Please accept my sincerest apologies...

I am having the busiest week EVER. And as such, I haven't been able to find much time to blog. So I am going to aim for the lowest common denominator and post eye-candy.

I know that guys are turned on by looks, so:

And, I know that girls are turned on more by intellect and mystery, so here's one for the ladies:

See you guys really soon :)

Men are from mars, women are from venus

I think that the difference between men and women is never more apparent than when faced with the task of buying gifts.

Whilst buying gifts for my mother, or girlfriend, or 'girl-pals' requires weeks or forethought and planning, buying gifts for guys is a much simpler affair. For instance, here in the UK, father's day is coming up. It's still over a week away and I hadn't even thought about what I am going to get him but I stumbled across something in the shops today which I immediately knew was the perfect gift.

It was.... drumroll... a 3.5kg jar of pickled onions.

Straight away I knew it was perfect. I'll let you know what he thinks next week. :D

Grown-ups wearing 'funny' t-shirts!

Recently, I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt which proclaimed that during his participation in the 'Sex Olympics', he emerged as the U.K. champion. Now, clearly this is intended to humourously imply that he is good at sex. But I think it fails to do so because the olympic games are an international event. So to be the U.K. champion is not actually that much of an achievement. It's like saying, "I'm good at sex... but not that good".

Now this might be funny to a somebody below the age of 16... but for a grown man to be wearing it, in what was quite a fancy bar, strikes me as slightly pathetic.

It's not the only example of an ill-advised 'witty' t-shirt I've seen. I used to know a guy who wore this beauty on a tshirt:

I don't even.

I also cringe whenever I see "FBI: Female Body Inspector" t-shirts.

Have you seen any 'funny' vêtements?

Laziness and Lethargy: my first love!

Today for the first time in a long time, I have the house to myself. This is a rare occurrence these days and so I am going to make the most of it by walking around my house in a state of semi-undress and generally doing NOTHING! :)

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah. This also means that my blogging might be cut short due to

I really like drinking tea

Like all British people I drink a lot of tea. Some say too much, but I say that there is no such thing as too much. And sometimes with my hectic and stressful life, I end up drinking coffee instead, but what I really love is tea. It is bloody delicious. Nice 'n strong. No sugar. Tiny bit of milk.

I mainly drink breakfast tea, but I also like green tea, jasmine tea and rooibois.

Yum yum yum yum yum.

Ooh, I can be *such* a bitch!

People never change their minds. OK, they do, but not often. Even when presented with devastatingly powerful evidence, people still cling onto their convictions. This is well known in science.... In science, people rarely change their minds about theories they hold dear, it's just that eventually all the people who support the bad theories die and are replaced by new generations of scientists who have been brought up on the newer, better theories. If you want a recent example, look up the "Steady State" vs. "Big Bang" theories. The "Steady State" theory has been long forgotten, nowadays, not because its exponents were ever convinced by the "Big Bang" theory, but because they died.

Another example is theism vs. atheism. It is extremely rare to see somebody switch sides. But anyway,what got me thinking about this is that on the rare occasion that we have an argument, it always follows a predictable formula which looks something like this:

The loop doesn't go on forever though. I try to brake the cycle by changing the subject... this works for a while until we dive back into the argument. :D It's a good job I love her (and she's hot).

Anyway, I don't think I can be bothered to write any more and you certainly can't be bothered to read it.

Love and kisses,
x x x

A quick hello...

Hey there guys :o)

Things have been pretty quiet on here for the past week or so because I am right in the middle of exams. 3 down, 3 to go. They're all going well so far, and hopefully this is a trend that will continue.

I assure you that by the end of next week, I'll be back into the blogosphere to carry on with my usual onslaught of wit and wisdom.

Love and kisses.

Summer of Love

It seems my blog posts are getting lazier. Last time was a YouTube video and this time, a link to some awesome art by a guy named Saiman Chow. See his website here.

