Thursday, November 15, 2012

Fido and Freddy... guess who got the job as food taster?

No, I've not gone bananas so I won't harp on that "evergreen" topic (but, yes, they're still ever so green).

I'm into clever and/or cheeky ads today. These first three ads below have a local context, playing on recent or past incidents, so I'm not sure if non-Singaporeans will appreciate the humour in them...


Remember the NParks/Brompton foldable bikes brouhaha? Someone at stjobs.sg must have had fun coming up with this idea. Likewise, the job portal's dig at recent key changes at our national table tennis contingent:


I believe this Ikea ad below was inspired by the woman who was very upset and cried foul after a school teacher snipped off her son's very expensively coiffured hair (he had breached the school's rule). She felt the teacher's amateur tonsorial handiwork was so bad she took her son to the expensive hair salon again...


I've found past Scoot ads cheeky and clever. This one lived up to my expectations:


Back to stjobs.sg. I'm including this ad because I had read somewhere that humans are actually employed to taste dog food (boy, we've really gone to the dogs)!...


I did an online check and, indeed, I was right. I also found this story below that listed 10 weird jobs:

http://money.aol.co.uk/2012/10/19/ten-weird-and-wonderful-jobs-that-really-do-exist/

Ten weird and wonderful jobs that really do exist

Have fun reading it!

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Bananalosophy: When life throws you a 'lemon' banana...

My "arrested-green-won't-turn-yellow bananas" saga continues.

Thanks, Nick, for sharing about your green bananas' experience (Comment, yesterday). It's good to know that the SAF takes "going green" very seriously in more ways than one. But I don't think what I bought was the edible green variety.

This bunch looks like pisang mas ("golden" bananas), which by self-definition should have turned yellow, as in this picture I found online:
The site http://www.beezfresh.com.sg/fruits/  that displayed this picture also claims that bananas have the following properties:

1.Reduce depression
2.High in iron
3.Rich in fiber
4.Eyesight protection
5.Protects your kidney
6.Reduce blood pressure and stroke
7.Prevent heartburn
8.Helps give up smoking
9.Reduce acidity
10.Reduce itchyness
11.Reduce stress
12.Reduce stroke risk

Helps give up smoking (Point No 8)? Go around with a banana in your mouth?

Meanwhile, those darned bananas I bought are proving a challenge to me with regard to Point No 11. Here's the latest pic I took:


Don't be fooled; my camera seems to be on the side of this wicked bunch... they are all as green, and hard to the touch, as ever. I cut one up and I could see the glistening sap:


But I've learnt that when life throws you "lemon" bananas, since you can't make either lemonade or banana split (the above picture notwithstanding), you can learn more about this versatile fruit online, such as:

SCIENTIFIC NAME: Musa species
FAMILY: Musaceae

I got that from this interesting site:

http://rfcarchives.org.au/Next/Fruits/Banana/BananaPlant11-88.htm

Here's some other interesting extracts, including what you can do with unripe bananas:

Out of the ripe fruit is made a juice that is sold in tins. Also from certain ripe species a liqueur is brewed, and preserved bananas are not altogether unknown in some countries. In the kitchen, most of the ripe bananas are made in sweet dishes e.g. pisang goreng (fried bananas), pisang kolak (bananas in coconut milk and brown sugar), pisang nagasari (bananas in coconut milk jelly), kue pisang (little banana tarts) etc. And... the unripe banana can have its use as well. It can be dried and pulverised into flour. The dried form can be used also for krupuk (crackers) and kripik (chips).

Every banana plant gives one bunch of bananas and does not grow anymore, but dies off. From the root, in the meantime, will grow 3 or 4 small banana plants. But it will take at least a year before those will produce bunches of bananas. When the ground is fertile, one generation of species can produce bananas for twenty years without decrease of quality in the fruit.

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So, if life gives you lemons?... Here are what some wise cracks suggest you should do:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lemons

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Snowed under, but it's not snow!

Lastly, there was plenty of billowy foam in the western part (Choa Chu Kang area) on Tuesday morning after detergent concentrate had spilled into a canal. A fire had broken out in a warehouse and cannisters of the concentrate had broken up when they were damaged. The civil defence force had to use foam to fight the blaze. This AsiaOne story has pictures:

http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20121114-383203.html

As expected, wacky bloggers went to work to create spoofs like this one:

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Is a banana that does not ripen a lemon?

