Thursday, June 11, 2009

Interesting Trivia :-)

Some random internet story……. :-)

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Charlie Sheen has slept with a lot of women, enough for let's say, "Two and a Half Men."

The sitcom star lands on Maxim magazine's Top 10 "Living Sex Legends" list having allegedly done the deed with 5,000 women.

The full Top 10 list of "Living Sex Legends" follows:

10. Bill Wyman (Rolling Stones bassist) - 1,000
9. Earvin (Magic) Johnson (basketball star) - 1,000
8. Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead frontman) - 1,200
7. Jack Nicholson (actor) - 2,000
6. Ilie Nastase (tennis star) - 2,500
5. Engelbert Humperdinck (singer) - 3,000
4. Julio Iglesias (singer) - 3,000
3. Gene Simmons (Kiss frontman) - 4,600
2. Charlie Sheen (actor) - 5,000
1. Umberto Billo (Venetian hotel porter) - 8,000


Surprisingly, the top lothario isn't anyone rich or famous (until now) at all. The men's magazine claims that lowly Venetian hotel porter Umberto Billo has charmed 8,000 women to his bed. "They crossed oceans to see me," he boasts. While guest satisfaction is the randy Italian's trademark, his work ethic isn't. Maxim reports that he has been fired after getting it on took precedence over his paid duties.

"Sometimes he was too exhausted to carry the guests' luggage," says his ex-boss

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

This is an article that appeared on NY Times columns. It is well written and most of us would feel the same way like the writer. Catch it if you have missed on the times.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

The Joy of Less
- By Pico Iyer
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all

Traveling Light
A great friend of mine decided to forsake possessions, to the point that he lived as a guest in friend’s homes, two weeks at a time. His friends looked forward to his visits, as he was an excellent storyteller and truly a brave and entertaining persona. He traveled the country, coast to coast.
When walking him to the train station after a visit, he realized he had accumulated enough to fill two suitcases, both heavy. We were on a bridge, crossing a canal, when he looked at both suitcases, declared he was “too heavy,” and tossed one of the suitcases over the side into the canal. He then smiled a huge smile and we continued walking. Ah, freedom.
— Posted by Paul Henderson
Embrace the Weird
Mr. Iyer, your experience in Kyoto is a lot different from mine. Street races, scraps with biker gangs, saving damsels in distress from would-be rapists and partying all night long on Kiyamachi-dori, Gion, festive occasions on the Kamogawa, etc.
Don’t get the lack of cellphones either, folks, some of the best mobile devices in the world are to be had in Japan. Killer fast Internet too.
Japanese TV? Funny, especially if you understand the humor, which is often crude and off-color and nowhere near politically correct.
If you are living in Japan, the very core of modern decadent consumerism, you should embrace the weird — have a bacon potato pie at McDonald’s, enjoy the white sauce special at Spaghetti Collection on Teramachi, get the 7-megabit wireless Internet for $30 a month. Don’t stick the toe in and wince and cringe, dive in! Have a coffee at a maid cafe, drink with some yakuza down in Minami-ku, get wild at Pub Africa or Pig and Whistle.
Once you have sorted out the language and stepped out a bit, things can seem a bit different. Like the time I was out in a gaijin ghetto bar and a senior monk in full vestments dismounted his long wheelbase S-Class Benz (V-12, naturally) and with his entourage jammed on the dance floor, smacking a young female companion 20 years his junior in full disco regalia over the head with a magazine when she said something stupid. Many of the monasteries I checked out in the hills had satellite dishes and empty sake kegs out back.
Sure, a bit of zen-like harmony is good, but thinking that is the totality of Japan is like thinking that convenience store robberies, shooting smack behind a dumpster and wearing cowboy boots are the totality of the American experience.
— Posted by Jason Lackey
Nothing to Lose
After a divorce and the loss of every friend of the past 10 years, I find myself living as a nomad — literally. I’ve been forced to fit 10 years worth of pain and memories and clutter into very small rented spaces, attic bedrooms in other people’s houses. I have nothing. I’ve lost any grand illusions of reputation I once held, among other things.
Even so, something wonderful has happened. In the forced silence and simplicity, I’ve discovered all of the things I don’t need (as well as the few that I do). And that is a special kind of freedom, I think.
— Posted by Amanda

Monday, June 08, 2009

Article from Newsweek

-- This is a newsweek article this week. READ this and you would play really really safe. Man it sends jitters in the spine :-).


NEWSWEEK's Rebecca Shabad spoke to Dr. Larry Lipschultz, professor of urology at the Baylor College of Medicine, about what it takes to cause a broken penis, how painful it can be, and the dangerous consequences if untreated. (Dr. Lipschultz was not aware of the daggering phenomenon or of the alleged problems with which it is associated). Some excerpts are below:

What exactly constitutes a broken penis?
A broken penis, also known as a fractured penis, is due to a tear in the tunica albuginea, which is the covering of the erectile tissue of the penis.

What does it actually take to break one?
A sudden bending of the penis when it’s in the erect state. We see it in men who are having intercourse and then just are thrusting. They miss the vagina and then they hit the [pubic] bone and their penis bends in half quickly and it fractures. They get a sudden, sharp pain and it gets black and blue. If you operate on them, you see a tear in the tunic covering the erectile tissue.

So it can only happen during intercourse?
No. If you have an erection and it’s thrust up against something that’s not going to accommodate it, or [will cause it to] bend—a sharp bend will cause a fracture or breaking of the erectile tissue covering.

Do you know if using drugs like Viagra are making men more prone to the injury?
No, it doesn’t make them more prone. Anything that can enable someone to have an erection would make them more prone, because then they would be able to experience this problem. I think basically these people in Jamaica are having an increased frequency [of injury] because they’re having these erections but they’re not penetrating.

How often have you come across that problem?
We usually see the sequelae of it, rather than the actual event. A lot of times men won’t come in when [the inital break] happens. But what happens is they form a scar, and the scar causes the penis to bend or to develop Peyronie’s disease [a connective tissue disorder which can cause unnatural curveature of the penis]. People believe now that Peyronie’s disease is most commonly due to trauma to the penis.

Is a broken penis preventable?
It’s a low incident in general. I think it’s preventable if men are more careful during intercourse—but I mean, in the heat of the moment, it happens.

You described the type of pain that they would experience. What would you equate that pain to?
I’d say on a scale of 1 to 10, it would be an 8.

Wow, that’s pretty harsh.
Yeah, it’s really painful.The quicker the person gets to the emergency room and gets treated, the more likely he’s not going to develop a permanent deformity.

War

My attempt at poetry....

Every day I read about the war
In Iraq, In Afghanistan, in the lands very far
Men of valor die
For reasons they think rational to die

People argue pros and cons
Of war and suffering, for peace and glory
The part of the brain makes us fight
Does the same make us cry?

Ever seen a tiger cry for killing
Or cry out ‘Dude why the fuck, you are killing?’
Animals fight for food, for self defense, to mate
Or do they fight for glory too?

We are a great mortal soul we cry
For defense we kill mercilessly
We want all pleasures carnal, banal and eternal
We seek truth and yet live a false life

For the quest unknown
Don’t we exploit everything like parasites?
Don’t we multiply like worms and fight to mate?
So, do you still think we evolved?