t been as entertaining since. Until now. In getting himself fired from his hit TV show Two and a Half Men
Illustration by Nathan Fox

[cut out a bunch of self gratification, here.  Then he continues….)
You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating. I know functioning addicts. They’re not that rare or that interesting. What this moment is about is Sheen solo. It’s about a well-earned midlife crisis played out on CNN instead of in a life coach’s office somewhere in Burbank. The midlife crisis is the moment in a man’s life when he realizes he can’t (or won’t) any longer maintain the pose that he thought was required of him. Tom Cruise had a similar meltdown at the same age in the summer of 2005, but his was more politely handled (and, of course, he was never known as an addict). Cruise had his breakdown while smiling. He’s always essentially been the good boy who can’t say “Fuck you” the way Sheen (or even someone as benign as Cee Lo) can. Cruise is still that altar boy from Syracuse who believes in the glamour of Empire earnestness, and this is ultimately his limitation as a movie star and as an actor.

But oh, no, not Sheen. Arrests. Accidental overdoses. Halfhearted stints in rehab. Martin Sheen’s teary-eyed press conference. The briefcase full of coke. The Mercedes towed out of the ravine. The misdemeanor third-degree assault on the third wife, who also went to rehab. Sheen allegedly threatening to cut off same wife’s head, put it in a box, send it to her mother. Sheen chain smoking on TMZ. The priceless dialogue. (On CBS executives: “They lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and look at their loser lives.”) The September 11 conspiracy theories. Shooting Kelly Preston in the arm. Fucking porn stars Ginger Lynn and Heather Hunter and Bree Olson. Compared with Cruise, Sheen has put on a mesmerizing and refreshing display of midlife-crisis honesty. He’s just himself, an addict—take it or leave it.

It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense: the most fascinating person wandering through the culture. (No, guys, it’s not Colin Firth or David Fincher or Bruno Mars or super-Empire Tiger Woods.) We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing—even in Sheen’s evasions there’s a truthful playfulness that makes Tiger’s mea culpa press conference look like something manufactured by Nicholas Sparks.

Anyone who’s put up with the fake rigors of celebrity (or suffered from addiction problems) has a kindred spirit here. The new fact is: If you’re punching paparazzi, you look like an old-school loser. If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. Not showing up to collect your award at the Razzies for that piece of crap you made? So Empire. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians. A lot of it is sheer bad-boy bravado—just cursing to see how people react, which is very post-Empire—but a lot of it is pure transparency, and on that level, Sheen is, um, winning.

What do people want from Sheen? I’m not denying he has drug and alcohol problems—or even that he might struggle with mental illness. But so do a lot of people in Hollywood who hide it much better—or who the celebrity press just doesn’t care enough about. What fascinates us is the hedonism he enjoys and that remains the envy of every man—if only women weren’t around to keep them liars. (His supposed propensity for violence against women hasn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either.) Do we really want manners? Civility? Empire courtesy? Hell, no. We want reality, no matter how crazy. And this is what drives the Empire to distraction: Sheen doesn’t care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea of PR. “Hey, suits, I don’t give a shit.” That’s his only commandment. Sheen blows open the myth that if men try hard enough, they will outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure and a life without rules or responsibilities.

We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks: Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire. No one knew it in 1986, but Charlie Sheen was actually Ferris Bueller’s dark little brother all along.

Remember the ‘80 Sexy Workout Videos? 2011 Update!

Antarctica Pictures

 

See Pics Here

Men's Rules: Women should learn these!

Women, learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don't hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

Birthdays, Valentines, and Anniversaries are not considered by us to be opportunities to see if we can find the perfect present again!

Sometimes we are not thinking about you. Live with it.

Sunday = sports. It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.

Don't cut your hair. Ever. Long hair is always more attractive than short hair. One of the big reasons guys fear getting married is that married women always cut their hair, and by then you're stuck with her.

Ask for what you want. Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!

We don't remember dates. . . .Period!!

Most guys own three pairs of shoes - tops. What makes you think we'd be any good at choosing which pair, out of thirty, would look good with your dress?

Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.

Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.

Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 days.

