A group of vultures is called a committee.
That clears up a lot of things.
February 9, 2010
February 8, 2010
You CAN Be Bored To Death – So There
People who complain of high levels of boredom in their lives are at double the risk of dying from from heart disease or a stroke than those who find life entertaining.
Of more than 7,000 civil servants who were monitored over 25 years, those who said they were bored were nearly 40 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study than those who did not.
Younger employees and those with more menial jobs were also more prone to boredom.
It is important that people who have dull jobs find outside interests to keep boredom at bay, rather than turn to drinking or smoking, said specialists from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.
You Can Still Observe It From The Ground
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is by far the world’s tallest skyscraper coming in at 2, 717 feet – compare to the Sears Tower at 1,450feet.
And it has unexpectedly, and indefinitely, closed to the public a month after its lavish opening.
In recent weeks, thousands of tourists have lined up for the chance to buy tickets for viewing times often days in advance that cost more than $27 apiece. Now they are queuing up for refunds.
Electrical problems are at least partly to blame for the closure of the Burj Khalifa’s viewing platform — the only part of the half-mile high tower open yet. But a lack of information from the spire’s owner left it unclear whether the rest of the largely empty building — including dozens of elevators meant to whisk visitors at 40 mph to the tower’s more than 160 floors — was affected by the shutdown.
February 6, 2010
The Record Shows, I Took The Blows…
Should you find yourself in a karaoke bar in the Philipines make your song selection very carefully.
If you feel the urge to perform Frank Sinatra’s My Way, it very well could be your last performance. Ever.
Authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed singing that song over the years, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed The My Way Killings.
Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the existential explanation.
‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant, Mr. Albarracin said.
The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.
February 5, 2010
Barry On The Move, Yet Again
A statue of President Obama as a boy will be removed from a public park in Indonesia.
In December, the city unveiled the 43 inch tall bronze statue in a park in Menteng, the neighborhood where Mr. Obama lived with his divorced mother and Indonesian stepfather in the late 1960s. Financed by $10,000 from Mr. Obama’s supporters here, it depicts the boy known at the time as Barry in shorts and a T-shirt, smiling as a butterfly lands on his left thumb.
The governor of Jakarta, Fauzi Bowo reported that the statue will be relocated as soon as possible to an elementary school that Mr. Obama attended during the four years he spent as a child there.
Critics filed a lawsuit to force the city to remove the statue.
Heru Nugroho started a Facebook group, Take Down The Baarack Obama Statue In Menteng Park, which gained more than 56,000 members.
We Indonesians don’t even pay enough respect to our own heroes, people who contribute to our country. Then, suddenly, you build a statue of a person who’s contributed nothing to Indonesia.
It’s only because he lived here when he was little.
Extinction Watch – Virtuoso Edition
William Moennig & Son, founded in 1909, was one of the oldest and
most distinguished dealers and appraisers of rare violins, violas, cellos and their bows in the world.
As business got tougher in recent years, William Moennig IV and his sister, Pamela Moennig Taplinger, decided late last year they had no choice but to close.
Taplinger said that her brother doesn’t have children and that her daughter wasn’t looking to take over the family business.
There was nobody else to pass it on to, she said. They looked into trying to sell the business but didn’t find any takers.
Moennig represented a certain style of shop that is perhaps becoming obsolete, said Tom Wilder, president of the American Federation of Violin and Bowmakers. That is the full-service shops, they are becoming rarer and rarer.
The renowned Wurlitzer shop closed in New York in the 1970s – Moennig bought much of their collection. Other recent closures are W.E. Hill & Sons in London and, in the 1990s, Jacques Francais Rare Violins Inc. in New York.
Musicians’ instruments are their livelihood, and they go to great lengths to develop trusted relationships with those who work on them — especially since good violins can cost $4,000 to more than $15 million.
To me, it was a personal loss, said renowned soloist Victor Danchenko, who has performed with orchestras across the globe and taken his violins to Moennig since emigrating from the former Soviet Union in 1977.
We should really trust our physician, our car mechanic, and our violin maker and restorer and dealer.
Scotch, On The Rocks
One of the greatest discoveries in recent memory has been announced – three crates of Scotch whisky and two crates of brandy left beneath the floorboards of a hut by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1909, at the end of a failed expedition to the South Pole, have been unearthed by a team from the Antarctic Heritage Trust.
The team had expected to find just two crates of whisky buried under the hut. The trust reported that that ice had cracked some of the crates and formed inside, making the job of extracting the contents very delicate.
Richard Paterson, a master blender for Whyte & Mackay, which supplied the Shackleton expedition with 25 crates of Mackinlay’s Rare and Old whisky, described the unearthing of the bottles as a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers, since the recipe for that blend has been lost.
How would it taste, Shackleton’s Antarctic whisky?
Paterson says: Whiskies back then — a harder age — were all quite heavy and peaty as that was the style. And depending on the storage conditions, it may still have that heaviness. For example, it may taste the same as it did back then if the cork has stayed in the bottle and kept it airtight.
If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated.
Oh, do let’s keep our fingers crossed for that!
Well, Obviously He’s Not A Neanderthal!
The Genographic Project, a five-year initiative backed by National Geographic and IBM, uses new technology to examine DNA, allowing scientists to determine how and when early humans moved around the globe.
Anyone can participate in the project – it’s as easy as buying at kit.
One participant is Charles Darwin’s great-great grandson, Chris Darwin, whose DNA has shown that the father of evolutionary theory is a direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people - some of the first humans to leave Africa for the Middle East about 45,000 years ago.
From there, they traveled to Europe, surviving the Ice Age by migrating south to Spain, eventually moving to England about 12,000 years ago.
The Best Written Record Review. Ever.
I’m fairly immune to sales pitches and propaganda – which is why I came to a dead stop when I read this review – I’d never come across anything this convincing…so I had to post it in its entirety for you…
Like a long-ago lover not quite forgotten, Sade has returned to steal our hearts with more beautiful, uncategorizable music.
It’s been 10 years since her last album, a fatal hiatus for almost any other artist, but just another hibernation for a woman whose disdain for fame only deepens our fascination. Sade’s voice sounds unchanged, a unique emotional instrument that conjures visions of rain-streaked windows and windblown streets. Her topics — love, loss, sorrow, strength — remain the same. But her music has still moved forward.
The aggressive title track makes a bold statement, its stabbing drums continuing the bass-heavy direction of her 2000 release, Lover’s Rock. Some of the new album’s 10 songs are classic, smooth Sade. But there’s also a country twanger, a reggae-tinged ode to fathers who are not husbands, even Sade’s first uptempo number since 1992’s Kiss of Life.
This is only the sixth album in 25 years for Helen Folasade Adu, born in her father’s Nigeria and raised in her mother’s England. She is still working with her original three bandmates: bassist Paul Denman, guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, and keyboardist Andrew Hale. She is still mysterious, ageless — and defiant.
I only make records when I feel I have something to say, Sade says on her Web site. I’m not interested in releasing music just for the sake of selling something. Sade is not a brand.
That’s exactly why you need to buy this album.
Extinction Watch – Another Language Vanished
Boa Sr was the last native of a 65,000 year old tribe living in the Andaman Islands who was fluent in the now-extinct language of Bo.
Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.
The Great Andamanese once numbered more than 5,000 people. There are now only 52 members surviving members of the tribe.
The king of the Bo tribe died in 2005, leaving only a handful of elderly members who also died over the next five years.
Boa Sr had been losing her sight in recent years and was unable to speak with anyone in her own language as she no children and her husband died several years ago. She was 85.
