For years the Internet was dominated by male ingenuity and needs:  computer stuff, free porn and killing each other in bloody games.

Now woman are taking control and are putting their stamp on the Internet to satisfy their gender specific needs: looking pretty, knowing all the newest gossip, shop and shop and shop …

Isn’t it great to see that biological patterns still reign supreme in the 21st Century and a totally virtual environment?!

Click image for a closer look.

Honestly - I still thing the 1991 is the sexiest version of them all. Coke out of a plastic bottle is just not the same physical sensation as holding a nice cold glass bottle.

"Overpopulation refers to when an organism’s numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat."

I would love to see some hardcore numbers how many inhabitants our "habitat" can support in an sustainable way?

Our oil reserves won’t last much longer and within fifty years our petrol based lifestyle and food production will simply collapse, because the supply won’t last. At least it seems production rates already can’t keep up with demand.

But we all as a world community have to figure out how many people this planet can support - so we can plan and adjust. We will need to once again have to look seriously on family planing, productions numbers and available resources - but in a scientific way.

More? Overpopulation @ Wikipedia

Summer, sunshine, sunburns …

It’s amazing how much chemicals we spill each year to avoid the effects of soaring sunlight on our skins. And how much more we waste on treating sunburns.

Why not simply move OUT of the sunlight to avoid damage to your precious pale office complexion? Or pre-roast yourself before dragging your sorry ass into the sun? Going from pale cavemen to roasted super model in just 14 days is not recommended.

This is the real thing! From the product description:

Plays "SpongeBob SquarePants Theme" at the end of temperature taking.

So when you hear music in your ass Spongebob is ready to tell you your temperature. Isn’t merchandise a wonderful thing!

Pat Robertson would have loved this - Spongebob is for the Gays.

YouTube knows the truth!

Photoshop and a great operator can greatly improve your career, even when you are already old and wrinkled. Hotness is no longer in the eye of the beholder, but based on the right image manipulation.

Shopping doesn’t make you horny or provide any form of therapy, but it for sure makes your poorer. Your credit card company will love you tho …

We might laugh today at the blunt message of this 1950’s TV commercial. But has the message really changed? Individualism has become more prominent since the 1970’s - but the method is still the same: fear. The fear of being not cool, fear of NOT belonging to the big crowd, fear NOT to doing (buying) the best for your loved ones, fear of being NOT adorable, sexy, smart … whatever.

Since most products hardly differ in quality or features - they have to get their uniqueness either through “cool design” or marketing. For example: most cell phones for €100 have the same features for that prices, but they look very different and are often targeted at different crowds (business user, kids, pussy tech, etc).

And it is still fascinating that we still reacted to finely tuned amounts of fear and associations: “Oh, no this cell phone is made for woman. I am a strong guy, I am not gonna buy this although it’s cheaper and does exactly what I want it to do!”.

*inspired by OliviaB sending me a similar coffee ad*

Just because you own an expensive vehicle doesn’t mean all the hot chicks want to play with you stick as well.

Some stuff might not be rocket science, but some instructions can totally confuse us poor consumers and make simple stuff really complicated.

That commercial precisely captures two modern truths: pumping yourself up with music (via your iPod) and loads of sugar & caffeine from your local latte dealer.

Music, sugar and caffeine to make ourselves feel good and calm down our neurotic egos. We do matter! We do great stuff! We have a great job to fulfil! We are someone!

So we force our brains to feel euphoric although there is nothing to feel euphoric about. So that high that you kick yourself into is simply self-deception and worth nothing.

Stop lying to yourself and get real highs.

As a kid I would have sold you both my grannies, my mother and my father for a Stormtrooper uniform. I only managed to buy a really really really crappy helmet for a HUGE amount of of hard earned Deutschmarks back in the 80’s.

Today you simply can order that bloody thing off the intranets - but still for a price: $899.

I could save (again) that amount of money - but I am afraid there are no Fattroopers in the Star Wars Universe and dressing up a Jabba the Hut is not my idea of a good time.

Maybe I could do an oversized R2D2? Or I go as a mutant Yoda?

Poor old Barbie - and many other cultural Icons - you are no longer the coolest (girly) toy around. I wonder if people will remember Darth Vader, Pac Man, Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man, Pokemons, Godzilla or King Kong in a 100 years?

Lick on that Holy Spirit! Nothing is sacred these days, but it least this tasteless stuff is pretty yummy. This dead man is easy to swallow … another Jesus please!

But is this chocolate Jesus any different what Catholics do during their service: they eat his Body and drink his Blood.

Consumerism and marketing is a funny thing. Producers want you to buy more stuff than you actually. The essence of consumerism is buying NEW stuff before the old really needs to be replaced.

