200GB iPod Nano

Linky

A story from HS

The summer after graduating high school, my friend Matt and I flew out to California to spend 6 weeks coaching at the Stanford National Forensics Institute, basically a debate camp. He specialized in "policy debate", and I was a multiple-time state-winner in Lincoln-Douglas debate and in competitive speech.

So they put us in a dorm at Stanford, and we were really only busy from like 9am to 2 each day. After that, we were free to fuck around as much as we wanted. As a new high school grad, 18.5 years old, I had already decided that this summer I was going to get drunk and do things to girls that I hadn't managed to do at that juncture. Probably, coaching at a debate camp was not the best way to attain that goal, but I digress.

Before moving to Michigan my parents were on the faculty at Stanford so I kind of knew some kids in the area still. At our age couldn't get into any of the nice bars in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, but there was a slightly seedier establishment a little off the main strip in Menlo Park where a california friend's ex-con older brother was bartending. We were quietly served alcohol with no hassles, so long as I kept buying pot from the guy after-hours.

So one afternoon at like 2:30 we're in there getting drunk, just because we can, and it just so happens that I was sitting next to a fairly cute girl up at the bar. I screwed up all my courage, and actually started to talk to her. Turns out she's a local high-school kid, maybe 17 (I guess this place was real popular with the local underage crowd too), and her name is Jen.

The cool part is that she's (GASP!) actually being friendly to me and not blowing me off. In fact, she's being downright flirty, which is making me feel funny down below, especially when her hand comes to rest on my leg.

So I chat with her, and I eventually say "hey well listen, I'm free like every afternoon, we should totally hang out." to which responded quite agreeably, even gesturing to my buddy Matt and saying that she will invite her friend along when we hang out (does this mean Matt gets laid too? awesome). So I get the girl's number (on a napkin, I didn't have a cell phone back then) and she has me write mine on her hand (YAY I AM GONNA GET SOME).

This is where things go from "stomach queasy from the prospect of sticking something of mine into something of hers" to "stomach queasy from feeling...um kinda sick". You see, at this point Jen's friend shows up...pushing a wheelchair.

She then picks Jen up off the barstool, and puts her in the wheelchair.

At that moment, for the FIRST TIME, drunk-ass, dumb-ass Haseeb realizes that Jen has no legs.

The horror. I have drunkenly flirted with this torso for nigh on 27 minutes. I've made plans. Numbers have been exchanged. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. fuckity fuck. Can I lose my virginity to a legless wonder? Is this going to forever brand me as a "loser"? My pride, combined with alcohol, is kicking my ass right now.

So Jen and friend (don't remember the bitch's name but all of a sudden I wished I was being set up with the chubby friend) leave the bar ("I'll call you tomorrow!" she says), and Matt turns to start making insane fun of me. drug dealer barkeep joins in. I just bury my face in a beer and say the word "fuck" a lot. Thinking back, this may have been when and and where I started smoking cigarettes.

So Matt basically tells me that I'm a total piece of shit if I don't at least go hang out with this girl, and I reluctantly agree. "30 minutes, Matt. We go, we hang out with this girl for THIRTY MINUTES, and then we're fucking out of there. And you have to come, don't fucking ditch me." Matt agrees.

Next day, Jen calls, and says how to get to her parents' house, so Matt and I strap on the ol' rollerblades and go over there. Jen's parents greet us briefly, but the girls are already pretty much out the door so it's like smile, wave, have fun kids and we're outta there heading down the street.

The girls take us to a nearby park and when we get there Jen (the amazing, legless, but also fairly cool Jen) whips out not one but TWO bottles of vodka, and my 30 minutes just got slightly less hellish. I had never done vodka straight before that day, but I'm hanging out with a legless bitch who wants a piece of my cock'n'balls, so I was pretty much just glugging it down. Matt is trying not to laugh, as he and chubby friend girl take the other bottle and head off for some privacy. He catches my eye and smirks as he's leaving. I hate that fucker.

