Mood: Hrmmm... 'normal' i guess (whatever THAT means)
Currently listening to: Numb - Portishead

A quiet weekend. Allow me to recap:

Friday: Uni again, and everything that that entails. Nobody seemed to be free so ended up hanging out in Sri Hartamas with Albert for the most part. Started off with a jug of beer at Bistro 19-something and some live music. Most of the conversation centred around blogs, women, and my trying to convince him to come to the Blue concert with me next weekend.

Yes, thats right - Blue. As in the boy band.

Seems like Joa won two tickets to the event by singing on national radio(!), but she can't make it to the actual event because of work commitments so she's trying to pawn it off to me. Hey, i'm not exactly in love with them or anything but hell, its something to do. Come to think of it, odds are that she might be winning the 'meet the band' thing to boot - how surreal would that be if Albert and i were trying to hide our faces while being pictured with the band in the newspaper/website? Or, hell, even attempting to talk to the band? Picture THAT! ;p

Come to think of it, i'm suspecting that i'll be the only 20+ male at an event that is likely to be dominated by 12-18 year old female teeny boppers... Hrmmm, thats almost enough for me to be arrested for suspected paedophilia... ;)

Aw, hell, maybe i'll just drop the idea unless Joa seriously can't find anyone else to go. But just in case - any takers for two tickets to Blue?

Please? :p

So, yeah, continuing on, we went for some mamak where we were joined by Sneexe. Managed to even get Albert to take up a bet to go and speak to two complete female strangers at one of the tables... The conditions were basically that he had to speak to them for one and a half minutes in order to get a mug of beer from yours truly. ;)

He was 10 seconds short! Hah! (but still, kudos to him for actually doing it. Sucker.) ;p

Met up with Weerada (hey whats your blog url?) and her two friends at Coffee Bean after that before moving on to play pool and drink more beer back at Bistro 19-whatever until 3am. Can you imagine that i haven't seen her for 13+ years??? Had fun though, and it was seriously good to catch up with her and news on some of the other people i went to primary school with all those years ago. Of course, i was a tad embarrassed at the fact that i could hardly remember as many things, events, or people as she did! Still, i did get an invite to visit Bangkok which i might be taking up at the end of the year...

Today: Slooooow day. Woke up, dropped my dad off at Sentral station, went samba dancing with my mother, and then spent the better part of the day at the Alliance Francaise grappling with my tri-monthly French exam.

Joy.

Was supposed to keep Albert company with this girl that Leonard was supposed to have introduced to him tonight over mamak, but this potentially amusing scenario was blown out of the water by a cash-strapped Leonard. *sigh*

Everyone else is going to some jazz concert in the city, but i think i'll sit this one out. Not only am i a little short on moolah myself after this week, but hell i just want to kick back and watch the late night shows while munching on an unhealthy excuse for a dinner... In other words, i'm just gonna emulate a single 40-something overweight guy for tonight.

Need job. Soon.

I don't know why but i'm currently obsessing over this song for some reason (despite it having been on my list for, like, the longest time)...

Just A Day - Feeder (Gran Turismo 3 soundtrack)

Waking up at twelve in my clothes again
Feel my head explode from a night of gin
Another night out late
I don't want to drink don't want to be a clown
I got to get my feet back on the ground
Before it pulls me in

How come it ended up like this
And who's gonna catch me when I'm coming down to hit the ground again

All by myself (waking up at 12 in my clothes again)
Cause I don't want to drag you down hold you down
Cause you're a friend, I blame myself (feel my head explode from a night of gin)
I guess you think it's funny now, funny now

On the underground with the freaks and frowns
Looking at the world through silver clouds
But then it all came down
I've got to rise above the emotional flood
I've got to cut these ropes around my hands
Pull myself around

How come it ended up like this
And who's gonna be there when I’ve lost control I'm heading to crashland

All by myself (waking up at 12 in my clothes again)
Cause I don't want to drag you down, hold you down
Cause you're a friend I blame myself (feel my head explode from a night of gin)
I guess you think it's funny now, funny now

All by myself, cause I don't want to drag you down,
Hold you down cause you’re a friend. I blame myself
I guess you think it’s funny now, funny now, it's such a shame

All by myself (waking up at 12 in my clothes again)
Cause I don't want to drag you down, hold you down,
Cause you're a friend. I blame myself (feel my head explode from a night of gin)
I guess you think it's funny now, funny now, it's such a sin

All by myself (waking up at 12 in my clothes again)
Cause I don't want to drag you down, hold you down
Cause you're a friend I blame myself (feel my head explode from a night of gin)
I guess you think it’s funny now, funny now.


