Avenue Odd

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

Engineer: What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!

Doctor: I don't know but I've never seen such ineptitude!

Priest: Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him.

Priest: Hi George. Say George, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow aren't they?

George: Oh yes. That's a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight while saving our club house last year. So we let them play here anytime free of charge!

(silence)

Priest: That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.

Doctor: Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them.

Engineer: Why can't these guys play at night?

Picture taken off Flickr.com. Uploaded on January 10, 2008 by bread_man_017.

please comment!

I would not profess to have visited many restaurants in my short time of existence, but one little question always pops into my mind when i pick up the salt shaker and see grains of uncooked rice in it, mingled into the salt.

At first glance the logical deduction is that the grains of rice, being much larger than grains of salt, would push the salt around so that they would not coagulate and form clumps. Many a times, we (my friends and i) would leave it at that.

So, being the bored student that i am (bored of accounting to be exact), i went and Goggled it to find out if our logical minds served us well.

As it would appear, rice, or starch in general, is a good desiccating agent. It absorbs surrounding atmospheric moisture so that the salt would stay dry and not absorb moisture and clump up. This is a little excerpt of a answer from a professor.

I think both sides of the argument are correct. Indeed, the grains of rice will tend to "knock 
the lumps out of the salt." So would small glass beads. However, the porous starch structure of
well dried rice is also very attractive to moisture by virtue of hydrogen bonds that can form
between water molecules and the -OH groups in the starch matrix. Thus, dried starch grains make a 
fairly decent desiccating agent.

So now we know.

‘tis funny!

When young people are increasingly having pre-martial sex. One has to ask, is the age old yardstick of morality, abstinence, finally obsolete?

This blogger thinks so.

The emphasis of abstinence has always been to “save yourself for that special someone”. However, it has to be noted that these ideas originated from a time and age quite distant, and very much different from ours. In the past, people got married at much younger ages than they do now. Most couples tied the knot at age 23 or below, while in our time, at age 23, in most developed countries, people are pursuing a tertiary education, and the average age of marriage is somewhere along the lines of 28.

Abstinence until marriage was practiced widely, though not universally, in the USA through the 1950’s. So it is possible, in the right cultural circumstances, for abstinence to be the norm.
What were the conditions that made it possible?

–A culture that hides and impedes sexuality. Dress codes, chaperones, no public display of sexual language and images.

–Early marriage: it’s possible to wait a year or two; it isn’t possible to get most people to abstain for a decade or more.

–Lack of contraception, so that pregnancy is a likely outcome of non-abstinence. Contraception was illegal in some USA states as late as 1968.

–Abortion illegal and dangerous.

–Shame and denial if pregnancy results. Hurried marriage with an attempt to cover up the pregnancy, or giving birth in a home for unwed mothers and releasing the baby for adoption, were the options.

Abstinence is certainly unrealistic without honesty, discipline and ethical values.

I would not want to go back to the time when abstinence was enforced by shame, ignorance, and withholding of alternatives.

Expecting total abstinence is unrealistic. Faced with a biological drive to have sex and a conflicting cultural drive not to, there are always going to be teenagers on both sides of the fence. Abstinence should be taught as the ideal solution, but should they choose to have sex anyway, teens should be educated on what the risks are and how to mitigate them, not simply fig-leafing the issue and be done with it.

©Picture taken off Flickr.com. Originally Uploaded on August 12, 2007 by pootydog

If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark.

Clark had persuaded the students of his social psychology class to help him find out which gender, in a real-life situation, would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The only way to find out, he figured, was to actually get out there and see what would happen. So young men and women from his class fanned out across campus and began propositioning strangers.

The results weren’t very surprising. Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, “I’m married”). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.

At first the psychological community dismissed Clark’s experiment as a trivial stunt, but gradually his experiment gained first acceptance, and then praise for how dramatically it revealed the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. Today it’s considered a classic. But why men and women display such different attitudes remains as hotly debated as ever.

Year upon year we strive towards so-called sexual equality. Can such an ideal equilibrium even exist?

Awareness Test-Amazing - Watch the top videos of the week here

A little awareness test up here, its pretty amazing what you miss when you aren’t looking out for it.