July 2006 Entries

July 30, 2006

Our cannibal past?

How full a man's stomach is can dictate the type of woman he will fancy, UK research suggests.

A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated.

The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman's body shape and regarded less curvy figures as more attractive.

The study appears in The British Journal of Psychology.

[etc etc]

They recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.

They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.

The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards and leggings.

The hungry men rated more of the heavier women as attractive than the men who were full up.
[full story on BBC Online]
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The alternative spin on this is that being attracted to big units makes you hungry. As well it might.

July 29, 2006

Back to the middle ages

I had the misfortune of spending 100 minutes driving home on Friday. The double misfortune was that I listened to the Bush/Blair news conference while my life inched by on the tarmac.

The Israel/Lebanon situation is a mess and not one easily resolved.

Hezbollah decided to annoy the hornets and rather than throw stones at the nest and run away, stood right next it while repeatedly whacking it with a stick. The result was as desired by Hezbollah as it was predictable by the rest of us.

Israel for its part defenestrated originality and went for all out reprisals. I am reminded of the Yakuza - they don't kill you; they kill your family, your friends, anyone who has ever met you. It is collective punishment for the entire population of the country that hosted Hezbollah. Illegal though collective punishment is, the Israeli government can barely be bothered to deny that this is the strategy.

Meanwhile Hezbollah is sitting pretty. Israel cannot possibly afford to back away now - that would be admission that the radicals cannot be defeated. So instead they will need to take southern Lebanon and occupy it while Hezbollah simply disappear back into the general population and pick off Israeli soldiers one or two a week.

It is history repeating.

The difference this time, supposedly, is the new world order(tm). We have an economic powerhouse that is happy to use military might to spread democracy and freedom, and to hold on to its wealth. The US has a choice between letting this play out for the next ten years and then start the cycle again, or intervening.

Not for the first time, the US figures that long term debilitating war is better for business than short term political and military action. So the US are busy arming Israel, ensuring the Hezbollah has no shortage of backers, while the UK pretends to care about the humanitarian crisis and tags along with uncle.

Bush and Blair declared a 'framework' and a 'clear path ahead', without actually saying what they were going to do. The 'framework' will do nothing to protect the peoples of nothern Israel or southern Lebanon. The framework is made of air and gutlessness. The framework means lets run through this tired old shit just one more time.

The alternative is to come down heavily on those who continue the violence. Stop the direct arms supply, intervene in the indirect supply, support the institutions of state in Lebanon, promote trade and wealth creation, facilitate talks and slap down those who act against any or all of these.

Unfortunately there is no new world order, there is no war on terror, there is no promotion of democracy and human dignity. There is only the middle ages repeating and repeating.

July 27, 2006

A housekeeper

I have acquired a housekeeper, and about time too. The effort of maintaining the stately home was become too much for my increasingly infirm body.

The housekeeper is called Molly Maid and she will be cleaning, washing and ironing.

And it is all free of charge. Sweet.

In other news, I have rented out one of my rooms to someone called, er, Molly. She gets the run of the house and her own bathroom. And it is all free of charge.

July 26, 2006

Dumb criminal of the week

A prison inmate pleaded guilty on Tuesday to sending letters to the FBI and secret service that included bomb and anthrax threats - as well as his full name and inmate number.

Donald Ray Bilby, 30, pleaded guilty in US District Court in Trenton to one count of false information and hoaxes after he sent five letters demanding authorities deposit $US20,000 ($NZ32,568) in his county jail inmate account because he needed money for bail, the US Attorney's Office said.

"I think it's fair to say we were not dealing with a great criminal mind here," US Attorney Christopher Christie said in a statement.

Bilby signed all the letters using his full name and inserted his inmate number beneath his signature. One letter to the FBI included demands for money, a piece of paper labelled "anthrax" and a white powdery substance that turned out to be harmless.

He faces a maximum of five years in prison after first serving a sentence for automobile theft.

July 24, 2006

Crime in the boondocks

We had the police in the office last week after we reported a case of credit card fraud. Most companies don't bother getting the police involved but I figure it is always worth reporting a misdeed - our money is lost but it might help a future potential victim.

It being another slow day for the local fuzz, two officers turned up and while they were taking statements and drinking tea I asked them what other stuff that had been working on that morning. We were their third call of the day and the other two were:

1. Milk theft
Not a dairy heist but the theft, from a doorstep, of a pint of milk. Cost of property stolen: £0.46. That is less than a buck my dear yank friends.

2. Dead badger
Someone called in to report a dead badger in the road. This is rural England - at this time of year there is a daily slaughter of the innocents. Later in the year the youngsters have learned a bit of road sense but right now it is the killing fields. Badgers, rabbits, deer and birds. Calling to report a dead badger is like calling to report the sunrise. Technically it could be a hazard to traffic, but believe me, a dead badger is less of a hazard than a live one and within a day it will look like a striped doormat.