Hrmmmm... memories. And not good ones either. Shit, i STILL can't believe that i managed to squander that much on booze back then... :(

Ok, i'm done (without an inkling of introspection as usual) so i'll just cut to the filler.

Chest challenged chicks ring in bigger breasts

This article has been making the rounds on the 'net, but just in case you haven't heard...

Hideto Tomabechi -- who first made headlines in Japan almost a decade ago after he cured brainwashed members of the AUM Shinrikyo doomsday cult that unleashed deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system -- claims to have developed a tune for ring tones that promises to increase the breast measurements of those who listen to it.

And Tomabechi's brainchild for better busts has boomed, with chest challenged chicks swarming to transfer data to their own phones.

"I listened to the tune for a week expecting all the time that I was being duped," says Chieri Nakayama, a 19-year-old pin-up model, tells Shukan Gendai. "But, incredibly, my 87-centimeter bust grew to 89 centimeters! It was awesome!"

Mobile phone ring tone tunes, or chakumero as they're called in Japanese, are almost an integral part of the arsenal of Japan's tens of millions of cellular phone users. Each of the big phone companies operates sites where their customers can for a few hundred yen per month download songs they use in place of the blase ring tones pre-installed in the phones. Normally, people select hit songs or TV themes, but Tomabechi's tit tune has hit a raw nerve somewhere, attracting an almost unimaginable 10,000-plus downloads in the first week it was made available, despite the numerous titters.

"Most would think it's a lie, but the techniques involved in the process have been known for some time and are the result of research I carried out in the '80s and '90s," Tomabechi tells Shukan Gendai. "I use sounds that make the brain and body move unconsciously. It's a technique involving subliminal effects."

Tomabechi claims that techniques exist to provoke movement in a certain part of the brain that reacts to sounds and light.

"It's a part of cognitive science. I suppose you could call it a kind of 'positive brainwashing,'" he says. "Sound waves travel in patterns that can be properly re-played."

It's an old adage that many illnesses are all in the mind, but if the counselor's claims are correct, the key to having a huge set of breasts could be the same. Tomabechi says he's already got plans on the drawing board for ring tones aimed at improving memory, increasing attractiveness for the opposite sex, making hair sprout and quitting cigarettes.

Even if the rockmelon ring tone doesn't prove to be as effective as its inventor claims, what can't be denied is its success on the chakumero charts.

"We offer loads of chakumero for sale at 300 yen a month and the tune promising huge breasts would have to be in our top 10 at least. It's doing far better than we ever expected," Yuichi Tsujimoto, a spokesman for Mediaseek, which offers Tomabechi's tune online, tells Shukan Gendai. "We haven't done any advertising for it, so I suppose the tune's success has come about through word of mouth. We've even received mail from one user who said they listened to the tune every night before going to sleep and it made her tits bigger."

Streangely enough i can't seem to find a place selling this 'Rockmelon' tune anywhere - but then again, its not like i put too much effort into it (what with it enlargening BREASTS and all). I'm just kinda curious as to what it actually sounds like... ;)

Look out for the penis-enlargement song 'Hard As A Rock' at your polyphonic ringtone dealer soon!

Dogs 'sniff out' bladder cancer

An article from the BBC? It must be true...

There have been anecdotal reports of dogs spotting cancer in their owners, but now researchers say they have proved this phenomenon scientifically.

The scientists at Amersham Hospital, Buckinghamshire, ultimately hope to build a tool that is as good at discerning these smells as dogs' noses.

Their findings appear in the British Medical Journal.

In 1989, researchers wrote a letter to the Lancet medical journal about how a woman claimed to have sought medical help as a direct result of her dog's inordinate interest in a skin lesion that turned out to be skin cancer.
Similar anecdotal claims have been made about cancers of internal organs like the breast and lung.

Cancers are thought to produce distinctive odours.

Even when present in minute quantities, it is possible that dogs, with their exceptional sense of smell, might be able to detect these odours.

Dr Carolyn Willis and colleagues conducted a carefully controlled experiment to see whether dogs could be trained to spot bladder cancer based on the odour of urine samples.

Over seven months, they trained six dogs of varying breeds and ages to discriminate between urine from patients with bladder cancer and urine from patients without bladder cancer.

On nine different occasions, each dog was offered a set of seven urine samples, of which only one came from a patient with bladder cancer.

