Insult or compliment?

Thought for the day

I prefer honest commies to socalled "apolitical" people any day.

Yes, I am very political and do not like people who pretend that they aren't.

This is what I said to someone today who claimed to be "apolitical":

I've been political ever since I was put in jail at the age of 20 in South Africa because I opposed apartheid.

I just don't jive with apolitical people. It's a cop out and usually translates into a lack of conviction and commitment.

Saying that you're "apolitical" to me means that you are an irresponsible libertine and/or sneaky left-wing passive-aggressive left-wing shill.

Christmas goose

When we get bored with chicken, we switch to duck and, by this time of the year, I've had enough turkey to last me till next Thanksgiving. So it's goose for Christmas. Yes, it's very fatty but goose-fat is the perfect medium for frying eggs - tastier than lard.

Guarding your Christmas goose from a fox:

Christmas is coming and Lauren and Ray, the Daily Telegraph geese, have been looking decidedly nervous of late. No, they have not anthropomorphically detected my intentions – they will be killed next week – rather, the source of their disquiet is a wily fox who has been trying to get into the goose house for the past few weeks and beat me to my Christmas dinner.

The first sign was a tunnel under the fence (I now fill it in daily and he digs it out again nightly) and one morning I discovered he had actually found a rotten board on the shed and worked a golf-ball sized hole in it. It must have taken hours and terrified the occupants. I screwed another plank over the top of the rotten board – and the next day discovered he had somehow managed to work the replacement plank loose. I screwed it in again with about 12 screws, and it has remained in situ.

I have spent much of the past month fretting about this fox, because, the closer we get to Christmas, the harder it will be for me to accept losing one or both of my glorious geese to Reynard the fox.

It’s been tricky with the early nights. As anyone who has ever attempted to combine having a job with keeping chickens can attest, being at home at 4:30pm every day for three months is hard to achieve, even for a feckless writer like me. And you can’t just miss a day and hope for the best. As my friend Anto, a proper farmer, warned me, foxes are patient enemies. They will check your chicken house every night as they make their rounds – and the day you forget to close it up is the day that they will reap the rewards for their persistence.

Last week, wrong-footed by the cold snap, I completely forgot to lock up Lauren, Ray and the eight chickens, with whom they share their spacious and well-appointed accommodation, until about 6pm. As every poultry-fancier worth their layers pellets knows, the prime time for a fox to strike is in the hour or so after the sun sets, so I threw on my wellies and raced down to the end of the garden. I heard the squawking before I got there, and the fox must have heard me too, because he was gone by the time I arrived and I never even saw him. He did, however, leave behind an ominous pile of feathers – white, goose-like feathers – glistening in the moonlight outside the chicken house.

It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that I turned on the pathetic torch on my mobile phone and surveyed the shed. The chickens had calmed down and were perched back on their roost as if nothing had happened. I counted them quickly and all eight of them were there. Of the geese, however, there was not a sign.

I actually felt close to tears. All that hard work gone to waste because of one silly slip-up! I also felt bad that the geese had probably died non-humanely as a result of my negligence. I stepped backwards outside the shed and was so busy cursing foxes that I actually fell over Lauren and Ray, who hissed at me furiously. They clearly had the good sense to leave the hen house when the fox had entered it. I knew geese were way smarter than chickens.

It was a horribly close shave, though, and that evening, in a flash of inspiration, I Googled “light- sensitive chicken house door”, which brought me to the web page of mail order specialists chicken-house.co.uk in Wales. Here, for the enormous sum of £120 (I long ago gave up the pretence that amateur poultry rearing was anything other than an out-and-out luxury) I ordered a photo-sensitive pop-hole door for my goose house. It arrived two days later and my father-in-law generously helped me mount it between snow blizzards.

It consists of a small unit covered in transparent plastic, housing a little motor which is attached to a light sensor. At sun-up, it winds up a length of string pulling a special lightweight aluminium door behind it, and when it gets dark – or has a bucket placed over it during tests by unbelievers like me – it unwinds, with an eerie Space Odyssey-esque hum, thereby lowering the door and protecting your flock (domestic birds tend to go into their sleeping quarters of their own accord just before it gets dark).

Despite the bucket tests, however, I still don’t trust it – so every evening at 4:45pm guess where you can find me? That’s right – shivering in the cold by the chicken house, watching and waiting for the automatic door to lower. After all, you can’t be too careful where foxes and Christmas dinner are concerned.