So Jen and I are talking...actually, Jen's talking and I'm just kind of staring at my dixie-cup. Anyway after a while Jen decides she's uncomfortable on the chair and wants to know if we can move to a bench in a secluded spot. We do so. Next thing I know, her hands are...um...massaging me in spots that all of a sudden I DO NOT MIND BEING MASSAGED IN. I guess the vodka is kicking in. What's that, Jen? You want to sit in my lap? Sure, what's the harm in that? Nice flowy skirt you've got on by the way...really detracts from your lack of lower extremities, but hey at least it allows me easy access to...well whatever. You get the point, Arsians.

Whether it was vodka, or the hormones of an 18 year old kid, or a bit of both, suffice it to say we end up in a position where she's "straddling" me (if you can straddle without legs), and um...demonstrating her upper body strength, with the assistance of a conveniently low-hanging tree branch. (Gee, you think she knew about this spot ahead of time?) Yes, ladies and gents, the girl is doing pull-ups on my monkey bar.

So there you have it. I lost my virginity in a public park to a drunk high school chick with no legs. It was 37 seconds of intense pleasure, followed up by wave upon wave of ridiculous nauseating shame and self-hate.

Anyway, after some awkward after-fuck cuddling (yes I cuddled a torso), Matt and chubbygirl show back up. Matt had a bit too much vodka and had vomited, thus preventing him from reaching any further than 2nd base. So Matt is walking, I put my blades back on, and we're heading back to Jen's house. Matt splits off for the dorm (for more vomiting), chubby girl goes to her own house, and it's just me and Jen arriving back at her home, still very drunk.

I'm ready to just see her to the door and get the fuck out of dodge, but of course her friggin' parents corner me and insist I come in. So I try my best to get my composure, take a quick bathroom break, and then go sit on the couch and stare at the TV until the dad walks in.

Just so you get a good idea of what's going on here: I'm 18. I'm drunk as shit. I just fucked a legless girl, and now I'm alone in the living room with the legless girl's dad. Yeah. NOT GOOD.

Anyway, the dad starts asking me about me, where I'm going to college, how am I liking my job, how am I liking Palo Alto, etc. I'm trying my best to just keep my answers short and trying not to slur my speech. Eventually he tires of the chit chat and moves on to the topic of his daughter, but rather than be pissy or threatening he seems really friendly and super-nice. "Listen, Omar, Jen's mom and I are really happy she met you. It's so nice of you to hang out with her. I mean, she's a wonderful girl but obviously you know how judgmental kids can be", to which I respond "oh sure Mr. such-and-such, no problem, yeah she's really fun."

Mr. Such-and-such takes a pause, and thinks before speaking again. "Anyway, thanks for taking the time, and thanks for walking her back home, it was really good of you...

...most guys just leave her hangin'. "

Punk Walrus's Halloween Story

I make goody bags. We're the best on the block.

For safety, we buy a pack of glow-bracelets, the ones that you snap and shake, and they glow for 8 hours. You seem at concerts and stuff. I can buy 4doz for $40. Every kid gets one (wee ones, I ask parental permission, because even though the goo is non-toxic, better safe than sorry).

Each plastic boo-ghost bag has:
- 1 full-sized Snickers
- Full sized Reece's PB Cup
- A small GID rubber duck
- A small silver bead maze
- A set of vampire fangs with whistle
- GID spider ring (see below)

Why? My parents were cheap. My father was one of those Grinches who had this speech about how hard he worked and didn't owe brats a damn cent, and for years, I was the one who had to scrub the damn egg from the cars and house, or pull TP out of the trees every Nov 1st.

After few years of this, and my mother relented and gave kids a stick of chewing gum. Cheap, yes, but we didn't get TP'd or egged that year. Later, my mother somehow got like a gross of cheap plastic spider rings because she didn't like the idea of kids rotting their teeth with candy. We didn't get egged or TP'd, but I was "the house that gave out crummy spider rings every year."

All this time, I was not allowed to go trick-or-treating.

