Although it’s no secret the Labor leader is something of an expert at yin and yang, he’s not bad at ping and pong either. Bloody competitive, though: “Not that I was counting but we won 21-16,” he bragged.Hmmm. Such a minor thing, but still noted in my little black book of likely character defects of the man who would be PM.
There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called "popular culture" or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant.True.
...the majority of sperm couldn’t fertilize an ovum if it were plunked down in front of them. “Only a perfectly normal sperm can penetrate an egg,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center, “and the majority of sperm are abnormally shaped.” Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all. As a rule, Dr. Fisch said, a man is lucky if 15 percent of his sperm are serviceable. “One guy I saw had 22 percent,” he said, “but that’s rare.”I didn't realise the figure was so low, even for fertile guys. Still, even with, say, 10% being effective, the article points out that the average ejaculation presents 150 million in total. So that's 15,000,000 good quality, potentially egg breaking, sperm each time.
There's a saying among journalists that news is anything someone doesn't want you to know. So let me tell you all about John Howard's immigration program. It's a key part of the Government's economic policy, but one it rarely talks about.Well, Howard has certainly made a repeated point about the size of the "official" refugee program. And after the Hanson fizzle, I just don't see that the Australian public has much interest in the level of Asian immigration, unless it has a strong Muslim flavour. (An understandable consequence of 9/11 and the West's increased interest in what that religion is about.) If anything, I suspect the concern about Muslim immigration has probably made most people see other Asian immigrants as benign.
Why? Because Howard wants his Battlers to think he shares their dislike and distrust of foreigners, especially boat people. And it wouldn't help his image for people to know he's running the biggest immigration program we've ever had.
The emphasis on skill means that permanent immigrants are a lot younger than the population they're joining. More than half are aged 15 to 34, compared with 28 per cent of our population. Only 2 per cent of permanent immigrants are 65 or older, compared with 13 per cent of our population.Younger people from non-English speaking backgrounds are naturally going to assimilate faster than older, non-skilled migrants. Pauline Hanson used to complain about street signage in some areas being in foreign language only; skilled migrants who come here to work don't need that.
The Battlers' eternal objection to immigrants - which I believe was a big part of the strong public support for our shameful treatment of people on the Tampa - is that "these people will take our jobs".I reckon the jobs issue had next to nothing to do with public attitudes about the Tampa. It was about the method by which a bunch of claimed refugees sought to get into Australia when they were in no danger at their last "staging post", and they were displacing other refugees who went through a long process of formal assessment.
Divorce is now so accessible that anybody who wants the protections of marriage can get them – unless their cohabiting partner doesn’t agree, in which case, caveat emptor. You need not affront your Dawkins principles by going to church, or betray your anarchist instincts by entering a register office. You can now marry in a bingo hall or a Sea Life Centre. A licence costs only £63.50.
Some couples – I know and love many – jointly decide not to marry. Good luck to them. They don’t whimper for new laws; if they are wise they make legal arrangements about property ownership (like becoming tenants-in-common with appropriate shares) and ensure joint responsibility for children. If they are not wise, then by definition they are fools. You cannot frame every law to suit fools, even fools for love.
Women – who traditionally get the short end of the stick – should be aware that marriage is a safer basis for scaling down work to raise a family, and that if they eschew it or are denied it, then they had better make arrangements. Men, these days, should do the same. If you hippyishly reject marriage because “it’s just a piece of paper”, don’t expect the nanny state to provide you with an equally safe piece. There are limits to how far government should protect adults from one another’s rapacity or flakiness. You make your bed, you lie in it.
I like the name "House of Fatwa". Is it anything like the House of Blues, I wonder?Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to shop around for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.
"There is chaos now," Megawer said. "The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong religiously."
In Egypt, there are two official institutions responsible for religious interpretation. The House of Fatwa, or Dar al-Ifta, which technically falls under the Ministry of Justice, and Al Azhar. All court sentences of death must be approved by Dar al-Ifta, for example.
The serial killer was a man called Dennis Nilsen, who used to pick up stray homosexuals in London, take them home, strangle them and then watch television with their corpses beside him on the sofa. As we doctors put it in our special, technical language, he was a bit odd.But the story which interested me most was the one about the mad French Dr Petiot:
The Occupation during World War II gave him his opportunity to become one of the most prolific serial killers in French history. He offered Jews an escape to Argentina for 25,000 francs, but when they came to his house to deliver the money he killed them and incinerated them.His story must have a following of sorts, because he has quite a lengthy Wikipedia article. It explains the murder method, and body disposal, as follows:
Petiot claimed that he could arrange a safe passage to Argentina or elsewhere in South America through Portugal. He also claimed that Argentinean officials demanded inoculations and injected his victims with cyanide. Then he took all their valuables and disposed of the bodies. People who trusted him to deliver them to safety were never seen alive again.When he was found with many bodies and body parts in his house, the doctor claimed it was because he was a member of the French Resistance, and the victims were "enemies of France".