There really is a different pace of life out here.

July 22, 2006

flanerie.org on speed

I have put flanerie on a diet and reduced the homepage size by around a third. In theory this means it has been loading a lot quicker since a couple of weeks ago.

Have any of my regular readers noticed?

I have also started work on a redesign, although it is very embryonic.

July 21, 2006

Never take a statement with your mouth full

More strange behaviour from the antipodes with this nugget:

--
A New Zealand policewoman has been allowed to keep her job, despite moonlighting as a prostitute.

The Auckland officer, whose name and rank have not been revealed, apparently took up the part-time work due to financial difficulties.

A police spokesman said although secondary employment was allowed, prostitution was "inappropriate and incompatible with policing".

Prostitution has been legal in New Zealand since 2003.
[continued on BBC Online]
---

Different countries have different standards and if prostitution is legal in New Zealand, and police moonlighting is allowed, then so be it.

In the UK police officers often moonlight as racist louts and occasionally get confused between the two personas. Senior police offers also like moonlighting as politicians, and one chief constable has become a blogger. It is the same one that said that English flags in Wales could cause racism and public unrest. I have yet to visit his blog, but I am hoping it is called 'The Police Intelligence Conundrum.'

Back to the matter, as it were, at hand - Officer Goodhead of the Auckland police. I guess her influencing skills could be honed by her second career, but it is not difficult to imagine difficult situations. Arresting someone for lewd behaviour perhaps, only to discover that the offender is a 'client' from the previous night; or unintentionally 'hooking up' with a witness in a future trial.

The solution would be to keep it within the force. She could be the official force hooker, allowing her to make ends meet (apparently this is known as a spit-roast) while avoiding potential conflicts with the criminal justice system.

You see? There is a common sense solution to every situation.

July 20, 2006

Sharing a bed makes men stupid

Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest.

When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day.

The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels.

According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply.

Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s.

Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors.

The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked.

Although the men reported they had slept better with a partner, they fared worse in the tests, with their results suggesting they actually had more disturbed sleep.

Both sexes had a more disturbed night's sleep when they shared their bed, Professor Kloesch told a meeting of the Forum of European Neuroscience.

But women apparently managed to sleep more deeply when they did eventually drop off, since they claimed to be more refreshed than their sleep time suggested.
[continued on BBC Online]
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This is so true for me. The best way of surviving a long term relationship is to have separate bedrooms or, even better, separate houses in the same street.

July 18, 2006

UK office workers 'at it like rabbits'

It's official: the UK office is a steaming cauldron of sexual desire in which colleagues exchange flirtatious emails and smouldering looks as a ritual prelude to forming the work-based beast with two backs.

That, at least, is according to research by the Aziz Corporation, which concludes that not only have one third of Brits had a "fling" with a fellow worker, but that the majority of managers consider the practice "perfectly acceptable".

Indeed, 83 per cent of big cheeses polled presented no objections to inter-staff rumpy-pumpy, and 53 per cent said they'd indulge in a bit themselves - even if it were with a junior colleague.

Your average boss does not, however, simply pounce on the receptionist and drag her into the server room for some light executive relief. Forty-three per cent admitted they'd "fancied someone at work but were unsure about what to do about it" - a far cry from the days when scullery maids were considered a fair target for the master's cruel intentions.

The hoi polloi, meanwhile, are apparently going at it like jackrabbits. In addition to the aforementioned 35 per cent who've enjoyed a brief encounter with a fellow worker, 29 per cent have formed long-term relationships with someone from work.
[continued here on El Reg]

July 17, 2006

Another family death

Uncle Ted, husband of the sister of my granddad, died this morning aged 84.

Granddad's mind faded while his body continued. Ted's body faded while his mind continued.

Which is the better way to go? Is any demise preferable?

Perhaps most people's first choice would be to continue in rude health forever, not because eternal life is necessarily desirable, but because death seems so grotesquely unpleasant. Yet that choice is closed to us - death comes to us all, with no grace or favour.

So what choices does that leave us?

The sudden heart attack? Bent in agony and unable to breathe, with no time to say 'goodbye' or 'sorry' or 'I love you'?

The deterioration of mental capacity? Knowing the mind is slipping away but not knowing where it is leading you, and seeing the distress of those around you who can only spectate?

Or the physical decline? Trapped within a body that won't let you speak, still thinking, still calculating, like a permanent state of drowning.

If we could choose a way to die, could we really choose?

I couldn't.

July 16, 2006

Chihuahua on the rampage

A pint-sized chihuahua known as Bertie is wreaking havoc in Otaki, rampaging around town, terrorising large dogs and children and causing state highway motorists grief.

Dog rangers say the tiny dog is a recidivist offender and has had them on the run for more than four years with his hell-raising antics.

