two things to tell a woman tomorrow

1. it’s possible you have not blossomed sexually.

2. you have far more sexual potential than you realise.

link

we ignore these warnings

Javier Marías:

‘In Your Face Tomorrow, the main subject is the near impossibility of knowing what a face, in a metaphorical sense, can bring us tomorrow. We tend to believe we know what to expect from the people around us, the people we love. Even if we have hints of things we don’t like, we ignore these warnings. One of the things Sir Peter Wheeler says is that people do not want to see any more, they do not want to be alert.’

sicilian lemons

FT:

Ferrero’s (creator of Nutella, Tic Tacs and Kinder Eggs) latest invention is a dessert tasting of Sicilian lemons called Gran Soleil which, when put in the freezer and shaken, turns into a kind of ice-cream.

emotional education

David Brooks:

For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

most accurate

one study has shown that when people use the word “most”, they don’t just mean more than 50%; specifically they mean 80-95%.

for example, when they say “women are mostly scary”, they mean out of 10 women, 8 or 9 of them are scary.

which is why i leave out the word mostly.

[via Barking up the wrong tree]

gay space

Vulture:

Lady: “You are my happy place. I want to know, what is your happy place?”

Bon Jovi: “I love it when women talk about their happy place.”

drinking late at the bar

wala wala played trance last night in the upper room and it was, as mr. tan put it:

just wrong.

i asked them to change the music.

they played Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.

it’s astonishing how a song about abject poverty can cheer me up so quickly.

pants and disks

FT:

When Don Fisher decided to open a store selling Levi’s jeans and records in 1969, he initially wanted to call it “Pants and Disks”. Instead, his wife Doris proposed calling the store on San Francisco’s Ocean Avenue “The Gap”…

ups and downs

Michael Sandel:

The bankers argued that a financial tsunami had caused the crisis. The question they should be asked is: If big systemic forces are responsible for the downs, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that big systemic forces are also responsible for the ups?

And if that’s true, maybe there’s a reason to question outsized bonuses in the good times as well as in the bad times.

doe a deer, a very discriminating deer

NYT:

during rutting season, females will squat and expel an unwanted buck’s semen.

gloomz! boomz! doomz! (or what the former ms. singapore might say)

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report:

You cannot postpone the hour of truth forever. The next stage is for total breakdown of the financial system and for an economic and financial crisis that will bankrupt governments.

history’s ultimate utility

NYT:

…history’s ultimate utility does not lie in its predictive or even its explanatory value, but in its ability to teach humility, to nurture an appreciation of the limits on our capacity to see the past clearly or to know fully the historical determinants of our own brief passage in time.

thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task

Professor Christine Hayes:

Job, possibly the greatest book of the Bible… challenges conventional religious piety and arrives at the bittersweet conclusion that there is no justice in this world or any other, but that nonetheless we’re not excused from the thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task of righteous living.

Randy Pausch

It is an accepted cliche in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

I always saw the value in that, sure. But in my mind, a better number one goal was this: I want to help students learn how to judge themselves.

Did they recognize their true abilities? Did they have a sense of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others view them?

In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective.

Mike Phelps’ 12,000 calories diet

BBC News:

For breakfast: three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate-chip pancakes; a five-egg omelette; three sugar-coated slices of French toast and a bowl of grits (a maize-based porridge), washed down with two cups of coffee.

For lunch: half a kilogramme (one pound) of enriched pasta; two large ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread smothered with mayonnaise, washed down by energy drinks.

For dinner: Another half-kilogramme of pasta, perhaps with a carbonara sauce, followed by a large pizza and more energy drinks.

the possibility to do well

Guardian:

… Kaká ran on to the pitch following Brazil’s 2-0 victory over Germany in the final in Yokohama wearing the ‘I belong to Jesus’ T-shirt he has become synonymous with. But, he says, ‘I don’t pray for victory. It may be tempting to some, but I don’t ever do that. That’s not something we should expect God to get involved in. It would be abusing our relationship with him. I do pray that he gives me the possibility to do well, but then, once I am given the chance, it’s up to me to do it. And, of course, I pray that neither I nor my team-mates, nor my opponents, get injured.’

to a fellow moron loved by jesus

thanks for your comment.

i did say i would give a pure and honest reply if you write a sincere comment. of course, i can’t tell how sincere you are. but like many others, i measure sincerity by measuring how much you did not insult me.

actually, my ability to make fun of others is much more superior to my writing (this is not a joke). i’m also sad that my top posts are about your preacher and malaysia’s top prostitute location. what is God telling me about the latter, i don’t know. also, i believe that God wants me to blog less and not make fun of women so much.

i have not written about my views on grace. making fun of your preacher does not mean i don’t believe in God’s grace. but as they say, God is in the details.

short short story

he couldn’t understand why.

he humbled himself and He was with him. and together they took 2 fish and five loaves and they fed five thousand.

like jesus.

but nobody believed him. they thought it was a trick.

was it because he was a magician, he thought? or was his gospel too effortless or was it because of his popstar wife?

He has heard Him so many times but today, He stayed silent.

simple, total, black-and-white answers

Meg Gardiner:

People want certainty. They want meaning. Some want purity. Unfortunately, the world is messy. Faced with the jumble of everyday life, some people jump off the reality ship, and join groups that promise answers. Simple, total, black-and-white answers. Some of these people are naive. Others are lost or needy. Some are seeking permission to unleash the violent impulses they feel. And remember: Nobody sets out to join a cult. They join that really exciting church.

two cotton balls

NYT:

Once (Tiger) Woods tried out four drivers that Nike was experimenting with and told the lab guys that he preferred the heavier one. The researchers thought the clubs were the same weight, but they measured and Woods was right. The club he’d selected was heavier by the equivalent of two cotton balls.