We do have foxes but our biggest problem is raccoons killing our chickens and ducks.

Blake Edwards dead at 88

Blake Edwards was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on July 26 1922:

He then got what he described as his “big break” with the naval comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), starring Cary Grant as the commander of a pink submarine.

Shooting was fraught because Grant wanted artistic control over the film. Typical of the many arguments between star and director was a row over which direction the submarine should be sailing in one shot. “Cary had this idea that the audience would get confused if they saw it going the other way,” Edwards recalled, “I told him I didn’t think so because it was the only submarine in the damn film which was painted pink.”

Despite the quarrels Operation Petticoat was among Universal’s most successful ever films, and Edwards found himself in the enviable position of being able to choose his next project. He immediately started work on Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The film, based on Truman Capote’s short story, was a hit both for Edwards and for his leading lady, Audrey Hepburn. Now considered a classic, it set him on a roll of winners, which began with Experiment in Terror (1962), a black-and-white thriller set in San Francisco, which marked a distinct change of direction for Edwards but won over critics, who had pigeonholed him as an adept hand at comedies and little else.

Days of Wine and Roses (1963), about a couple’s descent into alcoholism starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, saw his star rise yet further, with both principals nominated for Academy Awards.

In 1964, however, Edwards returned to comedy, with the first of the franchise for which he would be best remembered. The Pink Panther introduced the bumbling Inspector Clouseau to the world and proved such a box office draw that Edwards made a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, which was released just six months later.
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Edwards agreed to produce and direct the spy thriller Darling Lili in 1969.

Darling Lili became notorious as one of the greatest financial disasters in film history. Edwards nearly doubled the original budget and shooting was beset by problems, not the least of which was the studio’s insistence on making it a musical because it starred Julie Andrews, who had become Edwards’s wife earlier that year.
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He started work on 10, starring Dudley Moore as a man sexually obsessed with a young woman he sees on a beach, and Bo Derek as the object of his desire. “This is the sort of classical Hollywood comedy that will still look good in 30 years,” noted one critic, and it duly proved a big winner with audiences.

Such was its success that, in 1981, Edwards was invited to return to Paramount, the studio which had tried to sue him just a decade earlier, to make S.O.B., a satirical portrait of Hollywood and its denizens.

Although praised by the critics as a “savage satire”, S.O.B was better known to the public as the film in which Julie Andrews bared her breasts.

It did moderately well at the box office and Edwards followed it with Victor/Victoria (1982), also starring Andrews, which told the story of a singer masquerading as a female impersonator in order to find work.
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He is survived by his wife, by two children from his first marriage, and by the two children he and Julie Andrews adopted together.

Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark were all excellent. Darling Lili and Victor/Victoria were so-so. I haven't seen S.O.B, 10 or Experiment in Terror. I think I'll get them from Netflix.

Ron Wyden

Daniel Foster:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) released the following statement announcing his diagnosis with prostate cancer, and surgery scheduled for Dec. 20:

After my annual physical in late November, I was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer. After reviewing all the options with multiple physicians, I decided to take a proactive approach and have surgery, which will be performed December 20 at Johns Hopkins Hospital by Dr. Alan Partin.

Thanks to routine screening, this was diagnosed very early and I expect a full and speedy recovery.

I scheduled the surgery for the Monday before Christmas anticipating that the Senate would have recessed by that time and that there would be no disruption to my work in Oregon or Washington. However, it now appears that I will be missing votes tomorrow and possibly next week while I prepare and undergo this procedure. I expect to be back to work full-time when the Senate reconvenes in January.

...
We wish Senator Wyden a speedy recovery and a permanent remission. As icky as it makes me feel to do so, I must also point out that Wyden will likely miss votes on New START, DADT repeal, and perhaps even the omnibus.

I also wish Wyden a "speedy recovery and a permanent remission" but I don't feel at all "icky" that he can't vote on all that Democratic crap.

The senior senator from Oregon:

Ronald Lee "Ron" Wyden (born May 3, 1949) is the U.S. Senator for Oregon, serving since 1996, and a member of the Democratic Party. He previously served in the United States House of Representatives from 1981 to 1996.