Singapore now has a Lemon Law:


I thought this letter on the subject was refreshingly jargon-free and easy to follow:


I was intrigued by the term "lemon", a sourish citrus fruit. So, a deal gone sour is a lemon (usually for the buyer)? Typically, a car full of defects is a lemon. I found the explanation below, titled "The Origin of 'Lemon Law' is Murky" helpful:

http://www.lemonjustice.com/blog/?p=469

So, when is a lemon (the fruit) a lemon (a sour deal)? I ask this "cheem" (profound) question because I bought a bunch of green bananas last weekend -- it has been three days since -- and not one of the bananas has ripened:


The colour reproduction of the picture is not quite right... they really are still green! I had even put them inside a brown paper bag but, nope, these bananas are still lemons (as I write this blog entry). Some parts of the banana skins (the other side of the comb) are starting to turn spotty-black. So, should I go back to the supermarket and demand a new bunch? Headline: Consumer goes bananas in test of new lemon law.

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Actually, I did own a lemon of a car, way back in the early 1980s:

    
The second-hand car (these days they call them "pre-loved"... hahahaha!!) gave me endless mechanical problems and it once skidded on a dry road. And it wasn't even yellow. A white lemon.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Can your nose run and your armpit smell?... just get a bunch of scientists to do a study!

They say "the eyes are the window to the soul". Scientists have even done a study to show this is so:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-436932/Scientists-discover-eyes-really-window-soul.html

But that's passe now. Armpits are what researchers, of late, have been working up a sweat over:


Women sniff armpit odours of men for study on smell of fear

You can read about this weird study from insing.com:

http://news.insing.com/tabloid/women-sniff-armpit-odours-fear/id-28643f00

Anyway, here's the gist of it...

[R]esearchers tested the sweaty armpits of 10 men while they watched films such as ‘The Shining’ or gross-out scenes from MTV's television series ‘Jackass’.

Next, the researchers asked 36 women to take a visual search test while they unknowingly inhaled the chemosignals of the men's perspiration. Their facial expressions were recorded and their eye movements were tracked as they completed the task.

When sniffing the "fear sweat", the women opened their eyes widely in a fearful expression. A sniff of perspiration from men who were disgusted, and the women grimaced as if in disgust.

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Even Microsoft takes "weird science" seriously:

Microsoft Employed A Bunch Of Scientists To Research These 13 Weird Projects
 

(Angie, you'll love this one from the list of 13 studies, above...)
Microsoft also studied how groups move in capture the flag games... in World of Warcraft.

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And there's even an annual list of Ig Nobel Prizes:

Silly science: Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate weird and wacky research

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9557317/Silly-science-Ig-Nobel-Prizes-celebrate-weird-and-wacky-research.html

Full list Ig Nobel winners 2012

Psychology prize: Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe, for their study titled Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.
Peace prize: The SKN company, for using technology to convert old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person's speech by making them hear their own spoken words repeated back at them at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere – even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry prize: Johan Pettersson for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.
Literature prize: The US government general accountability office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics prize: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren and Robin Ball, for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
Fluid dynamics prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer, for studying the dynamics of liquid sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy prize: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify specific other chimpanzees from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance of their patients exploding.

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With all that funding for such exotic research projects sloshing around, surely someone will pony up to help prove once and for all that noses can really run (sprint even?) and armpits do really smell (maybe sniff out the different bouquets of red and white wines?). C'mon, Nike, "Just do it!"

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Fuzzy logic?

When Liane was a child, she saw two traffic cops get off their motorbikes and walk towards each other. "They must be booking each other," she quipped.