Repeatedly jailed at the local pound, Bertie is a menace known to confront dogs up to 10 times his size, repeatedly lunging at and threatening to bite young children and using State Highway 1 as his playground.

The terror of Otaki is currently in custody but is an accomplished escape artist known to have fled his own home and the pound on several occasions.

Kapiti Coast District councillor Alan Tristram said he had met Bertie during a brief visit to the pound to collect his dog.

"I was very taken by him – there was something engaging about the way he looked at me," Mr Tristram said.

The council would not comment on the case or Bertie's fate.
[from stuff.co.nz]

July 15, 2006

Erratum

Memo to self: do not write blog posts at 6.30am

The second book for the book group is Madame Bovary, not Frankenstein. I did have a minor doubt yesterday but figured someone would email me if I had it wrong.

Sure enough I got an email from Belinda Ballcock pointing out my ineptitude. Belinda is the book group queen and also the mother of my third wife.

July 14, 2006

The book club

Book clubs were the cool new thing about three years ago, and typically for me I have waited until now to join one.

Not that it was a conscious decision. I was invited to join one and couldn't think of a good reason not to. So I am a founder member of 'the book club'. Action item 1 is to think of a better name.

I had always wondered what book clubs 'do' and had prepared a few notes on the chosen book (The Time Traveler's Wife) for page quality, binding, smell and the niceness of the ISBN number (a bit disappointing: 0099464462)

Wide of the mark as it turned out.

What book clubs do is gossip, drink wine and eat tortilla chips, then move on to discussing good and bad things about the story.

I read the book on Christmas Day (there is a bit of a story about that which I will recount another time) and six weeks ago I sent the book to a bookcrossing member in Devon. As a result I was working from unreliable memory and managed to invent an entire chapter, which on reflection comes from Donna Tartt'sThe Little Friend. Although maybe I have remembered that wrong too and it really was in Time Traveler and the book club harridans were just messing with me.

Notwithstanding that, it was a very enjoyable evening and in the tradition of overambitious beginnings we have resolved to read two books and watch one DVD for the next meeting:

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Frankenstein
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The first and third were my choices and the second I should have read by now but never got around to it.

I had better get on with it.

July 13, 2006

Mumbai bombing

A bit of a pisser for sure, but there is a deeper significance to the coordinated bombing attack on Mumbai earlier this week.

11/9 New York
11/3 Madrid
7/7 London
11/7 Mumbai
(if you are American you will have to switch the numbers to have any hope of understanding them)

I have figured out what the finest idiots in the CIA never could - Islamic terrorists hate odd numbers.

Personally this is a cause for celebration. I was born on 10/4 and will be one of the last to be beheaded.

July 11, 2006

Police say severed foot not suspicious

This is one of my favourite headlines of the year so far. I also like the final sentence where the lazy kiwi cops just make up some shit rather than bothering looking for a missing person.

---

A severed human foot has been found on a beach by a man walking his dog.

Detective Ashley Gurney said the foot – in a black ankle sock and a dark blue Skechers velcro-strapped sneaker – was found on Himatangi Beach, near Palmerston North, about 1pm on Saturday.

Police are not treating the find – 3km south of Himatangi – as suspicious.

The left foot, around a size eight, belongs to a man and police believe it was only recently washed up on the beach.

"There's no sheared cut," Gurney said.

"To the naked eye it looks like the sea's pulled the body apart.

"It's been raging around in the water and nature's taken its toll."

There appeared to be no fish or animal bites.

Gurney said police were checking the find against any local missing persons, but would widen the search over the national database.

"We have no reason to suspect foul play at the moment – we're treating it as a missing persons," he said.

"We're really hoping for help from the public to identify the person."

The foot was sent to Palmerston North police station for forensic and DNA testing.

In the next few days it will be removed from the shoe and medically examined.

Gurney said the foot did not belong to missing pensioner Jim Alexander, who wandered away from a Palmerston North resthome more than a week ago.

Police believe Alexander may have fallen into the Manawatu River and drowned, but have not yet recovered a body.

July 10, 2006

I missed a trick

As exits go, Zinedine Zidane's was pretty spectacular. Playing his last ever game of professional football he headbutted one of the stylish Italian guys and got his marching orders.

Typically gallic, of course. He joins Eric Cantona in the pantheon of crazed french geniuses, along with the chap at the castle: "I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

Being English, reserved and the son of a hairdresser, my exits have always been very subdued. No histrionics for me, just a quiet exit with a box of CDs and cuddly toys.

Oh, and several thousand pounds of misappropriated funds, but I'd better not mention that.

