flanerie.org

Condi thought she had negotiated a temporary ceasefire, the Israeli government knew that she hadn't. Neither party was wrong, it is all just part of the fun of negotiating with Israelis.

A few years ago I worked for a furniture company called Teknion. We sold-to-order in Europe products that were made by a sister company in Haifa, which was run by a former general called Shmuel Reshef.

Four times a year we would visit the factory in Haifa to negotiate terms and on the first two visits I was completely scammed by the good general. He was very precise with what he said and agreed to. I was broad-brush and heard what I wanted to hear. Initially I was livid and accusational, but then I realised that it was me who was at fault. He never lied, he never reneged on a deal, he just ran circles around me. Shame on me, but a valuable lesson.

Once I knew the rules of engagement it became far more enjoyable and a couple of times I managed to tie Shmuel in knots of his own making. The art of judo is to use the opponent's weight against himself, and so it is in the art of negotiation. Set the bear trap then do all you can to keep the other guy away from it. He will figure that you are defending something worth having and will make concessions to get there. Only later does he realise he paid you to sell him nothing.

That's how it was with Shmuel - we both knew the business would pretty much look after itself, so spent our time manouvering, bluffing, double bluffing and waging war with thesaurus and dictionary. At the end of one particulalry sweet negotiation he stared at me for 30 seconds and then said, "you do know I carry I gun?".

Teknion itself was a basket case and I jumped ship long ago. Recent events have brought it all back, and I hope Shmuel Reshef and his team are safe in Haifa.

As suspected, the people buying my house were mealy mouthed, lily-livered, time-wasting bastards.

Thankfully I didn't set my lawyer off on a fee-charging mission so I haven't lost anything. I have fired the estate agent though, and that gave me a warm feeling.

NEW DELHI: They say it takes a thief to catch a thief, but India's Delhi Metro has hired a monkey to frighten off other monkeys from boarding trains and upsetting passengers.

The langur monkey, trained since the age of three months, has been patrolling monkey-prone stations on a leash.

In June, a monkey boarded a train at the underground Chawri Bazaar station and reportedly scared passengers by scowling at them for three stops. It then alighted at Civil Lines station.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation says it hopes the new hire will avert a repeat of that episode.

"It started working about a month ago and since then we've not had a single incident," said Anuj Dayal, a metro spokesman.

The langur's keeper – or langurwallah – is being paid 6900 rupees ($NZ245) a month.

Langur monkeys are similarly employed around the grounds of parliament and some government buildings in New Delhi.
[ripped from stuff.co.nz]

I like coffee shops. They are one of my few vices. I don't go in for complicated orders - just a simple latte, usually grande, often fairtrade, occasionally double tall, and skinny or soy when I am feeling fat. But still, nothing too fancy.

Recently I was in a small town in a rural part of England when I espied a coffee shop. The sign actually said, "Coffee, Cafe and Internet." What more could anyone want?

Er, plenty, as it happens. As soon as I walked in I knew there was going to be an underfulfilment of expectation. There was a bare counter, and behind it a prep area that consisted of several cups and saucers, a kettle and a jar of instant coffee.

On the bright side I got a cup of coffee for £0.50 (less than a dollar) that came with two biscuits (one was a rich tea, a prince amongst biscuits).

As entertainment there were some old folks being trained how to use PCs. "A folder holds things just like you might use a folder at home to hold letters" "I keep mine in a drawer"

Lovely stuff.

BERLIN: A German scientist has been testing an "anti-stupidity" pill with encouraging results on mice and fruit flies, Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.

It said Hans-Hilger Ropers, director at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has tested a pill thwarting hyperactivity in certain brain nerve cells, helping stabilise short-term memory and improve attentiveness.

"With mice and fruit flies we were able to eliminate the loss of short-term memory," Ropers, 62, is quoted saying in the German newspaper, which has dubbed it the "world's first anti-stupidity pill."
---

Well fuck a duck.

1. Mice are the most intelligent species on planet earth anyway, so using them as test pilots is hardly going to yield useful results.
2. Fruit flies are utterly useless. The have DNA with about five base pairs. Maybe six. They are so simple you can rejig their DNA to make legs grow out of their heads.
3. Herr Ropers probably needs to use this pill on himself.
4. And a few politicians

Search for phantom monkey beggar
09 August 2006

Is it a mysterious ape? Someone's lost pet monkey or the product of overactive imaginations?

Whatever it is, Cypriot authorities are searching for a stray primate reported to have tapped on windows at dinner time to beg for food near the western resort town of Paphos.

Police could not say whether they thought the animal was an ape or a monkey, but said there was no cause for alarm.

At least two sightings have been reported north of Paphos. A Russian tourist saw the beast in dense woodlands and a local woman said it appeared at her kitchen window, officials said.