Wyden was born Ronald Lee Wyden in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Edith (née Rosenow) and Peter H. Wyden (1923-1998), both of whom were Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany a few years earlier. Wyden grew up in Palo Alto, California, where he was a basketball star for Palo Alto High School. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara on a basketball scholarship, and later transferred to Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in 1971. He received a J.D. degree from the University of Oregon School of Law in 1974.

While teaching gerontology at several Oregon universities, Wyden founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers; he led that organization from 1974 to 1980. Wyden is also the former director of the Oregon Legal Services Center for Elderly, a nonprofit law service.
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Wyden has stated personal opposition to physician assisted suicide, but has also stated a commitment to defending the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which was twice passed by voter referendum. Wyden successfully blocked Senate attempts to pass legislation interfering with the Act by threatening a filibuster. Wyden has also consistently voted against limitations on the use of the death penalty.

In 2009 Wyden sponsored the Healthy Americans Act, an act that would institute a national system of universal health care through market based private insurance. Despite a voting record in favor of public health care, Wyden was attacked by union interests for advocating replacement of the employer tax exclusion with a tax deduction that would apply to all Americans (not just those who enjoy the good employer benefits provided to many union members.)
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Wyden has opposed most restrictions on abortion. He has voted against proposals to ban partial birth abortions, outlaw abortions on military bases, parental notification for minors who seek an abortion, and laws that prohibit minors from crossing state lines to obtain abortions. He has been rated 100% by the pro-choice NARAL. Wyden has been an advocate of gun control. He voted against limiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers and has voted in favor of increasing background checks.
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Wyden is critical of the estate tax, which he feels is inefficient, and has voted repeatedly to abolish it. He co-authored the Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act, which bans internet taxes in the United States. He has also voted with Republicans to lower the capital gains tax, to encourage the study of the flat tax, and to require a 3/5 majority to raise taxes. However, Wyden voted against the Bush tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003. He has also voted against the balanced-budget amendment.

Wyden supports lower corporate taxes and was generally supportive of the draft proposal for deficit reduction that was released by the chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in November 2010.

During the global Financial crisis of 2007-2010, Wyden voted against the financial bailouts backed by the Bush administration.

Wyden's a devout leftist but he's mixed bag and at least somewhat serious not a completely insincere two-faced fake and blithering idiot like the junior senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley.

John Nolte: "Brokeback Mountain not a left-wing film"

From John Nolte's latest post at Big Hollywood in his series, Top 25 Left-wing Films:

What’s not on the list - “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) and “Crash” (2004)

Writer/director Paul Haggis’ “Crash” doesn’t qualify because it’s a piece of cinematic shit — a sanctimonious, superior, strident, melodramatic, over-wriiten, over-acted, smug piece of cinematic shit that looks down on the “little people” of Los Angeles from the morally illiterate, self-righteous tower of the Hollywood Hills and declares us all racists. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost eight years now and the least of this Godforsaken city’s problems are its overwhelmingly decent and tolerant people. When it comes to different cultures living harmoniously together, L.A. is one of the great success stories of history. I’m a white guy married to a Spanish-speaking woman who was born in Mexico living in an overwhelmingly Asian neighborhood just a few block from the mostly Hispanic (and unfairly infamous — thanks Hollywood!) East Los Angeles (where we shop, eat, see movies…) – and I have never ever ever ever once seen or been involved in any kind of racial incident, much less the one’s depicted as an everyday reality in that godawful film

The only bigot here is Paul Haggis and those who rewarded his deep-seated prejudice against anyone not like his superior self with glowing reviews and Academy Awards (Best Picture!). In the worst way possible, he ruthlessly defamed the good people of this city, an overwhelming majority of whom look out for one another and see only fellow Americans in what is a richly diverse and endlessly interesting melting pot. The everday people in America moved past race a long time ago. The only ones who refuse to move on are like the leftists in Hollywood who remain obsessed with skin color and keeping those divisions wide and raw for political gain.

Adding insult to injury is that “Crash” stole that year’s Best Picture Oscar from the film that truly deserved it, director Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” a production that certainly had an agenda but not a political one. This poignant and heartbreaking story of two men who fall in love and can’t be together isn’t about gay marriage or any other partisan issue. Instead, Lee presents us with two very real and sympathetic characters, demands we recognize them as human beings, and wisely leaves it at that.