July 9, 2006

Detox

I am having a detox weekend. I have always been a little sceptical of the whole idea of a detox diet so while I was passing time daydreaming of pizza I decided to look it up:

A class of diets whose underlying assumption is that the body accumulates toxins that must be purged, especially after unhealthy periods such as over-eating during festivals. Toxins, in this case, refer to toxic substances - often of undefined nature - from foods, the environment and the body's own wastes. "Detox diet" is a common phrase, as is "I'm on a detox".

If I am such a sceptic, why am I doing it? The aim is to drop a couple of pounds and it seems as good a short term diet as any. Not that I am following a prescribed diet - I made up my own. Only fruit, salad and tea for a whole weekend.

My post-vacation diet has been pretty successful but I just wanted to round it off with a final sprint. Ideally I would like to lose 2 very specific pounds of fat which have taken up love-handle positions. Losing specific fat is like trying to only breath air from a certain part of the room, but there is no harm in hoping.

Meanwhile I have been feasting on apples, bananas, strawberries, figs, dates, prunes, orange juice and a big mixed salad, with only balsamic to liven it up. It is a diet that is not lacking in taste, or in volume of food, but it still isn't as scrummy as marmite on toast, pizza and fish and chips. Ideally all on one plate.

Of course, the best diet isn't a diet - it is to eat healthily and in moderation on a permanent basis. But I prefer the three-stage dieting process: binging, self-loathing, purging. Repeat at will.

July 8, 2006

Circular

This morning I made a start of my decluttering exercise. This involves finding all the hidden deposits of mail and sorting through them.

My house has been for sale for nearly a year and the real estate agent will often ring me at work to ask if they can show someone round that day. As a result I need to have the house in viewing-condition permanently and the way to achieve that has been to hide anything that looks clutterish.

Hence there are secret piles of mail all around the house. I hide it, then forget about it. Out of sight it very much out of mind.

So today I set about finding it all and going through it, with the intention of rounding off with a session of filing.

I hadn't got very far when I found a few tax documents, reminding me that I had been planning to complete my tax return this weekend. So I quit with the mail and started on my online tax return.

A while into that I needed to get some interest income data and went into MS Money to discover that it was only complete up to the end of January. So I quit with the tax return and started updating MS Money.

That was going okay until I needed some credit card statements that were missing from the file. So I quit with MS Money and went back to sorting through the post to find the missing statements.

Some days it really is better to stay in bed.

July 7, 2006

Medical news

A couple of medical items today, of the type that make your nuts retract to a safe place of hiding. I am not sure what happens to a woman in such circumstances. There is probably a website about it though. Anyway...

A man is on the run with his two-year-old son after a knife was plunged right through another man's face.

The victim spent most of yesterday with a 15-centimetre blade embedded in his head before Auckland surgeons removed it in a delicate operation.

During the attack the handle broke off the knife. The blade had entered the victim's face beneath his eye and penetrated the nasal cavity behind his nose. The point of the blade poked out on the other side of his face. [full story on stuff.co.nz]

---

Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy's skull came away on Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood.

"When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burnt and within months it came off exposing the skull," Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy said on Wednesday.

"Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases."

The piece came off on Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone.

[stuff.co.nz]

July 6, 2006

Going, going, almost gone

After 11 (eleven!) months on the market I have sold my house. Or rather, I have accepted an offer.

If the buyer doesn't change her mind, the survey goes okay, buyer can get the finance all sorted, and I don't have a fire, then the course of events will lead to me selling my house. Hurrah!

The next challenge will be to find somewhere suitable to rent, but I will tackle that once the sale looks more certain.

Meanwhile, I had better further declutter my already mostly clutter-free house.

July 5, 2006

Blague du jour

I was at the ATM the other day.

A little old lady handed me her card and asked me to check her balance.

So I pushed her over.

July 4, 2006

Almost a winner

I bet £71 last night and got £68 back in winnings.

It could have been even better - I won the first two races in a four-race accumulator and was getting ready to crack open the champagne when my third selection only managed a place.

Next time maybe.

A cracking summers evening though. Next up will be Ladies' Night on the 31st.

July 3, 2006

Turf and Skirt

A scorching summer afternoon with cornflower blue sky and scattered fluffy clouds; a Thames river taxi; the thunder of hooves; dogdy beer, dodgier food and scantily-clad women.

It can only be Monday night racing at Windsor.

I have relieved the petty cash tin of all but small change and am set to make my fortune, although previous performances give little reason for confidence.

July 2, 2006

Saxon Mill, Warwick

These days the Saxon Mill is a restaurant but there was a time when it was a working mill. In Saxon times probably.

A short walk away from the mill is this wonderful spot with a thousand shades of green and a stillness that evokes the long summers of childhood.

July 1, 2006

New horse shoes for Milly

Milly is my trusty steed, much loved and, these days, much driven.

A 100-mile per day commute has done for her tyre tread so today I bit the bullet and got all four tyres replaced.

Six hundred pounds. SIX HUNDRED! That is eleven hundred dollars in 3rd world money. Crikey.