Politis newspaper reported that the animal was thought to have either run away or been abandoned by its owner. Apes and monkeys are not indigenous to the east Mediterranean island and their ownership is permitted only with a licence.

"There was a team of people out this morning searching. . . but nothing was found," a Veterinary Services official said.

Animal rights' campaigners have complained of an upsurge in people abandoning or neglecting exotic animals.

Earlier this year a stray raccoon, a native of the Americas, caused a power outtage to more than 2000 homes after chewing through 11,000 volts of electric cable. It survived.
---

I am a little concerned that volts have become a unit of measure of electric cable. As for the monkey, surely a trail of bananas leading to the police station would do the trick.

It was a big news day on the BBC News website with my attention drawn in particular to:

Women 'must save for retirement'

Shit, really?

I suppose tomorrow we will have:

Children 'must go to school'

quickly followed by:

Food 'must be eaten'

Still, we do sometimes need reminding of the crushingly obvious.

On 24th July 2000 I observed to my colleagues that it would be neat if Concorde was to crash.

They looked at me with incredulity, but I ploughed on...

No, but really, think about it. Planes crash all the time, there is at least one decent-sized plane crash each year. They are commonplace. Barely worth watching on the news. Been there, done that, saw the charred bodies, bought the t-shirt.

But if Concorde was to crash it would be special. A unique crash that would give us something to talk about for years. A pointy-nosed supersonic Anglo-French crash.

They kind of accepted my point.

The next day Concorde crashed, frying some Germany tourists. It crashed in style, trailing a hundred-foot flame and flattening a hotel. Now that is how to crash a plane.

I caused that.

NEW YORK: Left-handed men, often seen as having an advantage over right-handed counterparts in sports like tennis, also enjoy much better paydays, a new study says.

Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15 per cent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 per cent more, wrote Christopher S Ruebeck of Lafayette College, and Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are "several suggestive and economically and statistically significant results that suggest further support for the notion that handedness matters," they wrote.

"We do not have a theory that reconciles all of these findings."

The researchers did not find a similar effect among women.

The data used for the study were hourly earnings taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a set of surveys including individuals aged 14-21 in 1979 who were interviewed every year until 1994 and every other year thereafter.
[lifted from stuff.co.nz]
---

I thought my success was down to diligence and hard work, now it turns out it was all in the hand.

Blondes may have more fun but redheads have more sex, according to new research in Germany.

The study by Hamburg Sex Researcher Professor Dr Werner Habermehl looked at the sex lives of hundreds of German women and compared them with their hair colour.

He said: "The sex lives of women with red hair were clearly more active than those with other hair colour, with more partners and having sex more often than the average. The research shows that the fiery redhead certainly lives up to her reputation."

He added that women who dyed their hair red from another colour were signalling they were looking for a partner, and added: "Even women in a fixed relationship are letting their partners know they are unhappy if they dye their hair red. They are saying that they are looking for something better."

Psychologist Christine Baumanns said however that it may not be the women who were to blame for the better sex lives of redheads.

She said: "Red stands for passion and when a man sees a redhead he will think he is dealing with a woman who won't mess around, and gets straight to the point when it comes to sex."
[from Ananova]
---

Hmmm. I have no personal data to go on here. Which makes me think I should find out.

Kill toons on the streets of London. Slick game with a boss soundtrack.

Toon Crisis

There is a charity store which I frequent called Oxfam. It is a good source of cheap books, but sells a wide range of other junk too.

Traditionally it is staffed by senile old women. A cash transaction can take any time between 30 seconds and 2 hours. Once the crazy crone serving me started reading the book I was trying to buy. It certainly adds a random element to proceedings.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Oxfam buying Frankenstein. The book, not the crazy doctor. Ahead of me at the cash register was girl aged, at a guess, 12 buying a bag of sweets. She was being served by a hunched old man, which struck me as a bit of a departure for Oxfam. Perhaps the sex discrimination rules have finally taken their toll.

After money had been exchanged the girl thanked the man and he said, "that's right, you go off and have a nice suck" (his emphasis, not mine)

The girl seemed unphased, but I am scarred for life. I wonder if this is the old guy's only pleasure, making inappropriate remarks to young girls. Or is it the tip of a throbbing ice-berg that includes sniffing bicycle seats and 'jousting' in movie theatres.

And what of the victim? No immediate signs of distress, but maybe she will never be able to eat sweets again. Or she might have repressed the experience only for it to re-emerge in her golden years in the verbal abuse of young boys.

Who knows. All I know is that wherever I go, strange shit happens.

David Copperfield says he's found Fountain of Youth
16 August 2006

MIAMI: The man who made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish may soon claim to do the same for unsightly bags and wrinkles.

Master illusionist David Copperfield says he has found the "Fountain of Youth" in the southern Bahamas, amid a cluster of four tiny islands he recently bought for $US50 million ($NZ78.6 million).

