New agrarian economy?

Apparently, the Canadian government reaps roughly C$20 billion a year from weed. That's right, peeps; selling TWENTY BILLION CANADIAN DOLLARS worth of marijuana to their southern neighbour annually, providing employment to near a quarter million citizens.

Who said agriculture is not profitable?

Biggest reason why I like my animals stuffed

Pets are a source of pain. Enough said.

Iz serious biznes, hokay?

Business Time by Flight of the Conchords is kinda like Marvin Gaye meets Steve Carel.



Trippy and soulful ... but sex-ay?

You decide.

It's a quarter after one ...

It has been ages since I fell in love with a song at the first listen. But the sheer emotional poetry of this song?

I am gone.

Enjoy Lady Antebellum's Need You Now.

Not mine, but sharing

Office Buzz Words and Phrases for the 21st Century

· BLAMESTORMING

Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

· SEAGULL MANAGER

A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

· CHAINSAW CONSULTANT

An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

· CUBE FARM

An office filled with cubicles.

· MOUSE POTATO

The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

· PRAIRIE DOGGING

When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

· SITCOMs

(Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

· STARTER MARRIAGE

A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.

· STRESS PUPPY

A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

· SWIPED OUT

An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

· TOURISTS

People who take training classes just to get a vacation from their jobs. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."

· TREEWARE

Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

· XEROX SUBSIDY

Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

· CHIPS & SALSA

Chips = hardware, Salsa = software. "Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa."

· PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE

The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again. (Try not to dent the case.)

· SALMON DAY

The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

· CLM

(Career Limiting Move) Used among microserfs to describe ill- advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

· ADMINISPHERE

The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

· DILBERTED

To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character.

"I've been Dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

· 404

Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message

"404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."

All courtesy of my friend, The Traveller.

Nightmare, I has 'em.

Not quite safe for work, but let's live dangerously, shall we?



Ganked from Obefiend's Blogserius.

Pictorial shits and giggles

Not the bedmate of your dreams.


It's not just Tom Hanks in The Green Mile.


Literal, much?


Ole!


My, what a big ... rocket ... you've got. *titter*


There's some really sick shit in comics, no?


Keep it flowing, baby!


Bonding moment: lost.


And we used to fear katak pisang in the bathroom in the olden days *pfft*


Balancing skillz; I has 'em.


Very true!


And the winner of this year's Darwin's award is ...


Because in a war, you never know what the right hand is doing.

Hindsight: always 20/20 (*sigh*)

Days you hate to re-live

An update of the WonderBra

The things that inspire people can be the darndest thing. Dr. Elena Bodnar and co-workers have filed for patent a most marvelous and unique invention: a brassiere that can be converted into two (yes, two) protective face mask in an emergency.




The next time you get caught unexpectedly in a haze-/smoke-filled environment, no worries.

Definite must for clubbing outfits for those of us who hate the ciggies haze. *makes point to look for one before next clubbing outing*

Blessings in disguise

Everyone has got an opinion about bureaucracy; most of them unprintable. And whenever there is an annoyance, there will be someone who wants to calculate and quantify it. Apparently, that includes bureaucracy.

The jury is still out on whether it is a good thing or just something else to elevate your blood pressure.

Tongue firmly in cheek

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.

The winners are:
1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief
that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.


The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take
any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are this year's winners:
1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the
purpose of getting laid.
3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate's disease. ( that one got extra
credit)
9. Karmageddon (n): Its like, when everybody is sending off all
these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's
like, a serious bummer.
10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.
11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub
in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Standing on the shoulder of giants

We learn from one another and build upon each other. This is never more true than in the medical sciences where hideous tests on prisoners of wars translated into hypothermia treatment and understanding the process of wound healing.

Radical bioinformatics that will make all experiments in silico is still some time away, so scientists who want to study biological processes but don't work with live animals (either in vivo or in situ) commonly use tissue culture from derived cell lines. The most famous of which are the HeLa cells that was derived from the tumours that riddled Mrs. Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who died of cancer in 1951.


The thing was, permission was not obtained from Mrs. Lacks' family to obtain the sample by either the physician who took the sample nor Dr Gey, the guy who propagated the cell line. Mrs. Lacks has been described as "a black woman whose body had been exploited by white scientists".

