Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

• A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel “inadequate”.
• A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.
• “The beach was too sandy.”
• A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.
• “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”
• “We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”
• “No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”
• “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home.”
• “My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”
• “I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller.”
• “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers – will we be OK staying here?”
• “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners.”
• “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”
• “We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”
• “It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”
• “I was bitten by a mosquito – no-one said they could bite.”
• “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”
• “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ’siesta’ time – this should be banned.”
• “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”
• “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”

I just really hope that they are isolated cases, otherwise a lot has to be said for the British tourist.

An interesting analysis of over 500,000 messages sent by new users on the dating website OkCupid, found some startling conclusions , and I have dutifully regurgitated the wholesome facts below to see what the best strategies are at getting a reply.

1) Literacy

Using a negative correlation (oooooooh!), it was found, rather unsurprisingly, that netspeak, textspeak, slang and poor spelling were all considerable turn-offs. In fact plotted against the average reply rate of 32%, using such words as ‘ur’, ‘r’, ‘u’, ‘ya’, and ‘luv’ dramatically lowered your chance of reply to as low as a pitiful 6%. So rule 1 – speak correctly!

2) Avoid physical compliments

The idea is here is by using compliments towards a person you haven’t even met yet, you risk alienating them and actually putting them off. Insincerity is another factor, not to mention if you keep telling someone they are beautiful, then the chances are you are not.

3) Use an unusual greeting.

Strangely enough, according to OkCupid’s analysis starting your messages with ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’ actually reduces your chances by up to 25%, whereas a staggering 55% reply rate was attributed to ‘How’s it going’. Just shows you what a cruel bitch online dating can be.

4) Don’t try and take it outside.

Such is the comfort of the relative anonymity of online dating websites is that if you try and mention alternative ways of contacting your prospective date, your chances of reply plummet. Mentioning ‘Chat’, ‘Email’, ‘MSN’, ‘Yahoo’, or even ‘GMail’ lowers your chance of reply to often less than 10%.

5) If you are male, be a pussy.

That’s my take on the analysis anyway. If you use words like ‘awkward’, ’sorry’, ‘probably’, and other self effacing words like ‘I have a vagina’, then your chances of reply boost significantly, almost doubling your chances in some cases. It may be the case that it helps the writer seem less threatening, but take it too far and use the word ‘please’ and your reply rate shoots down to a measly 22%.

6) Atheism gets people hot under the collar.

And finally, to the headline piece. I have no idea why people would mention Atheism so much in an opening message to someone they have never spoken to before (it appeared 342 times per 10,000 messages), but apparently it works. Response rates for Atheism soared above all other religions, so much so that emphatically mentioning God decreases your chances. The baby Jesus however, gives you a slight advantage. Must be those chubby cheeks.

Just goes to show you what a fickle lot we are with online dating, and it could also be said that these biases are closer to our true nature as we have the bounty and blessing of anonymity which does not necessarily afford us the same privileges in the real world. It may also be limiting, by being so cut and dry with our choices we do not necessarily open ourselves up to new and interesting people, who speak all in text abbreviations, tell you you are pretty every 10 seconds, and suggests going on MSN to talk about God.

This is just a brief post to show you why I love Norway (& Norwegians ), even their glaciers have style!

A crying face is revealed in a melting glacier
located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway.

Dr. Palaniappan says that his 33 years of research shows that heat friction brought on by homosexual activities will turn the body “hyperacidised,” increasing opportunities of infection by H1N1, the virus causing Swine Flu. Palaniappan emphasised, however, that intercourse between opposite-sex partners was “absolutely safe,” presumably because heterosexual sex is less hot.

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsindex.php?id=431369

Sorry for the lack of updates, my dissertation for my MSc is due on the 28th of August, and I am frantically piecing it all together in time.

With the worldwide organic industry worth $73 billion in 2007, somebody must think its better, and in fact the 5 main reasons are cited below, followed with my own personal thoughts together with some studies to back it up.

1) Organic food tastes better.

An impartial study completed by Showtime’s Penn & Teller concluded that :

In a blind taste test with organic and non-organic foods
71% preferred non-organic

80% guessed incorrectly which was organic

To further demonstrate the psychological effect of taste, they split a non-organic banana into two, and offered both halves to volunteers, who were told that one was organic and one wasn’t. 90% of volunteers claimed to detect a difference, each preferring the ‘organic’ choice, despite it being THE SAME PIECE OF FRUIT.

2) Organic food has higher nutritional value, and is therefore better for you.

The Organic Consumers Association of America want the entire American agricultural system to convert to organic practices as soon as possible . Their reason – they claim higher levels of vitamins, antioxidants, proteins and lower amounts of nitrates in organic foods.

There is no evidence to suggest this – despite an average 30% difference in price. This link to the BBC news article gives an accurate summary of the FSA report
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8174482.stm

There is also talk about the worrying levels of hormones in milk and other dairy products. Estrogen is present in milk as part of the natural calving process, and therefore you are getting no less hormones by buying organic. This is also the same with meat, every cut of beef chicken or pork contains natural hormones, which are also contained in organic products.