One of his islands in the Exuma chain, Musha Cay, is a private resort that rents for up to $300,000 a week and the other islands serve as buffers to keep prying eyes away from celebrity guests on the white sand beaches.

Copperfield is coy about his reasons for the Fountain of Youth claim, but the man best known for entertaining with grand deception insists his archipelago also contains the legendary waters that bestow perpetual youth. Seriously.

"I've discovered a true phenomenon," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "You can take dead leaves, they come in contact with the water, they become full of life again. ... Bugs or insects that are near death, come in contact with the water, they'll fly away. It's an amazing thing, very, very exciting."

Copperfield, who turns 50 next month, said he had hired biologists and geologists to examine its potential effect on humans but he's not inviting visitors to swim in or drink from it just yet.

A polar bear walks into a bar and says,

"please could I have a gin...

...

...

...and tonic"

And the barman says,

"Why the big pause?"

Dolphins are stupid but happy, according to a South African researcher, and their brains are only as large as they are to keep them warm in the sea.

Paul Manger from Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, argues that dolphins' large brains have fooled us into thinking they are smart. In reality, he says, the marine mammals couldn't outwit a rat, and don't have the sense of a goldfish.

Not counting humans, dolphins have the largest brain to body size ratio of any other creature on the planet. However, what Manger says is that since most of that brain mass is made up of so-called glial cells, rather than neurons, the size is irrelevant. He argues that the glia merely act as insulating material.

As Poirot would say, it is all about the leetel grey cells.

Despite this lack of "thinking" brain, dolphins are probably as happy as they look. Manger says they produce a huge amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin. This plays an important role in regulating mood, sleep and appetite. It is also often referred to as the happy drug.

Of course, any suggestion that dolphins aren't secretly playing chess in their spare time was bound to attract criticism.

Vancouver Aquarium's cetacean research programme head Dr Lance Barrett-Lennard says Manger's argument could be just as misleading as simply relying on brain/body ratios to inform us about the intelligence of animals.

He argues that dolphins' behaviour clearly indicates that they are highly intelligent.

"A dolphin could have a brain the size of a walnut and it wouldn't affect the observations they live very complex and social lives," he told The Globe and Mail. "They keep account of who their friends are with very complicated hierarchies and allegiances. The other thing is they have spatial maps. They know exactly where to go when they need to look for certain food."

Manger counters that dolphin behaviour supports his assertion that they are in the "two short planks" category.

"You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in," he said.

"But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks, the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water between the different pools."

He argues that if dolphins were really that bright, they would jump over tuna nets instead of getting caught in them.

Manger's research has been peer-reviewed and is published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
[lifted from El Reg]

The book I recommended for the last reading group meeting went down like the Titanic. I guess the Titanic went down quite spectacularly and over a couple of hours. My book went down faster and with much more ignominy.

The book was A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. A great book, but not according to the Reading Group. There was even a vote by text that managed to slaughter the novel in less than 160 characters.

Oh well, I had better not recommend anything for a while and hope that everyone forgets that I crashed and burned so badly.

For next month I need to read State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and I need to see Nacho Libre at the movies.

Flanerie.org have always been a fan of cows, and no mistake. Cows rock, cows kick ass. Cows rock while they kick ass. Cows own.

Small surprise then that the flanerie news desk received three emails today alerting us to an interesting news item. We immediately despatched one of our junior hacks to investigate rip the story from another site.

---
Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested.

They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from.

John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds.

The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals.

Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

"I've spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds.

"It works the same as with dogs - the closer a farmer's bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent."

Peer pressure

Prof Wells felt the accents could result from their contemporaries.

He said: "This phenomenon is well attested in birds. You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country.

"This could also be true of cows.

"In small populations such as herds you would encounter identifiable dialectical variations which are most affected by the immediate peer group."

Dr Jeanine Treffers-Daller, reader in linguistics at the University of the West of England in Bristol, agreed that the accent could be influenced by relatives.

She said: "When we are learning to speak, we adopt a local variety of language spoken by our parents, so the same could be said about the variation in the West Country cow moo."
[from BBC News]
---

This is one of those stories that sound reasonable enough to be true, but equally could be complete nonsense. It is also a little heart-warming. I plan to visit some cows at the weekend to see what they make of it all.

Judy the racing pigeon has ditched her chilly Northumberland home for a tropical paradise 5,000km away.

Her owner, John Stewart, got into a flap when the veteran racer failed to return to her coop in Hadston, after being released from Bourges in France.

Mr Stewart assumed Judy perished during the 600 mile cross-Channel trip.

But he was astonished to discover the bird had somehow managed to make it 5,000km (3,106 miles) to the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies.