A story in yesterday's ST (Saturday, Nov 10) had a twist to this storyline. A Certis Cisco cop appeared to have booked a Certis Cisco vehicle which had been parked illegally. But someone went and took a look at the summons ticket and found that it was "blank", ie nothing written on it! It was then explained that the "booking" officer had thought the vehicle was on "official duty". Fuzzy logic? Here's the ST headline:


Take a look at the picture above of the parked vehicle. One can see that it was illegally parked, whether on official duty or not. The picture was taken by the person who had blogged about the incident. The ST story can be read online on its asiaone.com site:

http://business.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/Story/A1Story20121110-382701.html

But the blogger had taken at least one other picture which he posted on his blog. For some reason, I could not access it, but this site below reposted both the blog entry and the other picture which clearly showed how irresponsibly parked the vehicle was:

http://therealsingapore.com/content/ever-seen-wayang-show-performed-our-cisco

I think, if ever anyone wants to cite an example of the power of citizen journalism here in this age of ubiquitous social media, this is one such. I don't know how this story will play out in the next few days, as more online chatter builds up over this issue, but I doubt if it will die down yet. Stay tuned.

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Trying for 11.11.11

This Foxtrot cartoon strip panel in The Sunday Times which I read this morning inspired me to try something during the night-time:


But drats! Not only was the picture fuzzy due to my haste in snapping it (and forgetting to use the macro mode), but the time delay between button-press and shutter-click meant I got 11.11.13 on 11.11.12. Fuzzy logic, sort of. Ah well, there's still 12.12.12 on 12.12.12.

Finally, a bit of "11" maths (and palindromic) trivia :

(2 digits) 11 x 11 = 121
(6 digits) 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
(9 digits) 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321

Saturday, November 10, 2012

From Yankee Doodle to Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!

I still wonder how, among the zillions of stuff that pop up on the Web daily, one or more becomes "viral". One example: A young American girl, just 18 years old and very unhappy that Obama will be her President for four more years, who tweeted this:


Yes, it went viral and many people -- not least Aussies -- derided the poor girl for her ignorance. Someone even said, "You'll find the drive there pretty scenic." Someone else posted this:


(Melbourne's international airport is also called Tullamarine Airport.)

Here's one online commentary headlined

Tweet on Australia’s Christian male president goes viral

http://www.australiantimes.co.uk/news/australia-world-news/tweet-on-australias-christian-male-president-goes-viral.htm

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So, you still want to go to Australia. You've packed your bags and are ready for that long flight to Oz (and it's not a long scenic drive, Sheila). Make sure you have a compendium of Aussie slang words (like Sheila, which is slang for young girl) and get used to the Down Under brand of jokes.

Here's one that is "comparatively" less in-your-face:

An American decided to write a book about famous churches around the world. So he bought a plane ticket and took a trip to Orlando, thinking that he would start by working his way across the USA from South to North.

On his first day he was inside a church taking photographs when he noticed golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that read "$10,000 per call".

The American, being intrigued, asked priest who was strolling by what the telephone was used for. The priest replied that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 you could talk to God. The American thanked the priest and went along his way.

Next stop was in Atlanta. There, at a very large cathedral, he saw the same golden telephone with the same sign under it. He wondered if this was the same kind of telephone he saw in Orlando and he asked a nearby nun what its purpose was. She told him that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 he could talk to God. "OK, thank you," said the American.

He then travelled to Indianapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. In every church he saw the same golden telephone with the same "$10,000 per call" sign under it.

The American, upon leaving Vermont decided to travel to AUSTRALIA to see if Australians had the same phone. He arrived in Australia, and again, in the first church he entered, there was the same golden telephone, but this time the sign under it read "40 cents per call."

The American was surprised so he asked the priest about the sign.

"Father, I've travelled all over America and I've seen this same golden telephone in many churches. I'm told that it is a direct line to Heaven, but in the US the price was $10,000 per call. Why is it so cheap here?"

The priest smiled and answered, "You're in Australia now, mate. It's a local call".

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Last but not least, you've gotta learn the "Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!":

Friday, November 9, 2012

I drink (coffee), therefore I am...


I've been a coffee drinker for as long as I can remember, and my poison ranges from the hunble kopi-O to the exotic Kopi Luwak (above). My nightcap is coffee, sometimes the instant variety, sometimes a Nespresso capsule cuppa.

I can't understand why some people say they get the jitters after just one cup of coffee. But a news item I read today got me jittery:


The story of coffee is actually quite fascinating, as this other article reveals...


 You can also read the above story online:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-coffee-went-global

I didn't know that mocha got its name from the Yemeni port of Mocha!

And here's a website dedicated to coffee. Enjoy!...

http://www.ineedcoffee.com/05/sipby/