Olympic village root-fest about to get underway

Another Winter Olympics is about to get underway, this time in Vancouver,  and that means loads of testosterone-fuelled young people, in peak physical condition, thrown together in a small village, and they will be up for it!

“What happens at Olympic Village stays at Olympic village” is the credo of Olympic rooters. Armed with their party packs of condoms and lube from Games’ suppliers, the athletes will be trying to score more than just medals.

Organisers will be handing out 100,000 condoms but if past games are anything to go by, that won’t be nearly enough. During the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, nearly 200,000 condoms were used. By all accounts, the French were the biggest shaggers but also the most xenophobic, with most rooting taking place in-team.

Here’s an excerpt from a more detailed look at sex in the Olympic village from a couple of years ago but still worth a read:

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right here in Beijing, where this time I’m a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend. It is like a world within a world.” A British runner (anonymous again: athletes are not supposed to talk to journalists unaccompanied by a PR type, least of all about sex) said: “The swimmers finished earlier in the week and it was like there was an eruption.”

Have a look at this interview with Canadian snowboarder Crispin Lipscomb about sex at the upcoming Olympics. Note the shameless interviewing style – attack-dog relentlessness in the dig for juicy stuff:

Just one question: Do you think the curling competitors ever get laid? After all, how sexy is sweeping ice, really?

Historical injustice: U.S. involvement in the death of the Haitian Pig

I’ve been waiting for John Pilger to produce a piece on Haiti and when it came, it was approximately what I expected — some decent polemical material mixed with a vitriolic attack on America’s treatment of Haiti both historically and since the earthquake. Pilger consistently writes about the abuse of power and humanitarian injustices perpetrated by large rich nations over smaller, weaker countries. Haiti fits the bill perfectly here, having been screwed over many, many times – politically, economically, and now by nature.

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

Pilger’s information on oil reserves and other natural resources comes from an article published last year in Salon–”Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US occupation”,– itself well worth a read.

But the following information was, to me, the key paragraph as it smacks of neo-colonialism, if not a modern analogue of slavery,  ironic given the fact that Haiti was the first Western Hemisphere country to throw of the bonds of slavery:

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing.

The circumstances described here by Piger reminded me of another story about Haiti that I read several years ago and that deserves to be repeated, as it involves a historical wrong perpetrated by the U.S. that had far-reaching consequences for Haitian society and contributed to the conditions that now exist in Haiti. The full story can be found in a book called In the Devil’s Garden by Stewart Lee Allen.

This story takes place in the late 1970s to early 1980s, beginning in 1978 when African Swine Fever was detected in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. Swine Fever is not harmful to humans but it is fatal to 99% of pigs.

Fearful that the fever might spread to the U.S. mainland, the Americans decided that all pigs on the island needed to be eradicated. The thing is, however, that the small black pigs—the couchon-planche—farmed by the Haitians  and which formed the backbone of Haiti’s meat-farming economy were largely immune to the fever and by the time the eradication programme got underway, the fever had already disappeared.

But the Americans went ahead anyway, promising to replace each and every Haitian pig killed with a big, fat, American pig that was three times the size of its Haitian counterpart.

So the cull took place, and as the book states, “Haiti’s last pig died on June 21^st, 1983.”

Now the problems start, and once again Haiti is about to get fucked over, big time.

Haitian Black Pig

For a start, the small Haitian black pigs, perfectly adapted to their environment,  needed very little in the way of maintenance, getting by on a scavenger-style diet that required little input from the pig farmer. The pigs lived on garbage, insects and excrement, acting as a natural vacuum cleaner of filth and as a natural insecticide. The almost pure profit derived from selling the pigs meant that farmers could afford to send their kids to school and buy medicine when needed.

The pig that the Americans were offering, however, was a specially bred, maintenance-heavy beast that required both a specialised diet and living conditions. These pigs “turned up their nose at anything less than a special vitamin enriched feed that cost $90 a year, more than half the average peasant’s annual income.”

Then, wouldn’t you know it, after the cull the Americans reneged on their deal (and they wonder why the world gets angry at them!), deciding only to supply pigs to farmers who installed concrete floors and special water systems for the pigs. Because of these onerous new conditions, very few pigs were handed over. Of those that were, none survived, as they were unable to cope with the Haitian heat.