If you won't dress like the Victoria's Secret girls, don't expect us to act like soap opera guys.

If you think you're fat, you probably are. Don't ask us. We've been tricked before!!

If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.

Let us ogle. We are going to look anyway; it's genetic.

You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.

Christopher Columbus did not need directions, and neither do we.

The relationship is never going to be like it was the first two months we were going out. Get over it. And quit whining to your girlfriends.

ALL men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.

If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.

We are not mind readers and we never will be. Our lack of mind-reading ability is not proof of how little we care about you.

If we ask what is wrong and you say "nothing", we will act like nothing's wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.

If you ask a question you don't want an answer to, expect an answer you don't want to hear.

Foreign films are best left to foreigners. (Unless it's Bruce Lee or some war flick where it doesn't really matter what they're saying anyway.)

BEER is as exciting for us as handbags are for you.

Thank you for reading this; Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight, but did you know, it's like camping.

A Group of Great Pictures

Follow this link

Then click on Slideshow above the first picture.

Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

This is long and the first few paragraphs is probably all you need to read, but the story is a disturbing indicator of how the health care industry is helping themselves and not their patients.

http://extragoodshit.phlap.net/?p=119475#more-119475

Self Explanatory

Cute

 

Is Your Job an Endangered Species?

This is an interesting read….

Technology is eating jobs—and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116340050218236.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#