In high school, a bunch of friends who spent their childhood overseas (military brats, state department brats) commiserated they didn't get to go ToT'ing either. So one year, even though we were 14-ish, we dressed up, and went out. No one said a thing. So we did it for the next 3 years, and noticed some people gave out FULL size bars (one guy gave out 1lb bags of M&Ms), and how awesome they were.

So that's why. I love Halloween, and it's my money, and sure there are some ungrateful brats, but I don't do it for them. Parents are pretty cool, too, and we deck out our yard with gravestones and haunted accessories.

Oh, and the ring is a tribute to my late mother. The one who had the clue.
Link

Bees *classic thread*

Ars Technica

Happiness instead of wealth for measuring national prosperity

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html

October 4, 2005
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.

Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.

Now Bhutan's example, while still a work in progress, is serving as a catalyst for far broader discussions of national well-being.

Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.

The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.

The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. "The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people," Mr. Saul said. And, he added, this could not be further from "the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you're at Disneyland."

Mr. Saul was one of about 400 people from more than a dozen countries who gathered recently to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity.

The meeting, held at St. Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th century need not be the norm in the 21st century.

Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan - teachers, monks, government officials and others - who came to promote what the Switzerland-size country has learned about building a fulfilled, contented society.

While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and exports hydropower to India.

"We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other."

It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as naïve idealism.

Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China.

Yet many experts say it was this very explosion of affluence that eventually led social scientists to realize that economic growth is not always synonymous with progress.

In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.

And some countries, studies found, were happier than they should be. In the World Values Survey, a project under way since 1995, Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, found that Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest.

In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed.

"Some types of societies clearly do a much better job of enhancing their people's sense of happiness and well-being than other ones even apart from the somewhat obvious fact that it's better to be rich than to be poor," Dr. Inglehart said.

Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.

Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.

About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

Such findings have contributed to the new effort to broaden the way countries and individuals gauge the quality of life - the subject of the Nova Scotia conference.

But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can capture this broader concept of well-being.

One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities, from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel.

A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to incorporate this kind of charting into its new "time use" survey, which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month.

"The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate that," said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist working on the survey.

For example, he said, subjecting students to more testing in order to make them more competitive may equip them to succeed in the American quest for ever more income. But that benefit would have to be balanced against the problems that come with the increased stress imposed by additional testing.

"We should not be hoping to construct a utopia," Professor Krueger said. "What we should be talking about is piecemeal movement in the direction of things that make for a better life."

Another strategy is to track trends that can affect a community's well-being by mining existing statistics from censuses, surveys and government agencies that track health, the environment, the economy and other societal barometers.

The resulting scores can be charted in parallel to see how various indicators either complement or impede each other.

In March, Britain said it would begin developing such an "index of well-being," taking into account not only income but mental illness, civility, access to parks and crime rates.

In June, British officials released their first effort along those lines, a summary of "sustainable development indicators" intended to be a snapshot of social and environmental indicators like crime, traffic, pollution and recycling levels.

"What we do in one area of our lives can have an impact on many others, so joined-up thinking and action across central and local government is crucial," said Elliot Morley, Britain's environment minister.

In Canada, Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social scientists to develop that country's first national index of well-being.

Mr. Messinger is the person who, every month, takes the pulse of his country's economy, sifting streams of data about cash flow to generate the figure called gross domestic product. But for nearly a decade, he has been searching for a better way of measuring the quality of life.

"A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to improve society," Mr. Messinger said.

The new well-being index, Mr. Messinger said, will never replace the G.D.P. For one thing, economic activity, affected by weather, labor strikes and other factors, changes far more rapidly than other indicators of happiness.

But understanding what fosters well-being, he said, can help policy makers decide how to shape legislation or regulations.

Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an index - an assessment of community health, living standards and people's division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with measurements of education, environmental quality, "community vitality" and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are under way in Australia and New Zealand.

Ronald Colman, a political scientist and the research director for Canada's well-being index, said one challenge was to decide how much weight to give different indicators.