Because watching any kind of physical intimacy between two men makes me extremely uncomfortable (you call it homophobia, I call it wiring), I’ve only seen “Brokeback” once but the final scene’s stayed with me ever since. Heath Ledger’s character alone in that house trailer with nothing but that shirt worn by Jake Gyllenhaal’s character to remember him by is emotionally devastating stuff.

There’s nothing right or left about “Brokeback Mountain,” and I personally found it refreshing to see the rare Hollywood portrayal of homosexuals as something other than the easy stereotype of flamboyant Judy Garland fanatics.

The pope is not gay

He just likes red Prada shoes and hunky young guys.

The cub at the liquor store?

You know who I mean.

The cheapskate next door?

Chart of the day

From Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog:

Far be it from me to defend the capitalist system, but can't environmental organizations recognize that economic activity counts for something?

Invariably whenever the subject of carbon emissions, energy use, or other instances of mankind's global "footprint" arises, the standard environmentalist narrative is all about how big the average American's shoe size is.
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But as I've written elsewhere, when you actually analyze (pdf with more detail) the effect of modern technology on things like growing food, you find that impact per person stays constant — or even declines — as individual affluence grows. The amount of land used to grow food in America, for example, has remained virtually unchanged in a hundred years despite a tripling of population and a large increase in the consumption of high-quality protein (meat, e.g.). In other industries, technological improvements likewise allow for greater production with less input of energy or other raw materials.

The Washington Post the other day ran a front-page story on carbon emissions featuring a large graph comparing the United States, China, and India; it showed both total emissions and emissions per capita over the last 50 years, and the most recent data (from 2007) looked like this:















The message, as usual, was that although China has surpassed the U.S. in total carbon emissions, the U.S. generates much more per person.

But what the Post, and environmental groups, never seem to look at is the impact per unit of economic production. The United States manufactures a lot of things the world needs and buys (food, airplanes, lumber, chemicals; in fact, the U.S. is still the largest manufacturer in the world, something most people don't seem to know) and it does so at vastly greater energy efficiencies than do less developed countries.

Here's the same data as above but adding a comparison of carbon emissions per dollar of GDP generated:















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Of course to concede that technology is often good for the environment runs against the Calvinistic, anti-materialistic strain of the environmental movement — a strain that goes back to John Muir and Henry Thoreau at least — and which tends to view the planet's ills as at heart a matter of personal guilt to be expiated through renunciation and penance.
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Per capita comparisons are fine if you want to emphasize the idea that energy use is a personal sin and that industry and commerce either don't exist or are an evil in themselves, chargeable to our individual burden of sins by virtue of our citizenship in a country that is successful at these things. But a more sensible way of looking at it is that energy use is an unavoidable fact of existence — and so should be made in a way that produces the greatest buck for the bang.

Stephen Budiansky is a meat-eating, gun-owning, military-history writing liberal.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Some facts about the evil rich

Star Parker:

Thomas Stanley and William Danko wrote a book called "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy".

They produced a portrait of who America's millionaires are and show that by and large these are quiet, understated, self-reliant Americans who are committed to hard work, education and family.

Their portrait shows that 80 percent of our millionaires are first-generation affluent, that less than half received a cent in inheritance funds, and only 19 percent get any income from a trust fund or estate.

Most Americans -- 80 percent -- are not self employed. But of those that are, two-thirds are our millionaires.

Seventy-five percent of these self-employed millionaires are entrepreneurs and the remaining quarter are self-employed professionals like doctors and accountants.

These are overwhelmingly self-made individuals, founders and proprietors of prosaic businesses like "welding contractors, auctioneers, rice farmers, owners of mobile-home parks, pest controllers, coin and stamp dealers and paving contractors."

Sure, we have high-profile billionaires in America. But most of America's millionaires, those whose income is in the $250,000 and above category whose taxes Weiner wants to raise, are our nation's bread-and-butter entrepreneurs and small-business owners.

Are We Too Dependent on Rich Taxpayers?

California’s budget crisis has highlighted one of the most important tax issues of our time: a growing dependence on wealthy taxpayers for government revenue.

In a column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters cited the need to reduce “the corrosive dependence on income taxes from a handful of wealthy people by broadening the tax base.”

This follows repeated reports from the California state controller stating that the state’s budget problems stem in large part from the state’s addiction to capital gains taxes and income taxes paid by the wealthiest Californians.

In 2005, the richest 13.5% of California taxpayers (or those earning more than $100,000) paid 83% of all income taxes. Capital gains from the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for $100 billion out of the $111 billion in total capital gains reported.