But to do this companies needed a new sales pitch, because throwing away perfectly good stuff makes no sense at all.

Edward Bernays - Sigmund Freuds nephew - told manufacturers to appeal to our lower and irrational instincts (based on his uncles discoveries). So the idea was to make you feel good about wasting stuff - to make you enjoy a certain brand or good, because it made you a better person.

So people would buy a car endorsed by Mr Spock - because they want to be like him - although it is highly illogical.

Smart campaign to visualize how we plunder the (green) resources of our planet. I wonder if we really still need to raise awareness of the situation - I would rather see a paper spender that limits waste in some way …

According to new research 30% of our planets usable land is used for growing food for humans. This is a HUGE number - I didn’t expect to be so high.

So it’s no surprise that so many species go extinct since we are eating up all the space and create more and more farmland to produce food and now biofuels. Plus we need space for our exploding cities and infrastructure …

Once again I think the real problem here is overpopulation. Too many humans needing too much space.

Let’s be honest: of all the legal drugs chocolate in all it’s pleasurable incarnations is not only the sweetest, but the most addictive. Chocolate has a smoothing influence in our brains and our stomachs. It’s instant (self)love in many shapes and states (still waiting for ‘inhalable’ chocolate).

But worse of all: you can get chocolate everywhere. It’s not like Heroine or Cocaine, it’s legal and everybody wants to sell it to you. Evildoers even give you chocolate for free - as a present or gratification. We even give it to our youngest kids as an incentive for good behavior - and so we start their addiction pretty early.

Nobody can escape the charming taste of chocolate! Whole nations like Belgium and Switzerland have based their economies on the production of this drug - like Afghanistan relies on Poppy production.

But please keep all these secrets to yourself - otherwise some American nut job declares a ‘War on Chocolate’ …

PS: Please leave a comment and tell us your favorite type chocolate!

Shitsenders does exactly what the name says. They collect some nice poo, package it and send it to a friend of yours. You can choose between a variety of dung (cow, elephant or gorilla) - depending on your level of friendship and depth of message you want to send.

The price? About 20 to 30 US Dollars. The effect on the receiving end? Priceless …

*I will not mention your name - but thanks for sending in that shit*

If you like Ikea you might buy more than your furniture or cake next time you visit the Swedes. They offer a wide range of homes made from pre-fabricated parts.

I am not sure if you assemble the whole thing with just a screwdriver? How big is the manual? And what to do when some part are missing?

More? Official Site and the Ikea Wikipedia entry

Watching the underclass, the addicted and the stupid getting busted. Doesn’t that make you feel superior?

It is amazing how many shows there are on TV that deal with justice, law and order. It doesn’t matter if it’s reality TV like Cops or fiction like those many CSI shows (all these different offspring of the same formula are a phenomenon in itself). Each country seems to have it own mixture of court TV, forensic documentaries, lawyer dramas and car chases …

In all these shows one topic prevails: the law wins, the bad guys are caught and punished.

One would think that we would want to watch something relaxing in the evening or ignore other people’s problems - instead murder and minute details of investigation seem to be more interesting than some simpler forms of entertainment.

I’ll give you blood, you give me better ratings!

But behind all this is our natural (?) desire for social porn: to participate in what’s going on and staying informed about the newest gossip of the global tribe. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real event like O.J. Simpsons trial or such trivial crap like Paris Hilton going to jail for being a drunken pussy. We want to be informed and we want to ‘relate’ - and it doesn’t matter if it’s a petty criminal or a superstar - or even fictional character.

It doesn’t matter if it’s other humans killing each other or making love to each other - we love to watch and learn intimate secrets behind it all.

But there is another layer to this lust for justice. It’s a double sided affair of the same mechanism of ‘violence’. We all have been victims of social, emotional or even criminal violence - so we want justice, revenge or just the reassurance that we will receive justice and protection. But deep in our fantasies we are also thieves and murderers - we all had the impulse / moments in our life’s to cause mayhem to others out of anger or a simple case of road rage.

Science and bad scripts to the rescue - we bring justice on a weekly basis.

So on one side we want protection from violence - but we also love to explore and participate when others were violent or even killed. For a few minutes we can dive into the mindset of the killer, the victims and the justice system - and compare it to our own inner world. It a mental carnival in which we can play every role and explore their good and bad sides while munching potato chips.

Scientists have shown many times that we mentally and emotionally emphatize on a deep level with other people - no matter if we watch something happening in reality (like driving by a traffic accident and everybody gloats) or a fictional event (we cry when made up characters die or model our lives on their behavior).

Especially in our hysterical media world plus criminals and terrorists at each corner we welcome ’security’, ‘justice’ and ‘protection’ - even when it’s just artificial. Soothing our minds is almost as important as real justice, protection or security.