For example, Dr. Colman said, the amount of time devoted to volunteer activities in Canada has dropped more than 12 percent in the last decade.

"That's a real decline in community well-being, but that loss counts for nothing in our current measure of progress," he said.

But shifts in volunteer activity also cannot be easily assessed against cash-based activities, he said.

"Money has nothing to do with why volunteers do what they do," Dr. Colman said. "So how, in a way that's transparent and methodologically decent, do you come up with composite numbers that are meaningful?"

In the end, Canada's index could eventually take the form of a report card rather than a single G.D.P.-like number.

In the United States there have been a few experiments, like the Princeton plan to add a happiness component to labor surveys. But the focus remains on economics. The Census Bureau, for instance, still concentrates on collecting information about people's financial circumstances and possessions, not their perceptions or feelings, said Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer there.

But he added that there was growing interest in moving away from simply tracking indicators of poverty, for example, to looking more comprehensively at social conditions.

"Measuring whether poverty is going up or down is different than measuring changes in the ability of a family to feed itself," he said. "There definitely is a growing perception out there that if you focus too narrowly, you're missing a lot of the picture."

That shift was evident at the conference on Bhutan, organized by Dr. Colman, who is from Nova Scotia. Participants focused on an array of approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical.

John de Graaf, a Seattle filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to work, wore a T-shirt that said, "Medieval peasants worked less than you do."

In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to happiness: "I want to live in a world without money."

Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion: "Become an artist."

Other attendees insisted that old-fashioned capitalism could persist even with a shift to goals broader than just making money.

Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales, described his company's 11-year-old program to cut pollution and switch to renewable materials.

Mr. Anderson said he was "a radical industrialist, but as competitive as anyone you know and as profit-minded."

Some experts who attended the weeklong conference questioned whether national well-being could really be defined. Just the act of trying to quantify happiness could threaten it, said Frank Bracho, a Venezuelan economist and former ambassador to India. After all, he said, "The most important things in life are not prone to measurement - like love."

But Mr. Messinger argued that the weaknesses of the established model, dominated by economics, demanded the effort.

Other economists pointed out that happiness itself can be illusory.

"Even in a very miserable condition you can be very happy if you are grateful for small mercies," said Siddiqur Osmani, a professor of applied economics from the University of Ulster in Ireland. "If someone is starving and hungry and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very happy."

Bhutanese officials at the meeting described a variety of initiatives aimed at creating the conditions that are most likely to improve the quality of life in the most equitable way.

Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960, now has schools at all levels around the country and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to be sure there is equal access to the best teachers, officials said.

Another goal, they said, is to sustain traditions while advancing. People entering hospitals with nonacute health problems can choose Western or traditional medicine.

The more that various effects of a policy are considered, and not simply the economic return, the more likely a country is to achieve a good balance, said Sangay Wangchuk, the head of Bhutan's national parks agency, citing agricultural policies as an example.

Bhutan's effort, in part, is aimed at avoiding the pattern seen in the study at Harvard, in which relative wealth becomes more important than the quality of life.

"The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption," said Thakur S. Powdyel, a senior official in the Bhutanese Ministry of Education. "There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being."

Mr. Saul, the Canadian political philosopher, said that Bhutan's shift in language from "product" to "happiness" was a profound move in and of itself.

Mechanisms for achieving and tracking happiness can be devised, he said, but only if the goal is articulated clearly from the start.

"It's ideas which determine the directions in which civilizations go," Mr. Saul said. "If you don't get your ideas right, it doesn't matter what policies you try to put in place."

Still, Bhutan's model may not work for larger countries. And even in Bhutan, not everyone is happy. Members of the country's delegation admitted their experiment was very much a work in progress, and they acknowledged that poverty and alcoholism remained serious problems.

The pressures of modernization are also increasing. Bhutan linked itself to the global cultural pipelines of television and the Internet in 1999, and there have been increasing reports in its nascent media of violence and disaffection, particularly among young people.