School attendance immediately dropped by 25% because of the lack of pig money. Farmers tried to bring back the black pig but the anti-Communist authoritarian government had both the pigs and their owners executed as Communists. Within ten years, virtually every pig farmer was forced to sell the family farm and move to the city.

But wait, there’s more:

“It turns out that a year before the Americans had started pushing to exterminate the black pigs, their friends at the World Bank had been pressuring the Haitian government to shift the island’s economic focus from subsistence farming to growing crops for export.  The idea was for corporations to take over the peasant farms and grow coffee and flowers, while the farmers moved to the cities to become splendidly desperate factory workers creating cheap goods for North American consumers.  The peasants, however, had held their noses at the idea — Haiti was home to the first successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere and the area’s first free black nation.  So the idea of ending up on some white boy’s corporate plantation went against their grain. The World Bank’s plan, in fact, was going nowhere until the Yanks wiped out the pigs and “accidentally” destroyed the peasant economy.  This forced farmers to sell their family plots, which multinationals grabbed up at bargain prices.  Within a decade Haiti had switched from subsistence to an export economy.  Staple food production decreased by 30%, and the urban population doubled.”

So, tragic mistake or deliberate action?  One would like to think that the answer was tragic mistake, but the weight of historical evidence that has now been assembled with respect to destructive meddling by the United States, the World Bank, and the IMF in the economies of developing nations would seem to suggest otherwise.

Is this the end of America’s love affair with the car?

Car ownership numbers peaked in Japan in 1990 and have been trending downwards for twenty years. There is now a worry in auto manufacturing circles that this trend may about to be repeated in the USA. We all know about the travails of the American car industry, where both GM and Chrysler have been bailed out financially (again) by the US government in the face of a major drop in new car sales and that this drop was originally attributed to the recession. But there may be more deep-seated cultural changes at work that are changing America’s driving and car ownership patterns.

Previously, the industry could predict quite accurately the number of new car sales, as from 1994 up to and including 2007, Americans consistently bought approximately 17 million new cars a year.  The recession caused what can only be called a catastrophic drop (almost 40%), and in the last two years only 10-11 million cars a year have been sold. 

This LA traffic jam is now 42 years old

But in the last year, 14 million cars were scrapped.  Simple arithmetic here shows that there are now 4 million fewer cars on US roads than there was a year ago. In other words, the American car fleet is shrinking, even though there are still five cars for every four licensed drivers in the country. But if Americans were to become more like Canada, where there is only three cars for every four licensed drivers, then the US could scrap and not replace four million cars a year for the next thirty years.

And that would be a game changer for the business.

In terms of social and cultural trends that might be affecting car ownership, NPR reports that:

•  U.S. public-transit ridership has been climbing steadily since 2005.
• Local governments are rethinking their old habit of subsidizing free parking.
• People are worried that $4/gallon gas could come back.

And, oddest of all, young people aren’t nearly as excited about driving as they used to be:

Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people. For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage. Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.

In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars. They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars. Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license. This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.

So, are these latest car-related figures another signifier of the potential decline of the U.S.  as an economic power?

When looked at in conjuction with a number of key statistics emerging from China in the last year, I would have to say yes.  These include the fact that:

• China became the largest producer of cars in the world.
• For the first time, the Chinese purchased more new autos that the Americans.
• China became the biggest creditor nation that world has ever known.
• China overtook Germany as the world’s greatest exporting nation.
• The US is the greatest debtor nation in history.

Yo-Yo makes a playground comeback

At the recent London Toy Fair, lo-tech was the big news with the good old yo-yo on the comeback trail, yet again.  Last time the yo-yo was big was 12 years ago in 1998 “when nearly four million were sold in Britain – the equivalent of one for every three children in the country.”

The Telegraph reports that “retailers and yo-yo manufacturers are gearing up for 2010 to be the biggest year for the toy since 1998” and that David Strang, the managing director of Wicked Vision, the distributor of Duncan yo-yos, said: “Since November they have been selling ridiculously well. We are up about 1000 per cent at least – tenfold on the sales we were having a year ago.”

Yo-yos, it seems, have bounced up and down in popularity over the last 80 years, typically hitting a craze phase every seven to eight years.

And if you practice hard enough, maybe you can develop some of these mad skills:

Further reading at Notes: Remember the craze in the old school yard?

Tube TVs are so retro, man!