Overall, the dogs correctly selected the bladder cancer urine on 22 out of 54 occasions.

This success rate of 41% was significantly more than the 14% that could be expected by chance alone.

Spaniels did the best...but we are still keeping an open mind as to what breed of dog might be best for the job

Also, all of the dogs indicated one of the "bladder cancer free" samples as positive. This patient had been investigated prior to the study and no tumour had been found.

The patient's doctor was sufficiently concerned by the dogs' behaviour to do further tests.

These revealed a tumour in the patient's right kidney which had escaped diagnosis by usual medical tests.

Lead researcher Dr Willis said: "We are very excited because this is the first time this has been scientifically proven.

Yet another good reason to get a dog. On the downside, if i'm not mistaken, your dog has to smell your piss in order to get a good bearing on this... which could be misinterpreted as 'kinky' by many ("Goooood Fido!"). ;)

Democrat Porn Stars Against 'Bush'



I quote: "While George Bush and his cronies put your money where his mouth is, these girls put their razor where their Bush is".

Just... just go watch the propaganda video. (do i HAVE to say that this ain't exactly safe for workplace viewing?)

Plus almost a third of them are Asian! wOOt!!! :)

Hell its better than what those poor Tajikstanis get by way of stalinistic authority.

And on that note - why are almost all tyrants fruitcakes?

Suicide Tops War, Murder for Deaths: WHO

Somehow, i think we've gotten our priorities wrong. Then again, i'm not really surprised... The article can be found here.

Suicide results in more deaths worldwide each year than war or murder, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Almost a million people take their own lives each year. A suicide occurs someplace in the world about every 40 seconds, according to WHO figures.

The highest suicide rate is in Europe's Baltic states where about 40 people per 100,000 kill themselves each year, BBC News Online reported. The lowest suicide rates are in Latin America.

Men account for most suicides, but women actually attempt suicide more often. In addition, it's estimated that there 10 to 20 million attempted suicides worldwide each year.

War Making Headlines, but Peace Breaks Out

In a similar vein in regards to surprising statistics from the previous article, this one - in the current - environment should be news to us. Not to mention true from a historical perspective (the 18th and 19th Centuries were the bloodiest by far). Maybe there is hope after all?

The full article can be found here.

The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.

In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meantime, are growing in number.

"International engagement is blossoming," said American scholar Monty G. Marshall. "There's been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts."

For months the battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s.

The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991.

The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995.

The Stockholm institute counts continuing wars that have produced 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in any single year. Project Ploughshares counts any armed conflict that produces 1,000 such deaths cumulatively.

The Stockholm report, to be released in September, notes three wars ended as of 2003 - in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia - and a fourth, the separatist war in India's Assam state, was dropped from the "major" category after casualties were recalculated.

It lists three new wars in 2003 - in Liberia and in Sudan's western region of Darfur, along with the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. These joined such long-running conflicts as the Kashmiri insurgency in India, the leftist guerrilla war in Colombia, and the separatist war in Russia's Chechnya region.

Other major armed conflicts listed by the Stockholm researchers were in Algeria, Burundi, Peru, Indonesia's Aceh province, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Israel, and Turkey. Their list also includes the U.S.-al-Qaida war, mainly in Afghanistan, the unresolved India-Pakistan conflict, and two insurgencies in the Philippines.

"Not only are the numbers declining, but the intensity" - the bloodshed in each conflict - "is declining," said Marshall, founder of a University of Maryland program studying political violence.

The continuing wars in Algeria, Chechnya and Turkey are among those that have subsided into low-intensity conflicts. At Canada's University of British Columbia, scholars at the Human Security Center are quantifying this by tackling the difficult task of calculating war casualties worldwide for their Human Security Report, to be released late in 2004.

Oh hey, this last one just came in...

Report: OPEC has lost control over oil prices

Article can be found here.

OPEC members have lost control over the oil market.

A report by the Center for Global Energy Studies asserted that the price of crude oil was no longer under OPEC control, Middle East Newsline reported. The report said OPEC, with spare production capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day, does not have sufficient capacity to significantly reduce oil prices, which have exceeded $47 a barrel.

"This leaves only the thinnest margin to cope with the unexpected and the market is worried that it could quickly be used up in the event of an interruption to supply or a cold winter," the report said.

The center said OPEC production in the third quarter of 2004 reached 29.19 million barrels per day. The figure did not include Iraq.

Interesting eh?

Ok, sorry for all the news articles but thats my passion for the day... g'night! ;)