His work is beautiful, surreal and humourous. I first found out about him when a friend linked me to his 'Summer of love' collection which features pencil drawings of interspecies passionate kisses such as this sensual union between a lady and a pussy-cat.

There are more on Saiman's website, which I wholeheartedly recommend you check out.

That's all for now, peeps! :o)

Colin Hammer: Urban Survivor

There are already a lot of good blogs around which link to funny/great YouTube videos, and I don't want to tread on their toes but when I saw this I couldn't resist sharing it with my loyal and loving followers.

This is the first episode. There is another one on YouTube. I know it's 10-minutes long and your paltry attention spans can't manage that, but trust me when I say that it is worth the effort even if you have to crack out the Ritalin. :P




I hope you enjoy it and share it with your friends :D

Too many clothes; not enough space...

My girlfriend recently moved in with me. She brought with her several square kilometres* of absolute junk. She doesn't agree that it is junk, though. She says it is "clothes, jewellery, make-up and pretty-things."
Whatever it is, the fact of the matter is that there is just not enough room for it all. I love her and everything, but no man should have to put up with this amount of crap in his house.

So, I began to look for solutions, and it turns out that this problem is one which has troubled philosophers such as Socrates and Plato, right through to Descartes and Bentham; and one which continues to bewilder 21st century thinkers such as Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins.

I think I might have found the answer, though. A young scholar named Tinie Tempah (seen below) writes:

"I've got so many clothes, I keep some at my Aunt's house"

Hopefully this is a piece of advice that my girlfriend will be willing to adhere to because the current arrangement of girly-crap all over my beloved bachelor-pad is unsustainable. Does anybody else have this problem?

*kilometres are what British people call 'kilometers'

Look at these chickens!

Just a short post today. I wasn't planning on updating until after the weekend but I thought of this and I couldn't resist.

A few of my friends keep chickens and so I have become familiar with a fair few of the rarer and more exciting breeds. My favourite type, though, are these Silke hens, which I fell in love with from the moment I first encountered one.

Now, how adorable is that? Silke hens just look so preposterous, they should only be found in a Pixar or Dreamworks film. But they real, and they walk around my friend's back garden. I've spent many a happy hour in the sunshine with a cup of tea, watching these fantastic creatures wander around.

That's all, folks.
Peace and love!

Female Badminton Players MUST Wear Skirts

The Badminton World Federation has decided that the best way to promote the sport will be to appeal to fans more base instincts... as of June 1st 2011, all female badminton players will have no option but to wear shorts if they want to compete... I'm not kidding here, the only reason behind the move is to make the girls look more "stylish and aesthetic" on order to attract more people to watch the events.

I am speechless.

Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely in favour of athletic young ladies wearing skirts, but introducing rules like this, seems a little bit backwards. The BWF are already facing criticism from many groups, expecially from people like the Pakistan Badminton Federation who say that the rule offends their religious sensibilities (an entirely different issue).

I wonder what will come of this? I'm sure other sports have uniform regulations, but I expect that they justify them in terms of safety or fair play.

Anyway, that's it for now. See you all soon. :o)

My favourite word...

Today I've been thinking a lot about one word in particular... OK it was a slow day (but that's the topic for tomorrow's blog post)... right, I bet you're itching to know what the word is.

It is....

*drumroll*

Pulchritude

I hope that wasn't too much of an anti-climax. The word is 'pulchritude' and it means beauty. If something is beautiful, it is pulchritudinous. 

 
What I like so much about it, is how the meaning of the word is so different to the way the word sounds. Say it out loud! It gets stuck in your throat like a bitter pill. It sounds too much like 'repulsive' or 'puke'. When you say it, all the saliva in your mouth gets smooshed around. It's such a juxtaposition to objects it describes. And for that reason, I love this word.

That's it for now, folks!

(My girlfriend hates it when I describe her as being pulchritudinous, lol)

More Unusual Song Lyrics...