Last week, I sold my last cathode ray tube (CRT) television —a 29” Panasonic — for $50, replacing it with a Pioneer Kuro (yeah, baby!). There was nothing wrong with the Panasonic – in fact, in my opinion, it had a much better picture, albeit smaller, than a Panasonic LCD screen purchased a couple of years ago.

 But it got me wondering what was happening on a worldwide basis to the perfectly good, established technology of tube TVs. Were they still being made, and if so, where could they be bought?

Research showed up some interesting figures. Despite being the latest “must have” domestic technology for the better part of a decade (remember when the first flat screen TVs cost $25,000-30,000?), LCD TVs only overtook CRT sales in 2008. This was aided by the fact that in many developed countries, major retailers stopped selling tube TVs in 2006-7.

But even two years after being overtaken, CRT sales are still not that far behind flat screens, mainly because the older, cheaper, technology is still popular in China and regions such as Africa and the Middle East .

But my favourite find was this: South Korean TV manufacturer LG has recently released a “retro” CRT TV into its home market. Seems like the old tube TV already has a nostalgia attached to it, or maybe it’s the “Mad Men” inspired decorating fashion that seems to be influencing interior design.

Check it out:

LG's Retro CRT TV

Boozing through the recession

The current recession has seen some marked changes in consumer behaviour. This has generally been a move towards austerity, so much so that a number of well-known American retailers have been unable to weather the economic storm.

Too expensive for me!

It would appear that there are some “necessities” that people just cannot give up and one of these is booze. The Distilled Spirits Council of America have just released consumption figures for the last year. These show that Americans are drinking more than ever with overall consumption up by 1.4 percent.

But this desire to continue drinking does not come with brand loyalty; there has been a “trading down” from premium brands to bulk buying of cheaper product in bigger bottles. This has been most noticeable in the premium vodka market where sales of Grey Goose, for example, have dropped by 5.1 percent while the lowest-priced segment, with brands such as Popov vodka, grew the fastest, rising 5.5 percent.

Cheap tequila has been the biggest winner, however, with sales rising by 21 percent.

This move to cheaper product has meant that more drinking now takes place at home (2.2 percent volume growth in the off-premise sector) rather than in bars and restaurants (three percent volume decline).

All class!

Readers’ feedback at a number of websites to this drinking information shows the implementation of several recessionary survival strategies. These include drinking premium brands at home but buying cheaper product if going elsewhere, to a party or dinner, for instance. Others offer hints for supposedly turning cheap vodka into a premium-tasting product by passing it through water filters a couple of times (Has anyone tried that?). Several barmen point out that cheap vodka is the way to go if you add a mixer as it is impossible to tell the difference between cheap and premium vodka as soon as you add the mixer.

Distilled Spirits Council CEO Peter Cressy does point out, however, that this behavioral trend to cheapness is not likely to last, as “long-term analysis of prior recessions showed a strong trend back to premiumization as the economy improves.”

Things I’m saving up for: #1 – A Giant Flying Penguin

I don’t think I’ve ever coveted something as much since the Evel Kneivel Snake River Canyon Set.

Check this out…

Ooh… hang on. They’ve got a giant flying jellyfish too. Now I can’t decide.

Share

How much for those fizzling underpants?

We’ve had a number of looks at airline security in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s miserably unsuccessful attempt to blow up Flight 253 on Christmas Day. But how unsuccessful was he after all?

We’ve seen how press hysteria, nobly pushed by those in whose political interests it lies, inflate the amateurish underpant fumblings into a full blown worldwide panic. “Twenty-five more bombers are on their way!” barked the headlines. “Yemen the new front in global war on terror” squealed another.

And now the price tag has arrived.

Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget for 2011 contains $734 million to be spent on up to 1,000 new Advanced Imaging Technology screening machines at airport checkpoints and for new explosive detection equipment for baggage screening. Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, conceded that this budget increase was impacted by the failed bomber and the “vulnerabilities he exposed in airport security”…

There were some adjustments that were made. The Department of Homeland Security had a healthy budget but we did make some additional adjustments after that even.

$734 million!!! I guess we can chalk that up as yet another victory for terrorism then.

734 million $1 bills stitched together would be 114,504,000 kms long. We could do something fun with that...

In a world in which acts of “terror” are symbolic gestures, designed to cause fear in the target population/culture it does seem slightly ironic that the heavy lifting is almost exclusively done by those who, ostensibly, claim to want to keep us “safe”.