Mr Stewart believes Judy hitched a ride on a ship, ending up on the other side of the Atlantic.

He had given up on his prized racing bird after she disappeared in July.

But the North of England Homing Union contacted Mr Stewart to say Judy had been found in the back yard of an expatriate British couple in St Eustatius.

The bird was traced after the couple emailed the identification number on a leg ring.

Mr Stewart said: "I didn't know what to think when they told me. I don't even know where the West Indies are.

"I think she probably took a wrong turn and dropped on a boat.

"I know I'll never get her back now, so I've written a letter to the people over there telling them to pass her on to fancier, if there is one.

"I'll miss her, but you just have to get on with life."

Is a samurai sword stronger than a speeding bullet? Thankfully the Japanese wondered this too...

China has added strippers at funerals to its burgeoning list of proscribed activities, the BBC reports.

Bare-assed ladies are apparently deployed at rural send-offs to boost mourner numbers, since "large crowds are seen as a mark of honour".

To show they mean business, the authorities have arrested the leaders of five striptease troupes, including two involved in a farmer's funeral in Donghai county, Jiangsu province on 16 August, which was exposed by a Chinese TV station.

Local officials subsequently ordered an end to the traditional practice - which they dubbed "obscene performances" - and declared that "funeral plans have to be submitted in advance", according to Xinhua news agency.

And just to make sure the ban sticks, the powers that be have set up a hotline where concerned citizens can earn cash rewards for reporting "funeral misdeeds".

For the record, the attendance at the farmer's farewell was estimated at 200. He can consider himself duly honoured.
[from El Reg]

British Airways is the shittest airline in Europe, which is quite an accomplishment give the competition from Aeroflot and Alitalia. Rather annoyingly there is no sign of them going out of business.

Anyway, this time they have lost a leg.

---

In just seven days Paralympic athlete Kate Horan is due to line up in the 100 metres at the IPC Athletics World Championships in Assen in the Netherlands. But there's a hitch – British Airways has lost her leg.

The Wellington athlete's $10,000 running leg has been missing for more than a week, sitting somewhere in a London warehouse with 20,000 other pieces of luggage.

"It's the worlds – this is the biggest event apart from the Paralympics," Horan said. She has been preparing for the championships for two years.

Since British authorities foiled a terrorist plot to attack flights out of Heathrow Airport, increased security has forced travellers to limit their carry-on luggage.

For Horan that meant she had to check in her running leg for the short flight from London to Amsterdam a week ago.

It was the first time the unique leg was not with her as carry-on luggage. And British Airways told her there was little it could do. "They said there's 20,000 bags sitting in Heathrow and mine is just one of them. I was told they don't know where it is."

Horan is now in a race against time with manufacturer Otto Bock and Ossur, which will attempt to build her another leg in time for the world championships. "I head to Holland today," she said. "And I'm going straight to the factory. These sort of legs take weeks to fine tune. At the moment that's the only possibility I've got.

"All the time that I should be training and getting myself ready, I'm going to be spending trialling this leg and trying to get a leg that fits."

The British government is to outlaw the possession of violent porn, with 'possession' including anything cached on a PC after viewing online.

There is the obvious issue of how to define violent porn - one man's violent sex is another's slightly frisky encounter - and I probably know some people whose activity falls into a middle England definition. In fact I definitely do, but I can't name them without having my plums removed. And if that happened, it would be illegal to watch it. I wonder if it would be illegal to witness it myself as a victim? That would be a bitter pill - prosecuted for witnessing yourself being the victim of a crime.

Returning rapidly from that blind alley, the real issue is why ban it at all.

The cause celeb behind this law change is the murder of a teacher by a psychopath that was addicted to violent porn. Well that seems perfectly reasonable then.

Of course we would need to ban alcohol too since it is involved in fifty percent of rape cases. Fifty percent. That means if you think that alcohol should be legal you are supporting the rape of thousands of women each year.

Hmmm, now it isn't so clear cut.

Okay so alcohol is essential to the workings of society (i.e. big business), but what about video entertainment? Surely a ban is legitimate here - violent porn has no merit as entertainment.

True, but nor does 90% of television.

Okay, okay, but violent porn has no merit as entertainment and could lead people to violence.

Fox News does that to me already, so I say ban them both.

Aussies, of course. No news on the pigeon though.

---

Five people ended up in hospital in Australia after a fight over a pigeon.

Four others were treated for minor injuries and all nine were spoken to by police in Melbourne.

Police were called after a fight broke out between two neighbouring families disputing the ownership of the pigeon.

The fight ended with five men taken to hospital with scratches, cuts, bumps and bruises to their heads and bodies.

The men were of varying ages, the eldest in his 50s or 60s, an ambulance service spokeswoman said.

A police spokeswoman said investigations were continuing and nine people were being spoken to over the incident.