I am a firm believer that in music, it is the rhythm, melody and harmony and not the lyrics that are important. That's not to say that I don't appreciate great lyrics... of course not, it's just I feel that if a song sounds good then it doesn't matter what the words mean.

But sometimes, lyrics stand out in songs not not because they are great, but because they are so confusing! For example, The Jackson 5 wrote a song called "I want you back" where a young Michael Jackson tries to convince a young lady to leave her current partner, and be with him instead. One lyric, early on in the song, reads:

" When I had you to myself
I didn't want you around
Those pretty faces always made you
Stand out in a crowd "

 Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but is MJ really saying to the girl, "Hey, I never noticed you before, because, compared to the hordes of beautiful girls that I know, you are nothing special?"

Really, Michael? I mean, I know he was young, but this is a very dangerous opening gambit when you're trying to woo a young dame. Or have I misunderstood?

Anyway, this poor choice of words does nothing to detract from one of the greatest songs of the 20th century.

Love and Marriage

I know that 'Royal Wedding' fever has been trumped by 'Osama is Dead' fever but I've always been a fashionably late sort of person. And what has got me thinking about it again is that just yesterday my girlfriend started humming 'Love and Marriage' by Frank Sinatra.

For those who are unfamiliar with the song, each verse begins with the lyric:

"Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage"

Now I started thinking about what this simile means. I'm assuming that in the analogy, love is the horse, and marriage is the carriage, because love carries the marriage along, not the other way around. What struck me, though, is that a horse and carriage is actually quite a perverse juxtaposition of nature with man-made, and frankly, the horse gets nothing out of the arrangement; and infact would be far happier were it not burdened with the additional weight.

I think Frank's analogy begins to really break down when you consider that some carriages require more than one horse... so perhaps this equates to a man having a mistress on the side. And also if the horse dies, the carriage is still perfectly usable with another horse; whilst if the love dies, a marriage falls flat on its backside.
Similarly, if a wheel falls off a carriage, there is no need to shoot the horse.

So, maybe it was a crappy comparison in the first place, or maybe I have destroyed the foundations of the institution of marriage. What do you think?

The relationship between effort and outcome.

I think that one of the main driving reasons people shy away from hard work is that the relationship between effort and work is non-linear. I'll give you an example.

Part of my workout is that I do half an hour on a rowing machine. Now rowing machines let you work as hard as you can, or go as slowly as you want. Now, if I were a lazier man, I think that in my half hour workout, I could put almost no effort in and manage to go about 5500m. I think I could do that easily and I'd not be short of breath at the end and I wouldn't even break a sweat. But what I tend to do, is go as hard as I can manage for the 30 minutes, and end up with a distance of about 7000m. (No laughing!)

What gets me here, is that although I am working approximately 100% harder, I am only seeing a 27% increase in the distance I go. This seems outrageously unfair.

Another example. If I do the bare minimum amount of work for a test (which I frequently do), as in attend most of the classes and get to the exam on time, I'll normally get about 60%. If I do a lot of work - I'll define this as 10 hours of studying - I'll manage 75%. So again, this huge increase in effort (10hrs compared to 0hrs) yields only a 25% increase in performance.

Obviously, if the extra effort meant a more significant improvement in results then I'd be more prepared to make the effort. But who said life was fair?

N.B. I was going to include a lovely sigmoid graph with this post, to illustrate my point, but making the graph turned out to be quite difficult (and it would only yield a small improvement in the quality of my blog post) so I decided to go for this picture of a fluffy bunny instead.

Books will beat the blues, says Philip Hensher

If you look at a guy with motor neurone disease, you can immediately see why it sucks to have the disease. You can imagine how it would affect you. And you wouldn't dream of suggesting that it was all in his head. Depression, another (albeit more common) neurological disease, is not afforded the same sympathy. And as such, people do not shy away from belittling the affliction, or dreaming up ways for the afflicted to overcome their disability.