Some attendees, while welcoming Bhutan's goal, gently criticized the Bhutanese officials for dealing with a Nepali-speaking minority mainly by driving tens of thousands of them out of the country in recent decades, saying that was not a way to foster happiness.

"Bhutan is not a pure Shangri-La, so idyllic and away from all those flaws and foibles," conceded Karma Pedey, a Bhutanese educator dressed in a short dragon-covered jacket and a floor-length rainbow-striped traditional skirt.

But, looking around a packed auditorium, she added: "At same time, I'm very, very happy we have made a global impact."

Ars Technica reviews the iPod Nano

Link to the excellent review, which included an awesome sequence in which they destroyed the Nano.

That stuff about black people "looting" vs. white people "finding" in New Orleans

Urban Legends page

Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that [photographer Dave] Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."

Regarding the AFP/Getty "finding" photo by [photographer Chris] Graythen, Getty spokeswoman Bridget Russel said, "This is obviously a big tragedy down there, so we're being careful with how we credit these photos." Russel said that Graythen had discussed the image in question with his editor and that if Graythen didn't witness the two people in the image in the act of looting, then he couldn't say they were looting.

From the guy who did the "finding" caption:

Jeasus, I don't belive how much crap I'm getting from this. First of all, I hope you excuse me, but I'm completely at the end of my rope. You have no Idea how stressful this whole disaster is, espically since I have not seen my wife in 5 days, and my parents and grand parents HAVE LOST THIER HOMES. As of right now, we have almost NOTHING.

Please stop emailing me on this one.

I wrote the caption about the two people who 'found' the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water - we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow. I wouldn't have taken in, because I wouldn't eat anything that's been in that water. But I'm not homeless. (well, technically I am right now.)


I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm don't care if you are white or black. I spent 4 hours on a boat in my parent's neighborhood shooting, and rescuing people, both black and white, dog and cat. I am a journalist, and a human being - and I see all as such. If you don't belive me, you can look on Getty today and see the images I shot of real looting today, and you will see white and black people, and they were DEFINATELY looting. And I put that in the caption.

Please, please don't argue symantics over this one. This is EXTREMELY serious, and I can't even begin to convey to those not here what it is like. Please, please, be more concerned on how this affects all of us (watch gas prices) and please, please help out if you can.

This is my home, I will hopefully always be here. I know that my friends in this business across the gulf south are going through the exact same thing - and I am with them, and will do whatever I can to help. But please, please don't email me any more about this caption issue.

And please, don't yell at me about spelling and grammar. Im eating my first real meal (a sandwich) right now in 3 days.

When this calms down, I will be more than willing to answer any questions, just ask.


Thank you all -
-Chris Graythen

Office Bathroom Etiquette

Office Bathroom Etiquette

We've all been there but don't like to admit it. We've all kicked back in our cubicles or at our desks and suddenly felt something brewing down below. As much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, the WORK POOP is inevitable. For those who hate pooping at work, the following is the Survival Guide for taking a dump at work.

CROP DUSTING -

When farting, you walk really fast around the office so the smell is not in your area and everyone else gets a whiff but doesn't know where it came from. Be careful when you do this. Do not stop until the full fart has been
expelled. Walk an extra 30 feet to make sure the smell has left your pants.

FLY BY -

The act of scouting out a bathroom before pooping. Walk in and check for other poopers. If there are others in the bathroom, leave and come back again. Be careful not to become a -------

FREQUENT FLYER. -

People may become suspicious if they catch you constantly going into the bathroom.

ESCAPEE -

A fart that slips out while taking a leak at the urinal or forcing a poop in a stall. This is usually accompanied by a sudden wave of embarrassment. If you release an escapee, do not acknowledge it. Pretend it did not
happen. If you are standing next to the farter in the urinal, pretend you did not hear it. No one likes an escapee. It is uncomfortable for all involved. Making a joke or laughing makes both parties feel uneasy.