So watching violence and how others deal with it or are doing terrible stuff helps us to cope with violence in our own lives and shows us new, different or frightening ways to deal with this topic.

But real crime and real violence is no ‘game’ to explore. Especially in fictional crime the dead always return in another series and lethal injuries can be overcome with a good script. Even court TV, recreations or documentaries do not really show the blood, pain and horror or real crimes. So can’t really emphatize, we always only get a filtered nicer version of reality.

Even celebrity victims are pretty dead after being murdered by their celebrity husbands.

Before I finish the empathy aspect of the Justice Porn: it is amazing that we do not really hunger for justice. In many fictional and real stories we are rather fascinated by the dark and evil characters. Some murderers have become celebrities or have a weird cult following. It is more of a social consensus that the bad guys have to loose, not because we love justice, but because we don’t want to be on the receiving end of a bad persons action without protection and the moral high ground against ‘evil doers’.

Since we all can relate to pain and suffering we all agree / empathize that we don’t want to suffer from it. This has nothing to do with justice, this is simply egoism and self preservation.

It’s good to be the king …

One last aspect is the God-complex in all of this. Sitting there and watching the crime like God watches masturbating sinners - we ’see and know’ more than the real or unreal protagonists. We are TV Gods, we know it all - and we also judge the people in the stories and events we watch on screen.

It’s truly pornography of power for the powerless. It’s an illusion of power and simpler version of sitting on a jury bench yourself (just without any responsibility). Most of all ‘all of our couch potato opinions’ don’t have any serious consequences. The law and justice are thankfully no longer bound to popular opinions or people’s anger and rage - at least in most countries.

And that’s a good thing. Instead of ropes for lynching and stones for stonings give them TV.

It is amazing that making money from willing believers is still so easy in the 21st century. Religion and fraud always made a great combination - doesn’t matter if it was done by the Holy Mother Church, some Indian pseudo guru or modern day tele-evangelist. The religion itself doesn’t matter - the attitude and willingness to milk your fellow believers does.

More disturbing than anything is that so called true believers are so easily cheated out of their money. Just tell them something they want to hear and swear that God sent you - and they open their wallets. The desire of some people to want to believe can be used and abused for almost anything - spending money on jets, hookers or drugs is the least of this chain of problems. I don’t mind people wasting money for such things - instead of bullets and bombs to kill infidels or exerts political influence.

Rob Hubbard was correct: “If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.”

Good thing that science and companies over all the stuff to become a perfect male: bigger penis, harder penis, hair transplants for your head and your chest, getting more muscles either via training or chemicals. Plus many more tricks to get rich and raise your social status.

Hardly anyone cares about males inner life and if they progress as happy human being - as long as their good sperminators and money grabbers.

… and it all depends how you define affordable? But I think $200,000 is doable for a person from an industrial country - if that is your life’s dream. Compared to 20 Million Dollars for a flight with the Russians it’s really cheap. 

And I am sure once the industry gets off the ground - it will start a competition and prices will come down.

I am sick and tired of Apple getting all that hype for it’s new MacBook Air. My Samsung Q-35 is already 14 months old and isn’t considered a hot item these days. Here are some numbers to illustrate my point that Samsung built a great machine over two years ago that still is almost as good as Apples new Yuppie gadget:

Weight:
Apple: 1.36 kg
Samsung: 1.9 kg

CPU:
Apple: Intel Duo 2 Core / 1.6 Ghz
Samsung: Intel Duo 2 Core / 1.6 Ghz

Battery Life (according to official propaganda):
Apple: 5 hours
Samsung: 4 hours

Display:
Apple: 1280×800
Samsung: 1280×800

Dimensions:
Apple: 325 x 227 x 4 - 194 mm
Samsung: 299 x 214 x 27.4~35.8 mm

My Samsung has more ports (Ethernet, Modem, 2x USB, Firewire, PCMCIA card) and INCLUDES a DVD drive plus a slot for all sorts of memory cards (why is that missing in a Mac?).

The Mac has a built in video camera and better graphics card (no surprise two years later). The 80 GB hard drive is more or less identical. The Mac has a bit newer Bluetooth and WiFi, but not that much different or better.

The new Apple keyboards are terrible - dunno if the MacBook Air feels as rubbery as these. The Samsung keyboard is brilliant - since I write a lot this was an essential point for me.

The new trackpad in the Mac seems to be a big innovative plus, but I am not sure if it makes any difference while writing or designing. Most people use an extra mouse even while traveling - and hardly anyone does design work with Photoshop or Illustrator using the trackpad anyway.

The Samsung Q-35 is no longer available - but you can get it’s successor Q-45 under 1.000 Euro with more power, bigger drive, CPU and better graphics. The new MacBook Air will set you back 1.600 Euros with NO DVD drive …