Menfolk are Happy Folk

I'm normally not a big fan of chain mail, but I'm gonna share this one ("FW: Men are just happier people", Friday, 5 March 2010 4:09:30 PM) from my inbox.

I like its simple-minded coverage of the Great Gender Divide (especially as it was sent to me by a woman), and find it pretty true to life. So, here goes:

MEN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

NICKNAMES

• If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.
• If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat-Boy, Gas-man and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT

• When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20, even though it's only for $32.50.  None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
• When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

• A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
• A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

• A man has six items in his bathroom:  toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel.
• The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337.  A man would not be able to identify more than 15 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

• A woman has the last word in any argument.
• Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

FUTURE

• A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband. 
• A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife..

MARRIAGE

• A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
• A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

• A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
• A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

• Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
• Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

• Ah, children.  A woman knows all about her children.  She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.
• A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE  DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes.  There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

SO, send this to the women who have a sense of humor and who can handle it ... and to the men who will enjoy reading it.

Guidos on TV

A little while ago, I gave some coverage to the shoe-scraped culture that is Guidos.

Well, they now have their own show. 

It's called Jersey Shore (kind've like an orange-skinned version of Laguna Beach). Daniel O'Brien writes a scathing overview of the series:

MTV’s Jersey Shore, a new reality show about self-described Guidos and Guidettes sharing a house in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, caught my eye. Not just because I spent the first two decades of my life in New Jersey, but because I’ve been looking for something just like this show for a long time, because it finally means we can move on: MTV’s Jersey Shore is the Worst Thing to Happen to the East Coast Since 9/11.

The show's already managed to generate a porn parody, which O'Brien also brilliantly dissects in "The Jersey Shore Porn Parody: A Critical Analysis".

Ancient Anomalies

I've always had a thing for "out-of-place" artifacts. That whole "alternate" history thing. They have a way of showing that the ancients weren't as "dumb" as we might like to think.

One of the more well-known examples is the Antikythera Device, a piece of complex machinery found in an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901. It's believed to be 2,000 years old. No one even knows exactly what it was used for.

Check out World-Mysteries.com's "Strange Artifacts" page for more examples of these archaeological anomalies.

One of its more startling examples is the "Piri Reis Map". It was a map drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, an admiral in the Turkish fleet. What makes it unusual, are certain geographic inclusions:

The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC.

Reis included notes on the sources he drew upon for his map, some as old as the fourth century BC. But we're still left with a confounding question:

The official science has been saying all along that the ice-cap which covers the Antarctic is million years old. The Piri Reis map shows that the northern part of that continent has been mapped before the ice did cover it. That should make think it has been mapped million years ago, but that's impossible since mankind did not exist at that time.

Further and more accurate studies have proven that the last period of ice-free condition in the Antarctic ended about 6000 years ago. There are still doubts about the beginning of this ice-free period, which has been put by different researchers everything between year 13000 and 9000 BC.
The question is: Who mapped the Queen Maud Land of Antarctic 6000 years ago? Which unknown civilization had the technology or the need to do that?

Cracked Samples

Although Cracked was a pretty crappy humour mag, its website has some pretty damn good articles. Here's a selection I've been reading, with rough attempts at appropriate subject designation.

History

• Jacopo della Quercia, "6 Assassination Attempts that Almost F#@ked the World".
• Jacopo della Quercia, "7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World" .
• Neal Nicholson, "The 5 Most Terrifying Civilizations in the History of the World".

Mysteries

• Jacopo della Quercia, "6 Insane Coincidences You Won't Believe Actually Happened".
• Andy Guerriero, "6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain". 

Revenge

• Jacopo della Quercia, "6 Historic Acts of Revenge That Put 'Kill Bill' to Shame".

Review

• Cracked Staff, "The Top 5 Everything of the Decade (For Better and Worse)".

War

• Jacopo della Quercia, "The 5 Most Widely Believed WWII Facts (That are Bullshit)".

I Heart Silphium

Silphium was a plant so popular in the ancient world, that many believe it was farmed into extinction.

Why was it so popular? Here's the break-down, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Aside from its uses in Greco-Roman cooking (as in recipes by Apicius), many medical uses were ascribed to the plant. It was said that it could be used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, aches and pains, warts, and all kinds of maladies. Chief among its medical uses, according to Pliny the Elder, was its role as an herbal contraceptive.

Interestingly, there's a probable link between its use as a contraceptive and contemporaneous depictions of the plant's seed/fruit:

There has been some speculation about the connection between silphium and the traditional heart shape (♥). The symbol is remarkably similar to the Egyptian "heart soul" (ib). The sexual nature of that concept, combined with the widespread use of silphium in ancient Egypt for birth control, and the fact that the seeds of silphium are shaped like a heart as shown in the left illustration, leads to speculation that the character for ib may have been derived from the shape of the silphium seed.

Here's the illustration in question:

Uncanny, isn't it?

What If the Atom Bombs Hadn't Succeeded?

What would've happened if Little Boy and Fat Man hadn't pounded Japanese morale into submission during World War 2?

Operation Downfall, that's what.

A plan was drafted for a massive Allied invasion of Japan. This wasn't going to be an easy feat, as only a few of their beaches would've been suitable for landing. Thus, the anticipated casualties of this proposed invasion were staggering:

In a study done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April, the figures of 7.45 casualties/1,000 man-days and 1.78 fatalities/1,000 man-days were developed. This implied that a 90-day Olympic campaign would cost 456,000 casualties, including 109,000 dead or missing. If Coronet took another 90 days, the combined cost would be 1,200,000 casualties, with 267,000 fatalities.

And another estimate:

A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.

Not that I'm supporting nuclear warfare here, but thank goodness the Japs surrendered when they did.

Just Over Two Years to Go

Still worried about the world ending on December 21, 2012?

This Cracked article should dispel your fears. They do a bang-up job of uncovering the source of this particular apocalyptic scenario:

It all started in 1975, when a bunch of New Age authors / hippies decided to take a break from their social worthlessness to talk about the Mayan calendar. Since this was not long after the whole "Age of Aquarius" craze made popular by the 1967 musical Hair, these sacks figured there might be a growing market of hipsters to learn about the new "age" . . . the Mayan calendar would enter on December 21, 2012. Sounds pretty harmless, and it was.

And then entered Terence McKenna...