JAILBREAK -

When forcing a poop, several farts slip out at a machine gun pace. This is usually a side effect of diarrhea or a hangover. If this should happen, do not panic. Remain in the stall until everyone has left the bathroom to
spare everyone the awkwardness of what just occurred.

COURTESY FLUSH

The act of flushing the toilet the instant the poop hits the water. This reduces the amount of airtime the poop has to stink up the bathroom. This can help you avoid being caught doing the -----

WALK OF SHAME. -

Walking from the stall, to the sink, to the door after you have just stunk up the bathroom. This can be a very uncomfortable moment if someone walks in and busts you. As with farts, it is best to pretend that the smell
does not exist. This can be avoided with the use of the "COURTESY FLUSH".

OUT OF THE CLOSET POOPER -

A colleague who poops at work and is damn proud of it. You will often see an "Out Of The Closet Pooper" enter the bathroom with a newspaper or magazine under their arm. Always look around the office for the "Out Of The Closet Pooper" before entering the bathroom.

THE POOPING FRIENDS NETWORK (P.F.N) -

A group of co-workers who band together to ensure emergency pooping goes off without incident. This group can help you to monitor the whereabouts of "Out Of The Closet Poopers", and identify and locate ----

SAFE HAVENS -

Seldom-used bathrooms somewhere in the building where you can least expect visitors. Try floors that are predominantly of the opposite sex. This will reduce the odds of a pooper of your sex entering the bathroom.

TURD BURGLAR -

Someone who does not realize that you are in the stall and tries to force the door open. This is one of the most shocking and vulnerable moments that can occur when taking a poop at work. If this occurs, remain in the stall until the Turd Burglar leaves. This way you will avoid all uncomfortable eye contact.

CAMO-COUGH -

A phony cough that alerts all new entrants into the bathroom that you are in a stall. This can also be used to cover-up a ----

WATERMELON -

A poop that creates a loud splash when hitting the toilet water. This is also an embarrassing incident. If you feel a Watermelon coming on, create a diversion.

Or:

To alert potential Turd Burglars, use in conjunction with an -

ASTAIRE -

A subtle toe-tap that is used to alert potential Turd Burglars that you are occupying a stall. This will remove all doubt that the stall is occupied. If you hear an Astaire, leave the bathroom immediately so the pooper can
poop in peace.

HAVANAOMELET -

A case of diarrhea that creates a series of loud splashes in the toilet water. Often accompanied by an Escapee. Try using a Camo-Cough with an Astaire.

UNCLE TED -

A bathroom user who seems to linger around forever. Could spend extended lengths of time in front of the mirror or sitting on the pot. An Uncle Ted makes it difficult to relax while on the crapper, as you should always wait to poop when the bathroom is empty. This benefits you as well as the other bathroom attendees.

eHarmony method?

My former flatmate worked for eHarmony for six months.

They're based here in Pasadena, CA, not too far from where I am now.

Here's what I can tell you about their matching system...
(This info is direct from their employee training material, which he kept):

- Christians are only to be matched with Christians, regardless if match percentage with another religion is higher.

- Atheists or agnostics are generally informed that they "have no matches"

- Sexual preferences other than "straight" are told that they have no matches.

eHarmony is a fundamentalist christian-run company. A fair portion of the staff is made up of members of the WorldWide Church of God (an apocalyptic cult, which has often voiced views of intolerance towards atheists, muslims, jews and homosexuals) which I attended with my parents as a child.

If you're anything but a fundamentalist christian, I can't in good conscience recommend eHarmony.com to you.

Oh, yeah, and another thing about them;

One of the questions during the interview is:

"What is your position on same-sex matching?"

Answering anything other than "I am against it" will not get you hired. There is currently a class-action lawsuit in progress by two people I know, who were posed this question in the interview. One responded that they had no problem with it. She was dismissed immediately. The second one said "I have no position on it." and was hired. He was fired within two weeks for pairing two eHarmony customers of the same sex.

Oh, and their matching system isn't really done by computer; It's done by the customer service reps that sit there and sort through the applications, and select from a list of existing customers to match new customers with.

