Poor Mojo Newswire

I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals section, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there that haven’t figured it out. <> What happened to all the nice guys?

The answer is simple: you did.

That’s not a resentful beginning at all!

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He’d tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn’t feel like going out,

Hey, wait, I know that guy! It was that guy down the street! The one who buys a lot of porn!

Seriously, who the fuck “tags along” with a girl when she goes shopping? If I want to hang out with somebody because I like the person, I do. I don’t expect to earn, like, extra points or something because she’s buying girl stuff (and that’s the implication in this little rant: “I was so good to you because I went along and did all the stupid crap you like when I could have been at home playing World of Warcraft”). If you like the person’s company, then that is its own reward. I’ve gone shopping with girls plenty of times, because I love used bookstores and I like company, and gosh darnit if that isn’t fun all by itself even if I don’t get any pussy afterwards.

And if you want more, then you actually have to try and make sure that the other person knows you want more, which doesn’t happen if you act like an expectant jackass who thinks if he spends enough time standing around awkwardly with his hands in his pockets while that girl he wants to fuck tries on dresses in… okay, I am honestly blanking on the name of a store that specifically sells nice dresses, but that’s probably because I don’t bother to be a whiny little kiss-ass and follow girls around when they go shopping… anyway, said guy figures if he does this enough, suddenly the Fuck Switch gets flipped. Except it doesn’t work that way, because that’s, you know, misogynistic.

How is this shit hard to figure out?

Executives from Mr. Letterman’s production company said Saturday that they were hopeful they would have an interim agreement in place with the guild as early as this week. That could potentially put Mr. Letterman at an enormous advantage over most of his late-night colleagues.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central has also been urging an interim agreement and would begin working toward getting one in place on Monday morning, according to a representative. But Mr. Letterman is in a stronger position because, unlike Mr. Stewart, his show is not owned by the network but by Mr. Letterman’s independent production company, Worldwide Pants Incorporated. (So is the show that follows it on CBS, “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” which would return with writers under the proposed interim agreement.) The news of Mr. Letterman’s potential deal came at the same time the WGA took a new tack that could potentially throw the negotiations into procedural chaos. The writers’ representatives said they planned on Monday to exercise a legal right to insist that the major studios and network production companies bargain with the guild individually rather than as a group.

The report said that the transit agency's lost property unit received more than 8,000 items each year and that only about 18 percent wound up back in the hands of their owners. Most unclaimed items were eventually auctioned off, the report said.

The audit also uncovered a chaotic system for handling property once it is turned in, with few safeguards. Often it can take weeks or months for lost items to make their way to the property unit's office where people can claim them.

Then there was the case of the lost earring. After it was found, a bus employee put the earring, which was set with what looked like a diamond, into an envelope for transfer to the lost property unit, the report said. But the envelope arrived empty.

. . .

Blackwater has been working this little town of 509 registered voters (which went for Bush over Kerry by 25.8%) hard. They deployed Brian Bonfiglio, a Vice-President at Blackwater out to San Diego County to regularly show up to town meetings in Potrero. They sent out propaganda mailers and generally tried to ingratiate themselves with residents of the community. In short, Blackwater has invested a great deal of resources into P.R. within Potrero and cares very much what the residents feel about the company. Naturally, Bonfiglio and Blackwater are trying to downplay this huge loss, even trying to claim that they couldn’t give a crap about the town.

It's definitely faster, but it's an easy system to defeat. The vulnerability is that no one verifies that the shoes you walked through the metal detector with are the same shoes you put on the scanning machine.

Here's how the attack works. Assume that you have two pairs of shoes: a clean pair that passes all levels of screening, and a dangerous pair that doesn't. (Ignore for a moment the ridiculousness of screening shoes in the first place, and assume that an X-ray machine can detect the dangerous pair.) Put the dangerous shoes on your feet and the clean shoes in your carry-on bag. Walk through the metal detector. Then, at the shoe X-ray machine, take the dangerous shoes off and put them in your bag, and take the clean shoes out of your bag and place them on the X-ray machine. You've now managed to get through security without having your shoes screened.

This works because the two security systems are decoupled. And the shoe screening machine is so crowded and chaotic, and so poorly manned, that no one notices the switch.

In the past 5,000 years, genetic change has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period, say scientists in the US.

This is in contrast with the widely-held belief that recent human evolution has halted.

. . .

"Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin," he added. "We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity."

This is happening, he said, because "there has not been much flow" between different regions since modern humans left Africa to colonise the rest of the world. And there is no evidence that it is slowing down, he added.