Frankly, I get Dr Gey's situation; you get samples for your experiment, you don't tend to question too much. After all, they are hard to come by. These days, what with university and hospital ethics committee having a voice in how you conduct your research, these sort of things are in the past. As the idea for informed consent evolve and people began to understand and assert their rights, no one will blindly sign forms just because someone in a white coat told them to do so.

Then again, may be not. Ask anyone who has to collect human samples for their research experiments.

But I digress.

The issue here is her tissue (notice the alliteration? I'm kinda proud of it XD). Although Dr Gey received no monetary rewards from the development of the cell lines (or so it stated), but there have been hundreds of inventions and innovations that had come about thanks to these ever multiplying immortalised cells. If the decendants of Arthur Conan Doyle could still dictate the way the source material of Sherlock Holmes is treated (and getting paid gobs of money for the right), why shouldn't her children, who are also not well-off and presumably struggling, benefit from the companies who have made millions out of the cells that had killed their mother?

*ponders*

Geek humour

see more Lol Celebs



see more Lol Celebs

Nerd and proud of it. *grin*

Numb3rs in life

Maths is the language of the universe. All digits are the same regardless whether you are in Tirana, Timur Leste, Timbuktu, Tasmania, or Tenochtitlan. They tell the same stories, uniting facts and figures, giving intrinsic value to things and data.

But like any language, some things get lost in translation. This usually happens, thanks to the spuriousness of the science called statistics where standard deviations may be deviants of the worst degree.

And the next thing we know, shit like subprime mortgage hits the fan. Why? Because the statisticians made the numbers look good.

Where is Charlie Eppes when you need him?

Of veiling kathoeys and bearded bois

What comes to mind when one says, Iran?

Nuclear warheads pointing westward? Bare-chested bearded men flagellating themselves down the avenue a la the best Folsom Street tradition? Xerxes and his funky curls?

I was privileged to experience first hand the beauty of the country and marvel at their historical monuments. The food is marvellous and travelling there can be pretty cheap. You get the pleasures of the four season and easy food (for Muslims).

But do many people realise that Iran is actually transsexual friendly? Apparently they lag second behind Thailand for the number of sex-change operation conducted annually. Yup, that means chopping off the family jewels and constructing a new plumbing system. Or creating new package where there wasn't any. If you want the gory details, go google it yourself.

Now, you may think ... nah ...

But seriously, the Shiite clerics are pretty enlightened about a number of things. The late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa to allow a trans-woman to undergo surgery, after asking his physicians to explain to him the difference between a hermaphrodite and a transgendered person. He believed that a good Muslim need to have a proper gender identity in order to fulfill his/her spiritual obligations and if that means going under the knife ... then so be it. Once they are the gender of preference, they are obligated to adhere to the conventions pertaining to their gender; e.g. veiling for women and beards for men.

This however, does not mean homosexuality is legal. They adhere to the strict interpretation of the Shariah law whereby men who have same-sex relations (the biblical knowing, okay?) can be sentenced to death. But a woman can marry a man who was born a woman (and vice versa).

The Government also issues a new set of documents to people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery for their new identity. So no getting flagged at the airport because the passport picture doesn't match. Isn't that wonderful?

So Fatine, hie yourself to Tehran, pronto!

Sacrificing for your country

... taking it to a different level. :(

Kinda like the telephone game gone wrong.

I get a variation of this a lot from my mum.



Except that she would insist that I was somewhere doing something with her when actually? It was my sister.

I ... have no words.

More dangerous than carrying a double-oh tag?

James Bond? Michael Westen?

Pfft.

My job has been classified as one of the most dangerous (albeit on the scientific front) job ever by Wired.

Check it out here.

Thank God we don't have a communal lab coffee pot.

Food ambassador

You gotta love Jamie Oliver. This is a guy who doesn't accept limitations and goes out to do what he feels is right. He overcame dyslexia and hyperactivity to become one of the world's most famous proponent of good food for everybody. Watching him cook is like watching a controlled whirlwind; but instead of destruction, he left lovely and delicious gustatory creation in his wake.

On his crusade to teach the world that you can cook and eat well, healthy and cheap, Jamie has embarked on a new journey: to teach super-size-this America to eat right.

Good luck, Jamie!

Not exactly dancing bears ...

Thanks to Interwebs friends, I got to know a new source of aurgasms: Grizzly Bear. Folksy, psychedelic pop that is great for acid trip listening.

Lovely.