High definition reveals more flaws on TV

Linky

June 12, 2005

Not Ready for Their Close-Up

By CLIVE THOMPSON

Cap Lesesne, a New York plastic surgeon, hears from a lot of women worried about aging. Late last year, he says, he had one visitor, a female newscaster, whose inquiries puzzled him. She was only in her 30's, he says, and still looked terrific. (Lesesne, citing doctor-patient confidentiality, wouldn't identify the woman.) When he asked her why she wanted surgery, she explained that her show was about to begin broadcasting in ''high-definition,'' the hot new digital technology that makes TV images look as crisp and sharp as IMAX films. On normal TV, she said, you can't see her few tiny wrinkles; in high-def, they stand out like folds of origami. ''When she walked in here,'' Lesesne says, '' 'high-def' was the first thing that came out of her mouth.''

Celebrities are considered attractive at least in part because they're suited to the technology of the age. The transition from silent movies to talkies destroyed many actors' careers, as did the shift from black-and-white to color. While almost all prime-time TV on the major broadcast networks is shot in high-def, there are only 18 million of the pricey, wide-screen sets in use. But that number is expected to more than triple by next year, and the new scrutiny that comes with high-def is already making some on-camera talent nervous. ''There are a lot of people who are going to be affected by this,'' says Deborah Paulmann, a makeup artist for ''Late Night with Conan O'Brien.''

To understand why high-def is so unforgiving, consider the numbers. Today's new top-of-the-line HD televisions can display two million pixels, nearly 10 times the resolution of a regular, old-style TV set. Also, the screens are the size of a tabletop. Watching a show in high definition is thus rather like being Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag -- where every pore on the giants' faces looms like a shell-blasted crater. Many new HDTV owners have tuned in to high-definition celebrity events, only to discover that their favorite stars suddenly look downright haggard.

''I'm seeing people in a whole new way,'' says Phillip Swann, president of OnHD.TV, an online magazine. ''If somebody's aging or if they've got any old acne damage, it just jumps out at you. They've got no chance.'' The editors of OnHD.TV examined several dozen stars and compiled a list of heartthrobs who (they claim) wither under the unblinking gaze of high-def, including Cameron Diaz (''littered with unfortunate pockmarks''), Jewel (whose makeup ''looks like it was done by Ringling Brothers'') and Bill Maher (''scary''). I've seen the effect myself: when I recently watched a high-def close-up of Bradley Whitford -- a handsome star of ''The West Wing'' -- a normally insignificant mark on his forehead suddenly stood out like a third eye. I couldn't stop staring.

The high-def format's merciless gaze isn't solely a matter of screen resolution. Color is a factor, too. For years, government standards have limited the range of colors available to broadcasters, based on the technological limits of the time. With high-def, more colors can be used, including some formerly forbidden shades of red -- which means that blotches, zits and tiny nose-veins can be presented with the brutal clarity of a surgery textbook.

''It's almost too realistic, too digital and computery,'' complains Alexis Vogel, a veteran celebrity makeup artist who recently worked on ''Stacked,'' a high-def show starring Pamela Anderson. ''We'd all like to go back to the old days.'' Makeup artists are now engaged in an arms race with the new medium. But they face a paradox: while makeup is more necessary than ever, its artifice is more obvious. You can't slather on powder when every grain looks like a boulder on your client's face. And interestingly, many cosmeticians predict that high-def could actually reduce the amount of plastic surgery in Hollywood, because the tiny seams look Frankensteinian at such high resolution. High-def is, in essence, a medium peculiarly unsuited to dissembling. ''It's harder to change people from their natural form,'' Vogel adds.

This will probably put an ever-higher premium on genuinely natural beauty -- those lucky few people who require virtually no touch-up. Indeed, high-def fans say that some stars look better in the new medium: Anna Kournikova, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones glow like supernovas, and, Vogel says, ''in high-def, Halle Berry's skin is so beautiful and flawless, she's almost a genetic freak.''

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.