“Those revenues rise and fall dramatically with the stock market, resulting in California’s unstable and volatile revenue stream,” the state Controller wrote.
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What governments need to do (aside from structural cost cuts, of course) is recognize the boom-and-bust nature of today’s wealthy and save money during the booms so they can spend during the busts. That way they can smooth out the inevitable tax swings.

But that’s probably asking the impossible.

Even more impossible than expecting governments to spend only the revenue raised from stable income taxes is expecting everyone to pay at least a minimum tax equal to the value of the services they receive from government. That's too much like common sense and common sense and socialism don't go together.

Couple's color co-ordinated trousers gave gay Saudi prince away

In October prince Saud Bin Abdulaziz was convicted of murdering his servant and gay lover:

LONDON - A Saudi prince was found guilty by a London court of murdering his servant in a London hotel after subjecting him to a "sadistic" campaign of violence and sexual abuse.

Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir al Saud, 34, a grandson of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah through his mother, was accused of beating and strangling Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz to death on February 15.
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"The defendant used his position of power over the victim to gratuitously inflict violence upon him over a long period of time," John McFarlane, the Scotland Yard detective who led the investigation, said after the verdict.

"After the victim's body was discovered he made every effort to evade justice, including misleading police by alleging that the victim had been robbed and then trying to claim diplomatic immunity, which he was not entitled to in the UK."

Saud was fuelled by champagne and cocktails when he murdered the 32-year-old in a ferocious attack after the pair had returned from a Valentine's Day night out, the two-week trial heard.

The victim, also a Saudi, was left with severe injuries including bite marks on both cheeks which prosecutors said showed a clear "sexual element" to the killing.

Saud -- whose lawyers argued that he could face the death penalty in Saudi Arabia over the revelations of homosexuality aired at the trial -- showed no emotion as the verdict was read out.

The prince had denied murder and a second charge of grievous bodily harm with intent in relation to an earlier alleged assault in a hotel lift that was captured on CCTV footage. He had admitted manslaughter.
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Prosecutors said he repeatedly assaulted Abdulaziz and that two brutal attacks were captured on CCTV by the hotel lift. The victim was so worn down by the violence that he let Saud kill him without a fight, they said.

Witnesses had told the court that Bandar -- an orphan who was adopted into the family of a low-ranking civil servant in Jeddah -- was treated "like a slave".
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A post-mortem found that Abdulaziz had suffered chipped teeth, heavy blows to the head, injuries to the brain and ears and severe neck injuries consistent with strangulation by hand, the trial heard.

The prince's father, a nephew of King Abdullah, was in court for the verdict.

The couple's color co-ordinated trousers gave gay Saudi prince away:

Dimitrov Dobromir, a porter at the Landmark Hotel in central London, said he helped Prince Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir Al Saud move to a bigger room in January this year.

Days later, the prince allegedly battered and strangled his aide Bandar Abdulaziz during a sexually motivated attack in the hotel room they shared.

Prince Saud, 34, described his companion to the police as a “friend”, but another hotel employee said Mr Abdulaziz, 32, was “like a slave”.

Details of the pair’s living arrangements emerged during the second day of the prince’s murder trial at the Old Bailey.

Mr Dobromir, who has worked at the Landmark for 18 months, said he helped the two men move their belongings from one room to another and carried rails of clothing.

He claimed they hung up their clothes in colour-coded order on hangers he brought to the room.

“I would describe them as a gay couple," he said. "I had the impression they were in a relationship.

“I do not think heterosexual men would have given such importance to hanging their pants.

“I am gay and I have a big feeling as who is gay and who is not."

Referring to Mr Abdulaziz, he added: “It was impossible not to notice that he was homosexual.”

John Kelsey-Fry, QC, defending the prince, insisted the two men were not in a sexual relationship and told the court: “It is not accepted that this is a gay couple.”

However, Prince Saud’s sexuality was put under the spotlight again by the evidence of Pablo Silva, a Brazilian gay escort who allegedly performed a sex act upon him at the hotel.

Mr Silva, 31, works part time as a male prostitute to fund his maths doctorate and is employed by sex agencies including Escort Guys and Men in The City.

Occasionally calling himself Jose, Mr Silva said he was called to the Landmark hotel for his services in the early hours of the morning at the beginning of February this year.
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Mr Silva said he normally stayed for an hour with his clients, but that the time was cut short.