Philip Hensher, for instance, believes that reading books will make people happier. And he implies that depression may even be caused by not reading enough. OK, well maybe he doesn't quite, but his recent column on the governments recommended amount of reading for school kids shows just the sort of ignorant and unhelpful attitude that pervades the modern psyche.

He asks:

Why shouldn't the GP, faced with an aimless, purposeless, depressed patient, not inquire "Are you reading enough?"

I'd suggest that Philip might not be 'reading enough' of the evidence-based lifestyle and medical interventions for major depression before he wades belittles the sufferers of a real and significant condition.

Besides that, though, I'm sure Phil is a lovely chap!

Blueberries are yummy

I read The Week because it amalgamates and distills the past weeks news and events down to bite size chunks which are much more palatable than reading 7-days worth of newspapers etc. I normally trust what it says because it doesn't have it's own agenda; it attempts uncouple the weeks events from the spin and speculation presented in other media. But, this week, when its science page reported a story from the Daily Fail which claimed that "Slimmers should start snacking on blueberries, as they slash the number of fat cells in the body by up to three-quarters (!), say scientists", this was my face:

The story originates from a press release (which I can't find: science-blogging n00b) from Texas Women's University where Dr. Shiwani Moghe has apparently shown that a chemical found in blueberries could prevent fat cell precursors from forming mature fat cells. Here is the abstract: Clicky!

The data are* yet to be published, but from what I can glean from the abstract, I can see that the Daily Mail's reporting of it is completely FUBAR. 

Here's what Dr. Moghe did: she cultured some cells from mouse embryos. The cells normally form fat cells (or at least cells which resemble fat cells in vitro). Then she added various amounts of blueberry extract to the culture medium (that's the juice that the cells grow in). Then she measured the rate at which the cells differentiated, the amount of fat in the cells and the rate at which they broke down the fat. Now, regardless of what her results are, its clear that this study cannot tell us what will happen to the fat cells in humans who eat blueberries.


There are a few things that I want to know before I'd encourage any portly-people up my blueberry intake. Firstly, how efficiently do out gastrointestinal tracts absorb these polyphenols? Secondly, how long do they last in our blood stream before they are metabolised or excreted? Thirdly, what concentration of polyphenols do fat cells see in vivo and how many blueberries would I have to eat to reach the concentrations that Dr. Moghe exposed her rat cell culture to? And finally, is the fat-cell precursor maturation model a good representation of how we gain weight?


And that is before we even consider whether or not the same effect would be seen in the much more complicated environment of a living organism or what other effects these polyphenols might have, especially at high doses. I'm not slating Dr. Moghe's work because it is a valid piece of research (if not very profound) , which I will read when it's published properly, but it doesn't even hint at the sort of extrapolations that the Daily Mail (and others) have hinted at: but nevertheless, these vultures will benefit from it.

A bit of a higgledy-piggledy post, I know, but hopefully I made my point. Thank you, and goodnight.



* using 'data' properly, as a plural, is one of life's little pleasures.

Audi's new slogan has a real ring to it

I can't help but wonder what it says about me, that my inaugural blog post is going to be about one of the more repulsive things I've ever seen on the internet, but nevertheless...

I was driving around earlier this afternoon and my eye was caught by this new Audi billboard (is that what we call them in England? I don't know...) which bears more than a little bit of a resemblance to Goatse. If you're unaware of what Goatse is, then trust me when I say that ignorance is bliss...And maybe it is just a coincidence, or it could be a graphic designer having fun, or maybe Baroness Susan Greenfield is right and the internet is affecting our subconscious minds. Who knows?

I didn't have a camera at the time but I made sure I had one in my car for the next time I went out and I snapped it... you're probably thinking that I could have just found the image on the Audi website, but it's not there. I sort of hope that somebody at Audi has noticed the gaffe and is quickly backpedaling.

I'm definitely not the first person to notice this, Count Libido seems to have pipped me to the post but I still thought that this might be worth pointing out.

And thus concludes my entry into the world of blogging.

See you soon.