The Chinese suck at zoos
“This kind of mistreatment is very common in Chinese zoos”
- Hua Ning, program director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, on the 11 rare Siberian tigers that starved to death at a Shenyang zoo. Three more are in critical condition.
Neural Advertising: The Sounds We Can’t Resist
In the early years of mainstream cell-phone use, the Nokia ringtone was recognized by 42% of people in the U.K. — and soon became widely loathed. That, Lindstrom says, was partly because so few users practiced cell-phone etiquette and the blasted things kept going off in movie theaters. The Microsoft start-up sound has taken on similarly negative associations, because people so often hear it when they’re rebooting after their computer has crashed.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1966467,00.html#ixzz0gi2AVelo
“Maybe all the stuff we wanted in the future sucks. Flying cars would block our light, food pills would make Gordon Ramsey’s yelling even more preposterous, and those moving sidewalks just give me another reason to hate fat people at airports. Far better is to have control over our most valuable commodity: time. Sure, we complain about being busy, but that’s great as long as we get to choose when we do things.”Joel Stein, TIME
“Given the feeling of abandonment that many of the soldiers I’ve spoken with during the past few years have, a more appropriate message to the American people might have been: I know you’re hurting, but we’re at war. We’re trying to stabilize the most dangerous part of the world. We’re trying to prevent the collapse of a nuclear state, Pakistan. We’re trying to capture and kill the people who massacred our friends and neighbors on September 11th, people who represent the purest manifestation of evil in the world. You have to be part of this effort, and no, merely mouthing platitudes in support of the troops is not enough. We all need to scarifice.”Joe Klein, TIME
el placer está en sus manos
What they’re teaching in Spain:
Officials in the Extremadura region are facing an outcry over taxpayer-funded sex-ed workshops for teens—including tips on masturbation—unfortunately named Pleasure Is in Your Hands. While organizers say conservative and Catholic critics have distorted the campaign’s purpose, an instructor admitted, “The title might have been a mistake.”
The Word
From Time:
Obamu v. a slang term gaining popularity among Japanese youth
To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think ‘Yes we can, yes we can’ and proceed with optimism…One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu, which means to refuse, reject or oppose.
- Japanese Teachers’ Network, via theatlantic.com, Oct. 19, 2009
“I want a law making all internet browsers’ default setting block pornography and for that setting to be difficult, but not too difficult to change. I want all alarm clocks, when they go off, to mention going to the gym. I think there should be limits on when you can sue, a ban on guns not used for hunting, parenting licenses enforced by social-services visits, more obstacles to post-first-trimester abortions, and a European-size tax on gasoline. Soda should be sold in containers no bigger than 8 oz. People should pay for their garbage by weight. And their plane tickets.”Joel Stein