“I asked him whether he wanted a massage and I think I asked him to remove something which he had on so that I should be able to do the massage.

“I took off my shirt and my trousers to cause a little more provocation to my client. I did the massage and in a short while I was free to leave.”

Saud was then sentenced to 20 years in prison:

During the two-and-a-half week trial, his lawyers denied he was a homosexual, despite naked pictures of Mr Abdulaziz being discovered on the prince's phone and police finding the 2009 Spartacus International Gay Guide in his hotel room.

The Daily Telegraph can also disclose that Saud had contact with up to six homosexual male escorts while in London, but police only managed to trace four.

Nine years ago Jamie Glazov wrote in The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror:

Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for "homosexual" in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

The prince and his sex slave - who seemed to like booze:

Gay waiter claims he had nipples tweaked by customer

He's suing:

Vincent Ma, 31, also alleges that two managers simulated a homosexual kiss and fondled each other in front of him.

Mr Ma says he was left "repulsed" and "humiliated" following homophobic abuse and harassment by staff and customers at the Yauatcha Chinese restaurant in Soho, central London.

London Central Employment Tribunal heard how one manager at the award-winning eatery sang Madonna's Like a Virgin at him before asking is he was a virgin.

Yauatcha was opened as a minimalist teahouse and Chinese restaurant in 2004 by Alan Yau, the man behind upmarket Hakkasan and the Wagamama chain.

Mr Ma was employed at the restaurant, a favourite amongst celebs and critics, as a commis chef.
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But in December last year he claims he began to be subjected to harassment at the hands of managers Imran Khaleel and Eder De Oliveira Fonseca Neto because he was homosexual.

Giving evidence through an interpreter, Mr Ma said: "Mr Imran Khaleel noticed my nipples popping out, by pointing at my chest with his finger (but not touching). At the same time he said it was 'sexy'."

Mr Ma, who is Chinese, was diagnosed with type two diabetes in January this year, which caused him to lose a significant amount of weight.

He claimed this made him more "defined" and noticeable.

He said: "There were managers discussing my body figure and expressing that my body figure was sexy.

"On April 12 2010 I worked as a food runner at dinner time and there was a dinner party for the staff of L'Oreal.

"There were a group of male customers drawing attention on me. They asked me to take photos for them and also they would like to take my photos.

"However during their dinner time I was unintentionally shocked when a gay customer pinched my nipple, when I was serving food.

"After the dinner I told of the situation to Mr Khaleel, that I was being harassed when I was performing my job duty. I expressed about my nipple being pinched by a gay customer.

"I was disappointed that he asked me, 'do you like it?'.

"There was another incident when I faced sexual harassment by Mr Khaleel and Mr Eder De Oliveira Fonseca Neto.

"When I was walking upstairs from the lower ground floor, at the same time Mr Khaleel and Mr Eder De Oliveira Fonseca Neto were both walking downstairs.

"Mr Khaleel and Mr Eder De Oliveira Fonseca Neto intentionally performed pretend gay kissing and they were fondling with each other in front of me.

"There actions were repulsive and humiliating to me."

Describing the virgin incident, Mr Ma said: "I heard Mr Khaleel was singing a song by Madonna - Like a Virgin.

"Mr Khaleel aproached me again and asked me 'are you a virgin'. I replied by saying 'yes'.

"Then Mr Khaleel said 'I don't believe you - do you ever enter, or being entered by somebody?'

"Their sexual harassment conduct became more aggressive and frequent, I lost my dignity and respect from people."

Mr Ma also claims insufficient rest breaks and the physical nature of the work made his diabetes worse.

He claims his managers failed to organise his lunch and dinner meals in accordance to his strict diet to control his blood glucose levels.

Mr Ma said: "I had energy efficiency decline. My endurance carrying heavy objects walking up and down stairs was no longer a good as a normal person.

"I had substantial risk of danger that I may collapse and fall by carrying heavy objects due to dizziness or faintness brought on by hypoglycemia.

"I should be offered other job tasks that are less energy consuming, as my job title is commis. Commis have other job duties to perform."

Mr Ma finally resigned on May 29 this year.

Hakkasan Limited, the restaurant group which owns denies Mr Ma's claims of disability discrimination and harrassment on the grounds of his sexual orientation.

The hearing continues.

