A Waltz for a Night

Top Ten Reasons Why Humans Have Sex

After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, two psychologists Cindy Meston and David M. Buss (at University of Texas at Austin) have recently assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons. Their list is a very thorough, interesting taxonomy of sexual motivations.

Below are the Top 10 :
1. I was “in the heat of the moment.”

2. It just happened.
3. I was bored.
4. It just seemed like “the thing to do.”
5. Someone dared me.
6. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy).
7. I wanted to feel closer to God.
8. I wanted to gain acceptance from friends.
9. It’s exciting, adventurous.
10. I wanted to make up after a fight.



I am glad to point out that "I wanted to have a child" is the reason No. 27.

Hmm..

Conversation With A Stone

- by Wislawa Szymborska

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.
"You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in."

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

Like this poem? Try Failing And Flying by Jack Gilbert

Internet Porn Statistics

Where All Street Signs Go To Rest

for jei who loves to take photos of them. ^_^
















Original link here.

Fantastic Tiger Diving Pics

Original Link here.

There Is NO Mystery to Happiness

There is NO mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn – or worse, indifference – cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn’t look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning – the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life – a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

EXCERPT FROM: INTERPRETATION OF MURDER BY JED RUBENFELD

Father and Daughter

8 Rules For Writing A Short Story by Kurt Vonnegut

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
   characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the
   reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
   possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
   finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

- By Lev Grossman, Original Article Here.

The proper length for an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut is three words: "So it goes." This one will do what Vonnegut never did, which is go on too long.

"So it goes" is a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. It's an expression the Tralfamadorians — a race of four-dimensional aliens — repeat whenever somebody or something dies. It expresses a certain airy resignation about the inevitability of death. Vonnegut — who died Wednesday night at the age of 84 from injuries suffered in a fall — had the Tralfamadorian attitude. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14," he told Rolling Stone last year. "So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me."

Vonnegut was born Indianapolis in 1922, the son of an architect. His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before. He put in a mediocre stint at Cornell before enlisting in the army in 1942, in the teeth of World War II. Shortly afterward — and within a year of each other — two events occurred that would prove to be formative for Vonnegut. In 1944, on Mother's Day, he came home on leave to discover that his mother, an unsuccessful writer, had committed suicide with sleeping pills. In December of that same year Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war. On February 13, 1945 Dresden was leveled in a massive Allied bombing assault so intense it created an enormously destructive firestorm. Well over 130,000 people died. Vonnegut survived by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Perhaps because he began his writing career fully disillusioned, Vonnegut's view of the world changed very little over his five decades as an author. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952 and set in a spiritually empty, hyper-mechanized future dystopia. (Vonnegut mixed literature with science fiction long before it was cool.) His most famous novel — his personal favorite, and the one that deals with most directly with the Dresden disaster — is Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of one Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time": Billy experiences the events of his life in random order, including his own birth and his own death. Understandably, this imbues him with a weird, almost redemptive fatalism, which is echoed by the narrator, who is Vonnegut himself. "There would always be wars," he writes, "they were as easy to stop as glaciers... And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike — he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.

Vonnegut struggled with silence and depression — including a suicide attempt in 1984 — but in all he managed to publish 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays and five works of non-fiction. His last book, Man Without a Country, a collection of essays published in 2005, was a surprise best-seller.

Although he died a literary celebrity, lionized by the culture of which he was so unsparing, Vonnegut was always drawn to outcasts and failures in his writing: criminals, the deformed, the exiled, the damaged, the insane, anyone who no longer had a stake in repeating society's familiar lies. The cast of Cat's Cradle includes one of those outcasts, a midget to whom Vonnegut gave the title speech:

"No wonder kids grow up crazy," the midget says. "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

RAPISTS: Come and Get It.

Rape-Stopper's Razor-Sharp Bite

Scumbags of South Africa, you have been warned. Later this month, women there "will be able to arm their vaginas with the Rapex device, a product priced at 1 rand (around 14 cents) and sold over the counter," the Guardian reports. "Shaped like a female condom and worn internally, its hollow interior is lined with 25 razor-sharp teeth, which fasten on to an attacker's penis if he attempts penetration."

Some people - including women's campaigners - have criticised the device for being "vengeful". Well, as its inventor, Sonette Ehlers, has said, it's "a medieval device for a medieval deed". If any rapist finds himself hopping with pain as a result - as well as facing the fact that the only way to remove the device is said to be a highly awkward and incriminating hospital visit - that seems just fine to me. Yes, it's vengeful. Yes, it hurts rapists. Oh well.

The device is "inserted with an applicator like a tampon, and removed with the same applicator," according to the Rapex. It can stay in for up to 24 hours. And it will be "available in various sizes... small, medium and large."

When should it be worn? "If you have to travel long distances alone, on a train, working late, going out on a date with someone you don’t know too well, going to clubs, or in any situation that you might not feel comfortable or even just not sure."