“Confessions of a Juggler” by Tina Fey

My daughter recently checked out a book from the preschool library called “My Working Mom.” It had a cartoon witch on the cover. “Did you pick this book out all by yourself?” I asked her, trying to be nonchalant. Yes. We read the book, and the witch mother was very busy and sometimes reprimanded her daughter for messing things up near her cauldron. She had to fly away to a lot of meetings, and the witch’s child said something like “It’s hard having a working mom, especially when she enjoys her work.” In the heartwarming conclusion, the witch mother makes it to the child’s school play at the last second, and the witch’s child says she doesn’t like having a working mom but she can’t picture her mom any other way. I didn’t love it. I’m sure the two men who wrote this book had the absolute best intentions, but this leads me to my point. The topic of working moms is a tap-dance recital in a minefield.
It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam - which, let me make it very clear, I have not done - than it is to speak honestly about this topic.
What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? “How old are you?” “What do you weigh?” “When you and your twin sister are alone with Mr. Hefner, do you have to pretend to be lesbians?” No, the worst question is: “How do you juggle it all?”
“How do you juggle it all?” people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. “You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?” their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.
The second-worst question you can ask a woman is: “Are you going to have more kids?” This is rude. Especially to a woman like me, who is in her “last five minutes.” By that I mean my last five minutes of being famous is timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a baby.
Science shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after forty.
When my daughter says, “I wish I had a baby sister,” I am stricken with guilt and panic. When she says, “Mommy, I need Aqua Sand” or “I only want to eat gum!” or “Wipe my butt!,” I am less affected.
I thought that raising an only child would be the norm in New York, but I’m pretty sure my daughter is the only child in her class without a sibling. All over Manhattan, large families have become a status symbol. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying, “I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in elementary-school tuition fees each year. How you livin’?”
Now, I’m not really one for status symbols. I went to public school. I have all my original teeth and face parts. Left to my own devices, I dress like I’m hear to service your aquarium. But the kid pressure mounts for other reasons.
The woman who runs my local toy store that sells the kind of beautiful wooden educational toys that kids love (if there are absolutely no other toys around and they have never seen television) asks me, “Are you gonna have another one?”
A background actor on the set of “30 Rock” will ask, “You want more kids?” “No, no,” I want to say. Why would I want more kids when I could be here with you having an awkward conversation over a tray of old Danishes?
The ear-nose-and-throat doctor I see about some stress-induced canker sores offers, unsolicited, “You should have another one. I had my children at forty-one and forty-two. It’s fine.” Did she not hear the part about the stress-induced canker sores?
My parents raised me never to ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold non-food.
Behind Door No. 2, you have the movie business. Shouldn’t I seize the opportunity to make a few more movies in the next few years? Think of the movies I could make!
“Magazine Lady”: The story of an overworked woman looking for love, whose less attractive friend’s mean boss is played by me…when Bebe Neuwirth turns the part down.
“The Wedding Creeper”: An over-worked woman looking for love sneaks into weddings and wishes strangers well on their wedding video, only to fall in love with a handsome videographer (Gerard Butler or a coatrack with a leather jacket on it), despite the fact that when they first met they knocked over a wedding cake, causing an old lady (Academy Award winner Jane Fonda) to rap.
Next, a strategically chosen small part in a respectable indie dramedysemble called “Disregarding Joy,” in which I play a lesbian therapist who unexpectedly cries during her partner’s nephew’s bris. Roger Ebert will praise my performance, saying I was “brave to grow that little mustache.”
Finally, for money, I play the villain in the live-action “Moxie Girlz” movie, opposite a future child star who at this moment is still a tickly feeling in Billy Ray Cyrus’s testicles.
How could I pass up those opportunities? Do I even have the right to deprive moviegoers of those experiences?
These are the baby-versus-work life questions that keep me up at night. There’s another great movie idea! “Baby Versus Work”: A hardworking baby looking for love (Kate Hudson) falls for a handsome pile of papers (Hugh Grant). I would play the ghost of a Victorian poetess who anachronistically tells Kate to “go for it.”
I debate the second-baby issue when I can’t sleep. “Should I? No. I want to. I can’t. I must. Of course not. I should try immediately.”
I get up to go to the bathroom and study myself in the mirror. Do I look like someone who should be pregnant? I look good for forty, but I have the quaggy jawline and hollow cheeks of a mom, not a pregnant lady. This decision cannot be delayed.
And what’s so great about work, anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old. Work won’t drive you to the radiologist’s for a mammogram and take you out afterward for soup. It’s too much pressure on my one kid to expect her to shoulder all those duties alone. Also, what if she turns on me? I am pretty hard to like. I need a backup.
And who will be my daughter’s family when my husband and I are dead from stress-induced canker sores? She must have a sibling. Hollywood be damned. I’ll just be unemployable and labelled crazy in five years, anyway.
Let me clarify. I have observed that women, at least in comedy, are labelled “crazy” after a certain age.
FEMALE WRITER: You ever work with XXX XXXX?
MALE AGENT (dismissive): She’s crazy now.
FEMALE WRITER: You know who I loved growing up? XXXXX McXXX. What about her for this part?
MALE WRITER: I don’t know. I hear she’s pretty batshit.
FEMALE WRITER. I got a call today from XXX XXX.
MALE PRODUCER: Ugh. We had her on the show once. She was a crazy assache. She wanted to see her lines ahead of time. She had all these questions.
I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all “crazy.” I have a suspicion - and hear me out, because this is a rough one - that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.
The only person I can think of who has escaped the “crazy” moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.
This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated. Network executives really do say things like “I don’t know. I don’t want to fuck anybody on this show.”
(To any exec who has ever said that about me, I would hope you at least have the self-awareness to know that the feeling is extremely mutual.)
It seems to me the fastest remedy for this “women are crazy” situation is for more women to become producers and hire diverse women of various ages. That is why I feel obligated to stay in the business and try hard to get a place where I can create opportunities for others, and that’s why I can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody’s business and I’ll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.
And now it’s four o’clock in the morning.
To hell with everybody! Maybe I’ll just wait until I’m fifty and give birth to a ball of fingers! “Merry Christmas from Tina, Jeff, Alice, and Ball of Fingers,” the card will say. (“Happy Holidays” on the ones I send to my agents.)
I try to think about anything else so I can go back to sleep. I used to cling to the fact that my mom had me unexpectedly at forty, only to realize a couple of years ago that I had the math wrong and she was thirty-nine. A world of difference, in my insomniac opinion.
My mom was conceived in the U.S., born in Greece, and brought back here as an infant. Because of this, she never gets called for jury duty.
She grew up speaking both English and Greek, and when I was in elementary school she volunteered to be a classroom aide, because of the lot of the Greeks in our neighborhood were “right off the boat,” as she would say, and needed a translator. Sometimes the teachers would ask her to translate bad news: “Please tell Mrs. Fondulas that her son is very disruptive.” And my mom would nod and say in Greek, “George is a lovely boy.” Because she knew that if she translated what the teacher really said the kid would get a beating and the mother would hate her forever out of embarrassment.
Little kids’ birthdays in my neighborhood were simple affairs. Hot dogs, Hawaiian Punch, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, followed by cake and light vomiting. (Wieners, punch, and spinning into barfing would later be referred to as “the Paris Hilton.”) I would always complain to my mother after the Greek kids’ parties, because they served Italian rum cake. Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate. No one ever ate it. It just got thrown away.
Cake Time is supposed to be the climax of a birthday, but instead it was a crushing disappointment for all. I imagine it’s like being at a bachelor party, only to find that the stripper has overdosed in the bathroom.
My mom finally explained to me that the reason the “Greeky Greeks,” as she called them, got the Italian rum cake was that it was the most expensive item in the bakery. They wanted the adults at the party to know they could afford it. Anyway, is that what I’m trying to do with this second-baby nonsense? Am I just chasing it because it’s the hardest thing for me to get and I want to prove that I can do it?
Do I want another baby? Or do I just want to turn back time and have my daughter be a baby again?
Some of you must be thinking, Well, what does your husband want? He’s a part of this decision, too, you know! He wants me to stop agonizing, but neither of us knows whether that means go for it or move on.
Why not do both, like everybody else in the history of earth? Because things that most people do naturally are often inexplicably difficult for me. And the math is impossible. No matter how you add up the months, it means derailing the TV show where two hundred people depend on me for their income, and I take that stuff seriously. Like everyone from Tom Shales to Jeff Zucker, I thought “30 Rock” would be cancelled by now.
I have a great gynecologist, who is as gifted at listening as she is at rectal exams. I went for my annual checkup and, tired of carrying this anxiety around, burst into tears the moment she said hello. I laid it all out for her, and the main thing I took away from her was the kind of simple observation that only an impartial third party can provide. “Either way, everything will be fine,” she said, smiling, and for a little while I was pulled out of my anxious, stunted brain cloud. “Everything will be fine” was a possibility that had not occurred to me.
That night, as I was putting the witch book in my daughter’s backpack to be returned to school, I asked her, “Did you pick this book because your mommy works? Did it make you feel better about it?” She looked at me matter-of-factly and said, “Mommy, I can’t read. I thought it was a Halloween book.”