There are so many jokes here I don't know where to begin. Type two diabetes made his nipples more "defined" and noticeable and "popping out?" You can't make this stuff up.

This is Wagamama - oops, I mean Vincent Ma:

Steve McQueen's cock

Now, there's no saying if maybe the weather doesn't play a role (he is wearing a sweater) in the representation:

This style guide appears to be the oldest source of the photo, and the poster doesn't seem to be aware McQueen's not holding a hot dog in his right hand.

It was sent to us after we posted the quote about McQueen's "golden cock" and it's the standard you'll have to judge it by.

A review of "Silent Spring"

David Zetland:

Holy cow. What a well-written book. I can totally understand how Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) jump-started the modern environmental movement.

The 300 page book starts and ends with hopeful fables of a healthy environment full of vibrant flora and fauna. The middle 15 chapters document, in painful detail, the damage that synthetic chemicals inflict on life. The book is famous for exposing the dangers of DDT (and aldrin and heptachlor), but I was shocked and angered by the bigger problem: All knowing bureaucrats over-applying chemicals in places that do not need them, to fight bugs that may not be present, without a clue of the collateral damage that they are causing.

Yes, we're talking about the USDA (and various government "landscaping" bureaucracies).

I took a few notes while reading the book...[USDA incompetence made me want to throw the book across the room at this point. I feel the same about corn ethanol. I bet politicians were involved...]
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A big thought: Most farmers will tell you that they minimize the volume of chemicals (and fertilizer) that they apply to their land, because they do not want to waste money and time on over-application. It's thus important (and sad) to note that the biggest abusers of chemicals in Silent Spring are bureaucrats whose jobs dictate that they should "do something" with other people's money (OPM!) and homeowners who do not understand the dangers of the chemicals they use and who think that "some is good, so more is better" when applying them to their yards.

Farm-fed beef is bigger, fatter, meatier and more filling

Do country boys have bigger cocks than city kids?

It’s the plot of a thousand adult movies and one film classic, “Midnight Cowboy”: A naïve country boy goes to the city and makes lots and lots of female friends thanks to his farm-fed beef.

Fantasy? Maybe not. In the December issue of the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Bulgarian doctors report results of a 6,200-boy survey showing “a modest though significant difference … with respect to penile size between urban and rural populations.” Country boys were born with longer ones and the disparity continued as the boys grew.

By the time the boys turned 19 -- considered the age of full maturity -- the country boys had a mean length of 9.72 centimeters, which sounds more impressive before the conversion to 3.826 inches (about the length of a string bean). The city boys measured 9.29 centimeters, or 3.657 inches.

The purpose of the study was not to measure size, but to establish a baseline set of data for tracking male puberty onset.

Those measurements are typical for the average man, said University of North Carolina adjunct professor Marcia Herman-Giddens, although she wondered how the researchers managed to examine the boys for testicle size and penile length. “I cannot imagine it would be easy,” she told me. “I am conducting a boys’ puberty study right now and it’s been a challenge getting permission.”

And the Bulgarian exam wasn’t exactly subtle.

“The stretched penile length in the flaccid state was measured with a rigid tape from the pubopenile skin junction to the top of the penis … under maximal [yikes!] but not painful [phew!] extension. The penile circumference was measured at the base of the penis … with a measuring tape. For obese males, the abdominal adipose tissue [body fat] was shifted manually to one side to measure penile length and circumference.”

The docs measured testicle size using an orchidometer, a medical device that's a necklace of egg-shaped beads of ever increasing volumes. You just hold one of the beads up to Mr. Lefty or Mr. Righty and eyeball it.

It’s possible, Herman-Giddens said, that embarrassed rural boys with smaller units opted out leading to skewed results. Or perhaps the racial makeup of country boys in Bulgaria is different from urban boys, or maybe the country boys -- and their parents -- eat better. Maybe the difference is related to chemicals in the environment. All three variables can affect size.

The other possibility is that country boys don't have adults breathing down their necks all day like city kids and start "playing rude" with their family jewels sooner and oftener. Of course in very isolated areas cocks really are family jewels - or at least the only entertainment. City kids play with X-boxes. Country boys play with their own and each other's family jewels.

And, if you've got a filthy mind like me, you wonder if country boys evolved to be horse-hung because most animal cunts are quite big and sloppy.

PS The "study" measured only fully-stretched flaccid cocks. Some growers are not showers and vice versa.