The media’s role in that task is probably the most obvious. Shock and awe is the way to sell yourself these days and should a competitor appear strident then, well, just shout louder. Politicians have a fairly obvious axe to grind too. There’s nothing like accusing those at the helm of not “doing enough” to scare up a few votes among us fear filled masses.

But now Obama’s waving a fistful of cash around a new, ungodly host of “security experts” have inserted themselves into the discourse and are telling us it’s all our fault.

Here’s American Science and Engineering’s vice-president of marketing, Joe Reiss…

Everybody’s grateful that flight 253 was not a successful attack but those of us in the security industry are terribly aware of where a lot of the vulnerabilities remain. The reasons this technology hasn’t been deployed have to do with privacy and safety concerns that seem to us like very minor issues when you consider the possible loss of life a terrorist attack can cause.

(Spoiler alert – Joe sells body scanners).

Brian Ruttenbur, a defence industry analyst at stockbroker Morgan Keegan agrees that our unreasonable demands for dignity are putting us at risk. However he takes a more upbeat view and says, in the long run, privacy concerns are unlikely to prevent the rollout of body scanners worldwide.

My view is that it’s not an inalienable right to fly in an aircraft and the public will have to put up with some inconvenience if they want to do so.

Although he suspects the industry may need one more marketing opportunity in order to achieve market saturation saying initial installation may be patchy and…

I don’t think we’ll see 100% roll-out until we see a successful attack.

Thanks for helping keep us safe Brian.

Yesterday the absurdly named Lord Adonis, UK Transport Secretary, announced that selected passengers would be required to submit to compulsory body scans at Heathrow Airport.

If a passenger is selected for scanning and declines, they will not be permitted to fly

Lord Adonis assured the Commons that the interim code of conduct meant passengers would not be singled out on the basis of race or ethnicity or religious beliefs.

Randomly selected passengers await screening at Heathrow yesterday

Let me make one thing clear here… my objection to spending vast amounts of money on scanning machines isn’t based on privacy issues. It’s based on efficiency issues. I don’t think they will make travelling by air any safer and they will cost a small fortune.

And there are two very good reasons I think it would be hard to make air travel safer.

Reason Number One. It’s incredibly safe already!

Here are some quick stats produced by Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.

In the decade from October 1999 through to September 2009 there were six terrorist incidents (four planes on 9/11, failed shoe bomb and Nate adds in the underpants from Dec 25 for good measure). In ten years there were 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, that is one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

Or one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Or, looking at it another way… Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

So how much safer can we be per dollar invested in your fancy see-through-our-clothing-machines? Can you tell us Brian and Joe?

If we look at Nate’s graph, previously featured in the post Security Fail, we have a visual indication of the decreasing threat to passenger’s lives.

What I would like to see is a graphic representation of  Indignities Forced Upon Passengers in order to Board Plane mapped against time. I think we can safely say the line would be poking up in the other direction and nosing into our nether regions.

But here’s Reason Number Two. If we rely on body scanners to keep us safe what is to stop a potential terrorist from stuffing their various bomb making components up their arse? Or are we going to just pretend that muslims would shy away from that sort of dedication to duty?

Here’s some links to our previous posts on the subject of airline security – C’mon Yemen, man up!, Security Fail, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and Security Update – The Parrot Sketch.

Share

G-Spot News – It exists but the English can’t find it.

Around three weeks ago we looked at a British scientific paper from Kings College London, which claimed the G-Spot was a figment of women’s imaginations. The original post is here (Sex News: G-Spot Confusion) and it generated a number of responses, principally on my Facebook page, most of which pointed out the scientists probably weren’t looking hard enough.

Turns out the French appear to agree. When gynaecologists gathered at a conference in Paris last week they were asked for their reactions to the Kings College paper. Leading French surgeon Pierre Foldes said…

The King’s College study shows a lack of respect for what women say. The conclusions were completely erroneous because they were based solely on genetic observations. It is clear that in female sexuality there is a variability. It cannot be reduced to a yes or no or an on or off.

Gynaecologist Odile Buisson added slightly more pointedly…

I don’t want to stigmatise at all but I think the Protestant, liberal, Anglo-Saxon character means you are very pragmatic. There has to be a cause for everything, a gene for everything. It’s totalitarian.