Lasting Memories

The course was ‘How to prevent Alzheimer’s’. The project of the day was:
‘Keep Your Mind Working. Try to Create Something from Memory.’

Amazing Snow Picture

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee - The Oatmeal

Some of these are actually interesting.  Work through to the end.

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee - The Oatmeal

Trimming the Budget

This is pretty cool.

Interesting History

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families
used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken and
Sold to the tannery . . . if you had to do this to survive
You were “Piss Poor”

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t
even afford to buy a pot . . . they “didn’t have a pot to
piss in” & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands and complain
because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it,
think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about
the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their
yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by
June. However, since they were starting to smell . . …
Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting
Married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man
of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then
all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the
children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so
dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the
saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water!”

Houses had thatched roofs – thick straw – piled high, with no
wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get
warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs)
lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and
sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof . … .
Hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the
house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs
and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence,
a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top
afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into
existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other
than dirt. Hence the saying, “Dirt poor.”

The wealthy had

slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet,
so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their
footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh
when you opened the door, it would all start slipping
outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way.
Hence: a thresh hold.

(Getting quite an education, aren’t you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big
kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit
the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly
vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the
stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold
overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes it
had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence
the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas
porridge in the pot nine days old.

Sometimes they could

obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When
visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show
off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “bring home
the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests
and would all sit around and chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high
acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food,
causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with
tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were
considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt
bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests
got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky.
The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of
days.
Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare
them for burial.
They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the
family would gather
around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up.
Hence the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running
out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins
and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the
grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins
were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they
realized they had been burying people alive . . .
So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through
the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night
(the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone
could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

And that’s the truth . . … … Now, whoever said History was
boring!!!