"The myth of the vagina dentata - vagina with teeth - has proved strangely compelling down the centuries, " the Guardian adds, "but who would have thought it would become real?"

Source:  http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/04/rapestoppers_ra/  

Audrey Kawazaki

Komorebi

Oil on wood 15x11
2007

More: Audrey Kawasaki

Calculus Batman

Anil Gupta Arm Tattoo

This is what I'm getting if I get the needle. The great Anil Gupta.

School Lawn

From a display at Reed College, Portland, OR. Each white flag
represents six dead Iraqis since the beginning of the war, and each red
flag represents a dead US serviceman. Statistics come from the Lancet
survey of Iraqi mortality since 2003, published October 2006

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

- By Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945

I hold my honey and store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

Clark Kent

I studied in a catholic school. As such we would have fridays when the teachers and nuns go off to a one-hour, half day or even one day retreat of prayer and communion depending on the time of day or which saint's canonization was to be celebrated.

I was never nominated before until one day, together with a fellow classmate, I was asked to mind a roomful of kindergarden kids for two hours or so. I was in grade six; I was age ten.

And so it went, the horrors of child rearing, in which were were given a glimpse of the martyrdom of motherhood. Exhausting. The fidgety were frisky, the drama queens were emoting, the action heroes went leaping amongst tables and chairs with the tarzans.

Except for this little boy who was doing his darnedest to be good. Sat on the chair: behaved when told, crayon-scrawled when papered, and gave me far too many glances of where-is-she? and am-i-doing-it-right?

This boy gave the impression of a young Clark Kent. Quite handsome, actually. Headful of black hair swept at the forehead, quite tall or, possibly, he just stood erect unlike his helplessly springy compatriots. His was quiet dignity amidst the exploding enthusiasm all around. And I surprised myself because he moved precisely - I half expected him to fumble and bump into things. He also had an innate sense to lead, he stood in front of the line when we finally had to corral the group to wash hands for snacktime.

Inevitably, our duty was done and my friend and I thankfully welcomed the end of our misadventure. As I was about to leave, Clark Kent ran up to me and frantically tugged my uniform skirt.

What's the matter? I said, kneeling to him at eye level. His face was just too serious.

I love you. He said.

I laughed and hugged him and said goodbye. I never saw him again.

Each Individual Counts

Rich and Poor

I got this over at EarPhone's site. It was too good to pass off.

One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people can be. They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"
"It was great, Dad."
"Did you see how poor people can be?" the father asked.
"Oh Yeah" said the son.
"So what did you learn from the trip?" asked the father.
The son answered, "I saw that we have one dog and they had four.

We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.
We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.
Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.
We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.
We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.
We buy our food, but they grow theirs.
We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them."
With this the boy's father was speechless.
Then his son added, "Thanks dad for showing me how poor we are."

Moody Hanging On - Thank You People

Bunch of people came and went recently. Crashed in during the holidays and made it merry. Now I'm flopping around with a hole in my insides. I've hung "Gone Fishing" signs in my other sites and I'm a little strung out having to take it off. I'm verging on sappy but don't you worry - we've got that under control.

Paperlilies said a lot of things about being thankful for having an online community of friends. She probably will say it better in many ways than I ever could. She said it exactly as I've wanted to from 1:00 to about 3:00 minutes into her video clip.

If you never get around to watching it, the nutshell of it all is that: I really appreciate all the traffic and the people who've come around and hung around this site. There is a special thank you to people who matter more than expressed, and you guys know who you are. I've said it before and let me say it again:

Thanks for dropping by and giving me a read. It's really humbling that people give me notice. Google Analytics tell me I get about 200 pageviews and 80 visits a week - there are a lot of silent readers out there. I'm still trying to find my voice and couldn't make up my mind what sort of dignity or lack thereof should be presented. That said, your comments (even silent ones) are appreciated. Do come back soon. Have a great year ahead.

Thank You For the Warm Memories

Momofuku Ando died last January 6th. He was the inventor of the cup noodle and the founder of Nissin. If you don't know what I'm talking about, shame on you and I pity your probably stale gastronomic life.

Let me just say that his invention brought tremendous joy into my life. The Pure Magic in the styrofoam cup with a foil lid has been a permanent prop in the background (and sometimes foreground) of my life. There are only two warm things about me -- coffee, and this. The rest of me is made up of doritos. (Some people might claim motor oil and battery fluid better describes my composition and they maybe right).

Reading about Momofuku's life and longevity has also given me tremendous hope and courage. I have long been plagued by misguided detractors and miscreant spammers who do not believe monosodium glutamate is the ultimate super nutrient. IN YOUR FACE YOU FOOLS!

And so, Mr. Ando, thank you for making my life instant and beautiful. Rest in peace, O Great and Noble One.