So there you have it. English scientists can hardly be expected to find the G-Spot because they are… well, they’re English really.

Britain's leading gynaecologist, Sir Basil Muff-Badger, encounters a French woman

Doctors in the United States meanwhile seldom look a gift horse in the mouth. Gynaecologist David Matlock has pioneered a “treatment” called G-Spot Amplification. Dr Matlock will fossick around your furry fun cave and then inject collagen into your G-Spot, in order to enlarge it to a G-Zone. The effects last “up to four months” and according to his website, 87% of women who received the G-Shot™ reported “enhanced sexual arousal/gratification”. Presumably the remaining 13% spent the next four months with their legs crossed muttering “Ow, ow, ow”.

The testimonials on his site certainly seem to hint at some sort of effect…

What a result. All I have to do is think about sex and I can feel my G-Spot react

During my spinning class I have this smile on my face and people think that I am enjoying my workout but actually I am sexually aroused

After my G-Shot I get sexually aroused performing yoga

After the G-Shot^® it is simple to direct your partner to your amplified pleasure center

Would you like to explore our Amplified Pleasure Centers?

Apparently a patent is still pending.

Share

Australia’s Biggest Loser (Spoiler Alert – Winner Revealed)

Australia’s Biggest Loser premiered here last night with the usual tearful contestants confessing that overeating is making life miserable. Each contestant gravely outlined what the saw as “their journey” and talked about how the show was their last chance to change their lives. The show’s new host, Olympian Hayley Lewis, writes in her blog…

It goes beyond my vocabulary to describe to you all the honour I feel in being chosen to host the show.

Right ho… and what can we expect this season?

The challenges are amazing, the temptations are without question simply too good to refuse and the weigh-ins are jaw-dropping.

Without sounding cheesy or disingenuous, the contestants have become like family to me and this (you will see) will play out over the season.

But it looks like one member of the family has already brought shame upon the Loser household. 26 year old Deryck Ward and his older sister were entered as Team Black. Deryck weighed in at 189.6kg and said his goal weight was 100kg telling the producers he was teased at school for being fat and gave up playing rugby as a result. Promotional material for the show added…

He is now determined to lose weight especially as he’s never been in love and would like to start a family

Cue inspirational music and tears all round.

Unfortunately Deryck and his sister failed to make the cut on the second weigh-in and Team Black returned to Brisbane which is where things got slightly awkward. When producers from the show called to get a follow up story from Deryck to see how his “journey” was continuing, they discovered he had been arrested and charged with one count of possessing child exploitation material and one count of using the internet to access images of child exploitation.

Deryck's profession? "Communications Specialist" So presumably he'd understand how the internet works...

With only days to go before last night’s premiere the show’s producers have worked overtime to radically re-edit all the existing footage in order to remove all trace of Team Black’s involvement in this years show. A Channel Ten spokesman said…

Given the seriousness of these charges and that this matter is to be resolved in the courts, the network decided it will not broadcast any episode in which Mr Ward would have appeared. We believe this is in every party’s interest, including Mr Ward’s.

Deryck will appear in court on March 8th when the scales of justice will deliver the final verdict but, until then, I strongly suspect that we have already found Australia’s Biggest Loser.

Share

A beginner’s guide to news reports

A satirically incisive look at the formulaic nature of television news reportage.

Observations of Tony Blair at the Iraq War Inquiry

I dropped into the live webcast of Tony Blair being questioned by the Iraq Inquiry. Only intending to watch for a few minutes, I was still there two hours later. After a somewhat nervous start, perhaps due to the fact that he no longer engages in the cut and thrust of British parliamentary question time, Blair’s old zealotry was soon on full display.

What quickly became evident here was the

Paper Art – A Prosaic Object Transformed

Danish artist Peter Callesen is currently working almost exclusively with single A4 sheets of paper. The beautiful artifacts he creates are even more stunning because of the everyday nature of the medium he works in.

Here are some of my favourite examples…

Australian politician’s advice on virginity not a votewinner

We’ve previously looked at virginity a couple of times (here and here) at Notes, particularly the way in which virginity can become overvalued within a culture, and how that overvaluation is often associated with

Topless sunbathing versus the New Puritanism.

It’s summer time in the southern hemisphere and for many people that means heading to the beach and getting your gear off. It appears, however, that in many countries women are taking off