At first Petiot dumped the bodies in the Seine, but he later destroyed the bodies by submerging them in quicklime or by incinerating them. In 1941, Petiot bought a house at 21 rue le Sueur.
What Petiot failed to do was to keep a low profile. The Gestapo eventually found out about him and, by April 1943, they had heard all about his "route." Gestapo agent Robert Jodkum forced prisoner Yvan Dreyfus to approach the supposed network, but he simply vanished.
On May 25, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.It would appear from the Wiki article that no one has every made a film of this story, which is pretty surprising. Given the jewish connection, I see it as Spielberg material.
...the pop-elitist defence is always the same – we’re giving the people what they want. This is, of course, ridiculous. It implies that, before Big Brother, viewers were sitting around thinking, “Hmmm, now what I’d really like is a show about a bunch of dysfunctional freaks stuck in a house for three months.”The truth is that the show and its popularity are an invention of its makers. They choose to make it, they are not compliant servants of popular taste. They don’t like to hear this because it jerks them out of their cool, postmodern amoral-ity by dropping the moral buck right back on their desks. But let’s get real: you did it, you’re responsible.
From what little I notice of its coverage, the current Australian series of Big Brother is being seen as terribly dull. I would guess that it may have one last season to go before even its fans tire of the format completely.
Solar cell efficiencies vary from 6% for amorphous silicon-based solar cells to 40.7% with multiple-junction research lab cells.[2] Solar cell energy conversion efficiencies for commercially available mc-Si solar cells are around 14-16%. The highest efficiency cells have not always been the most economical — for example a 30% efficient multijunction cell based on exotic materials such as gallium arsenide or indium selenide and produced in low volume might well cost one hundred times as much as an 8% efficient amorphous silicon cell in mass production, while only delivering about four times the electrical power.The reporting on new developments should therefore concentrate on the cost of new types of solar cells, not just energy conversion efficiencies.
It is hard to see why such sectarian killings would not escalate spectacularly in the event of rapid departure. But it is also easy to understand how US patience with the with the country cannot last for ever.In Mosul, a Christian priest was gunned down as he left his church after finishing Sunday services. In Baghdad, a director of the Iraqi Central Bank and his brother were shot to death in the dangerous neighborhood of Amel. Thirty-one corpses were found scattered about the capital, where sectarian murders have once again been on the rise.
Insurgents struck repeatedly in Diyala, the militant-dominated province that borders Baghdad, Iran and Kurdistan. A suicide car bomber parked at a crowded marketplace killed nine people in Balad Ruz. Insurgents set up a fake checkpoint near Baquba, the provincial capital, and raked a bus with gunfire, killing three. And south of Baquba, nine corpses were found handcuffed and shot.
The belief of the Shiites that they must consolidate power through force of arms is tethered to ever-present suspicions of an impending betrayal by the Americans. Though the Americans have helped institute the representative system of government that the Shiites now dominate, they have failed to eliminate memories of how the first President Bush allowed Saddam Hussein to slaughter rebelling Shiites in 1991. Shiite leaders are all too aware, as well, of America’s hostility toward Iran, the seat of Shiite power, and of its close alliances with Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia.
The article doesn't tell us what happened. Wikipedia to the rescue again:You see, North By Northwest is the kind of vehicle that enabled stars to exist. By the standards that function today - by the standards of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck - it is a great film, an entertainment that turns into a moral tale.
Time and again, the apparently "easy-going" Grant found himself in stories in which his character had to make up or to change his mind. That was hardly accidental. It was the self-awareness of a man who was himself a constant worrier - and who had "lost" his mother in a quite remarkable way. One day she was there in Bristol; the next she was gone. It was more than 20 years before he learned the awful truth.
An only child, he had a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother Elsie (who had apparently never overcome her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy), was placed by his father in a mental institution when Archie was ten. His father (who had a son with another woman) told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.Sad, hey. The whole Wikipedia entry about Grant is interesting. He had issues of all sorts, it seems.