3) Organic farmers do not use pesticides.

On the contrary -they do. They use naturally derived poisons from plants and other extracts, which are often untested and consequently unaware of the effect they may have on the environment.

In 2006, the American Cancer Society determined that there was ‘ no scientific evidence that pesticides and herbicide residues are a cause of cancers’. The average cup of coffee gives you 1000 times more cancer risk than a years worth of pesticide residues.

One example is Rotenone – a commonly used ‘organic’ pesticide, which has been found to cause Parkinson’s disease like symptoms if injected into rates, and also kills the freshwater snail Lymnaea stagnalis by attacking the mitochondria in its neurons.

A recent study compared the effectiveness of a rotenone-pyrethrin mixture versus a synthetic pesticide, imidan. Rotenone and pyrethrin are two common organic pesticides; imidan is considered a “soft” synthetic pesticide (i.e., designed to have a brief lifetime after application, and other traits that minimize unwanted effects). It was found that up to 7 applications of the rotenone- pyrethrin mixture were required to obtain the level of protection provided by 2 applications of imidan.

It seems unlikely that 7 applications of rotenone and pyrethrin are really better for the environment than 2 applications of imidan, especially when rotenone is extremely toxic to fish and other aquatic life.

It should be noted, however, that we don’t know for certain which system is more harmful. This is because we do not look at organic pesticides the same way that we look at conventional pesticides. We don’t know how long these organic pesticides persist in the environment, or the full extent of their effects.

When you look at lists of pesticides allowed in organic agriculture, you find warnings such as, “Use with caution. The toxicological effects of [organic pesticide X] are largely unknown,” or “Its persistence in the soil is unknown.” Again, researchers haven’t bothered to study the effects of organic pesticides because it is assumed that “natural” chemicals are automatically safe.

4) Organic farming is better for the environment

The greatest problem with organic food, is that it takes so much more land to produce a given amount of food. If we all switched our farming methods to organic food, estimates suggest that around 2-3 billion people would starve, as there simply would not be enough food being produced to sustain them.

By law, organic food can only be grown with natural fertiliser. And where does this come from? From our friend, the humble cow, responsible for 18% of all greenhouse emissions (more than cars, buses and airplanes combined).  Not to mention manure aids the spread and reproduction of E. coli and salmonella.

5) Buying organic produce helps to benefit small farmers.

Most organic foods in supermarkets come from large corporate suppliers. In fact, 20% of all organic food sold is grown in China – with its recent notorious melamine scares. Not to mention the ‘air miles’ to ship it around the world.

Conclusion
I am not advocating organic food, nor am I suggesting that you avoid it entirely – instead simply become a more informed consumer with these revelations of organic practises.

The city is clean, its people friendly and staggeringly attractive. Overweight people must have been put in a secret ghetto on the outskirts as I saw none. Also a surprisingly disproportionate population whom almost entirely consisted of people under 50. I found that the best way to see the city was by renting a bicycle (or in my case borrowing a decrepit fold-able painfully uncomfortable bike). The whole city has been designed for the bike in mind, testament to the large amounts of multi-storey bike parks dotted around the city. Cars are few and far between, and have to dodge cyclists, motorbikes and the trams.

An evening jaunt to Utrecht (a leafy university suburb about 25 minutes from Amsterdam) reinforced my love for the country, with wonderful traditional tall skinny deep Dutch houses (and their inhabitants), to a selection of good bars and restaurants and tolerant locals.

I also managed to attend a performance of the Orchester der KlangVerwaltung (nothing special but enjoyable nonetheless) at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, a fine hall with wonderful acoustics, which are world renowned. The performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E  major, with the distinct Wagner tubas, a rare instrument that was originally created for Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (which thankfully was not on the bill that night), was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was also being recorded for a later performance on Radio 4, and despite my very noisy (feigned) heart attack, I did not get picked up on the microphones. Fame, once again, passes me by.

I attach a few random photos, to be fair a lot of the time I was either cycling, ogling, eating, or reading, so I did not take as many photographs as perhaps I would like. I did spare an hour to do the delightfully touristic endeavour known as the canal cruise, which is why most of the photos have a hue of reflection from the domed windows of the boat.

So enjoyable I found my short trip that I was encouraged to seek employment in the city of which I am now seriously considering, not necessarily because of the wonderfully attractive populace, the culture and the atmosphere, but also the Dutch reliance on multilingual characteristics of life which would mean an expert understanding of the native language would not entirely be necessary.

And no, I did not smoke pot. Not even once. You would be interested to learn that 40.8% of the population of the USA have tried cannabis. The same statistics for the Netherlands is 22.6%

Last photo just for Harry, with the Maersk container

For more photos, the original source is
http://iraqiexpat.blogspot.com/2005/05/iraq-sandstorm-photos.html

http://www.galeriebertin.fr/en/artistes/liu-bolin.html