Instead of arbitrarily dividing every sport into 'male' and 'female' on grounds of some 'average man' and 'average woman' that only exist in a statistical fairyland, just have different leagues: the sport-specific equivalents of lightweights and heavyweights (like, how hard they can hit a ball or something). If it IS true that men are on average better than women, you'll find more men in the more powerful tiers and more women in the less powerful tiers, and a few intersex people here and there, and then that's that. No problems.

I'm fine with the argument that more than 50% of men are better at sports than more than 50% of women. But 'every man is stronger than every woman' is bullshit. Who's this Everyman anyway?

"This can not be. This is not a woman, it's a man. She does not have the power of a woman and no woman has such a technique," Tzoref said. "She serves like a man. It's very strange."

Schlomo Tzoref deserves to be found drowned in a puddle of his own urine. What a horrible thing to say.

Imagine what would happen if someone proved Federer had a vagina. "He can't play with the real men! The girly moans are really distracting!"

Bloody misogynists.

I don't really hang out with the girls from animal sciences, but they seem pretty stable. I did notice none of them mind cutting up cadavers very much, though.

I just love how the BBC filed this news article under the entertainment section. It's like those newscasts that are a little too dark and serious so they throw in a happy story at the end to lift the mood... and this is what they use. "So yeah, the situation in the Middle-East is looking very grim... in other news, Jade Goody died and left her kids a fortune! Isn't that nice?"

I really miss the old days when you had to spit in the face of at least three of the seven popes to get excommunicated. These new world catholics are a real letdown.

Also drop by the sixtine chapel in the Vatican.

Don't do this. You'll be queuing for over an hour, and you can't take pictures or sit down in the Sistine Chapel (plus the guards are rude). It's like going to the Louvre just to see the Mona Lisa for five seconds and then walking out again. There's a ton of great (and better) art to see besides the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museum. So yeah, get a proper tour guide if you can.

Oh, and when in St. Peter's, keep your hand on your wallet. It's swarming with pickpockets (mostly of the sweet old granny variety).

√-16

-1*√16=-4

What I'm wondering about is whether emperor Meow sentenced these guys to death over the melamine or over the scandal...

It's a pretty big deal when privately owned companies aren't inspected and allowed to serve their products to the masses.

Not only is China a communist country, it's also bad at being communist! I'm pretty sure the Chinese KGB could have prevented this, and killing the perpetrators after the fact probably isn't the best PR for the Party.

People in China have been sentenced to death for less, so it's not as if this comes as a terribly big surprise.

Are there reasons you would give for NOT executing the men?

Well, being civilised is one.

If it had not been such a worldwide scandal do you think they would have the same sentence? Or does this have to do with China losing face in the world?

Hard to say. On the one hand, I could see China executing all of them. On the other... no, that's about it. They can get away with killing some of them in public, seeing as the other superpower gets away with that kind of barbarism, but to kill all of them would strain relations with civilised countries. Plus, no international company would want to move to China if they risked capital punishment.

He shouldn't have called the police, otherwise he might've been successful.

If he didn't want 'the police' to think he'd gotten into actual plane-crashing-dying-in-fireball trouble, he could have just landed the plane instead of making it crash. He wanted to stage his death, but it didn't work out because the wreckage was recognizable enough to see the door was open and his corpse wasn't in it. If he wanted to disappear, why rent an airplane instead of, you know, crossing the border and growing a beard?

Still, nice try. He might be a bastard, but at least he's a bastard in style.

Since the Wii has become such a success off of titles like Wii Fit and Wii Sports, I'm certain they will continue more in that direction.

That's not actually what they're doing. They're being rather lazy, yes, but they're waiting for all the newly generated 'casual' gamers to want to move on to more 'hardcore' games. They did it with the DS, where they started with Nintendogs and Brain Age and shit (and every other developer thought it was just another Virtual Boy or whatever), and moved up into 'actual games', and now they rode that wave they're doing it again with the Wii. Notice that they didn't make Nintendogs 2 or Wii Sports 2. They'll probably start making your kind of games again once the 'casual' gamers have caught up.

When the whole casual games fad dies and all the imitating developers go bankrupt, they'll probably make another console or handheld or VR hamsterball or whatever and start all over again. Nintendo's calling it a 'strategy of disruption', but nobody's listening and thinks the Nintendo strategy is just to make sickeningly-sweet retard-friendly games, and then third-party developers complain how every gamer's a Nintendo fanboy when nobody buys their crappy peggle knock-offs.

The reason the whole thing is going so slow for the Wii is probably because for it to work for Nintendo, it has to make quality games if it wants to snare the new gamers along into the hardcore, and to get back to whatever the topic was, this is why you'll have to wait a bit for your hardcore franchises.

I his defense really "I was only trying to torture him, it's not my fault I didn't put my taser in my gun holster"?

I'm guessing it's time to stop giving policemen tasers when they're using them as an excuse to shoot defenseless people in the back!

Why's the santa standing in an acacia is what I want to know.

It was between Medieve and Mr D for me, but I'm going with Medieve because he's cuter. Sorry Mr D :(

There's this religious studies class my old middle school has to give to get extra subsidies. There were some good teachers that made it remotely bearable, but my class was stuck with this closet evangelist. I remember we had to write an essay about god (of all people), and when I finally managed to claw my way out of the dark pit of teenage depression and wrote an essay titled "god is a woolen sweater, a rhetorical dialogue" the bastard didn't accept it and almost failed me. I did bloody research for that one.

I've been looking for a way into this nerd theatre stuff, so I might as well start here. I haven't ever played tabletop before, but I've lurked around D&D boards for long enough (leeching creativity) to get the gist of it. Not too familiar with IRC, though. Like, how do you roll dice over the internet?

I'm at GMT +1, but since I'll only really have time in the weekends anyway I can probably stretch my sleeping schedule enough to work with whatever time zone. I'll go and check out #darkling sometime.

my parents have 'yes on 8' boards outside, i like how the only other thing written on them is something about parental rights(to not let their kids learn about homos in kindergarten?) and doesn't mention a single thing about what 8 is.

This is usually the point where decent people replace those signs with "yes on 8 WHITE POWER" or "yes on 8 jews lied about the holocaust".

That is seriously the coolest thing ever, Lars.

If anyone is afraid of centipedes, slugs, catterpillars or worms, don't watch this. Seriously, if there's any creeper to be creeped out by, it's the velvet worm.

and i thought The Witcher was that first person game where you have this black stuff around you that kills people and you were living in like the 1940's.

That was The Darkness (I know this because that Yahtzee review featured the phrase 'fan-dabby-babulous').

Shamus Young on the atrocious unenhanced version.

'Jesus, that picture of the little girl IS creepy.

But besides that, people I see walking alone in the dark freak me out. Or, walking alone at night outside on the streets, when I'm driving by.

"...WHAT IS HE DOING OUT HERE???"

People driving by when I'm walking alone at night outside in the streets... if you get my drift. Seriously, unidentifiable car drivers are scary as hell. Please stop doing that.

In other news, I don't so much have phobias, I'm just an all-round easily frightened person. Generally, all my fears fall into the "I'd really rather not get eaten, please" range. I'm afraid of stalkers, hungry lions and similar predators, dangerous criminals, poisonous animals, unsafe heights, very turbulent water and brandished weapons, to name a few.