What would Freud say??

Talk about 'all men want to marry their mother'

Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach -- and discovering that his on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!

'I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams,' the rattled bachelor later admitted. 'And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she'd said she would.

'But when I got close, she turned around -- and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn't know what to say. All I could think was, 'Oh my God! it's Mama!' '

Mr and Mrs become Mrs and Mrs

A couple who wed as man and wife in 1967 have remarried as a gay couple

A husband and wife have 'remarried' as a gay couple - 14 years after the groom had a sex swap operation.
Bernard and Joyce Rogers wed in 1967 but have lived "like sisters" since 1991, when Bernadette, as she's now known, underwent gender surgery.

The Sheet Music Archive

Anyone a budding classical musician??

Well now you can downlad lots of free public domain scores - the only restriciton is that you can only download two per day so be careful what you choose

Look kids, this is what we had before we had iPods

Do you remember the days of cassettes? the C60, C90, how they used to get tangled around the tape head or stretch so the sound went all funny - I do

Here's a page that has loads of images of old cassettes for a burst of nostalgia. Which reminds me, somewhere at home I have a great big bag of cassettes that haven't seen the light of day in years- I should find out what's on them

Oooo how vile!

Look at how horrible this toilet is - surely that's designed to give a man a complex

The health benefits of olive oil

It seems that olive oil works in a similar way to ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory

Now scientists believe they have discovered exactly what it is that makes extra virgin olive oil so good for us.

A study suggests the oil can prevent inflammation in the same way as common headache pills. In doing so, it helps stave off long-term health problems such as cancer and heart disease.

The researchers, based at the University of Pennsylvania, found the main compound in the oil, oleocanthal, contained the same properties as the painkiller ibuprofen.

Ibuprofen has been linked to a lower risk of cancer and heart problems, as has aspirin, which belongs to the same class of antiinflammatory drugs, called COX inhibitors.

The study concluded that extra virgin olive oil - made from the first pressing of the olive - may offer similar long-term advantages.

The extra virgin oil costs around twice as much as the standard version. While the ordinary oil offers some health benefits, these are less pronounced. Now scientists believe they have discovered exactly what it is that makes extra virgin olive oil so good for us.

A study suggests the oil can prevent inflammation in the same way as common headache pills. In doing so, it helps stave off long-term health problems such as cancer and heart disease.

The researchers, based at the University of Pennsylvania, found the main compound in the oil, oleocanthal, contained the same properties as the painkiller ibuprofen.

Ibuprofen has been linked to a lower risk of cancer and heart problems, as has aspirin, which belongs to the same class of antiinflammatory drugs, called COX inhibitors.

The study concluded that extra virgin olive oil - made from the first pressing of the olive - may offer similar long-term advantages.

The extra virgin oil costs around twice as much as the standard version. While the ordinary oil offers some health benefits, these are less pronounced.

Iraq profiteering

Interesting article looking at the wheels within wheels among the warmongerers and consortia profiting from the war in Iraq

The Bush family connection was obvious. The chairman of New Bridge was Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and national campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign. Directors Edward M. Rogers Jr and Lanny Griffith came from one of Washington’s best-connected Republican law firms. Both had been assistants to George Bush Sr in the White House.
A bizarre Bush-Thatcher-Bush-Blair continuum was completed when the company invited an unlikely Englishman to join its ranks. Sir Charles Powell was defence and foreign affairs consultant to Margaret Thatcher and John Major, expending much effort advising PMs that the government needed to invest more in military technology and arms sales. He went on to work for the chairmen of arms firms BAe Systems and Thales, advising them, evidently, that the government needed to invest more in military equipment and arms sales.
As luck would have it, Charles’ brother Jonathan, another Foreign Office diplo-wonk, who used to be Britain’s ambassador in Washington, is now Tony Blair’s chief of staff. He is also said to be the man responsible for single-handedly rubbishing Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy on the basis that Britain needed to invest more in military equipment and arms sales. It must run in the family.

And then, as if that isn't enough, there's yet another connection to Bin Laden and Al Quaeda

What the press release doesn’t mention is that an al-Bunnia partner is also a founding partner in an organisation identified as helping to fund al-Qaeda. Documents from the Swiss Federal Commercial Registry show Sadoon al-Bunnia to be a founding partner in the Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber (MIGA), one of 14 businesses controlled by Ahmed Idris Nasreddin and Youssef M. Nada.

In August 2002, US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill announced that businesses in the Nasreddin-Nada network “appeared to be providing a clandestine line of credit to a close associate of Usama bin Laden and as of late September 2001, Usama bin Laden and his Al Qaida organisation received financial assistance from Youssef M. Nada.”

You would think this record might blot the copybook of businessmen hoping to do deals with the US administration in Iraq, but no; US engineering super-giant, Bechtel has just signed them up to help rebuild the Al Mat bridge, bombed by a stray cruise missile during the war.

Astonishingly, the US government and their contractors seem blithely unconcerned about al-Bunnia’s al-Qaeda connection. According to the US Treasury, its undiplomatically-named Office of Foreign Assets Control keeps a list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, prohibiting trade with the listed persons or organisations. MIGA makes the list. Al-Bunnia does not.

When pushed, the US Treasury said that al-Bunnia’s “association with MIGA should raise some due diligence concerns, but it is not necessarily wrong for a US company to do business with him, and it is certainly not illegal.” Senseless and dangerous, perhaps. But not actually illegal.

And then it discusses Karen Kwiatkowski, a whistleblower who was embroiled in the sexing up of the intelligence.

Interesting and yet angry-making reading

Draw a pig

Germans discover world's oldest dildo

Archaeologists have found the remains of the world's oldest dildo

German scientists are tickled pink after unearthing one of the world's oldest sculpted phalluses - 20cm of polished siltstone lovingly created around 28,000 years ago.

The stone schlong was discovered in Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm, Swabia, by a Tübingen University team. Professor Nicholas Conard, from the university's snappily-named department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, explained the excitment to the BBC thus: "Female representations with highly accentuated sexual attributes are very well documented at many sites, but male representations are very, very rare."

Indeed, although other examples of male genitalia - from France and Morocco - predate the Ulm member, to have "any representation of male genitalia from this time period is highly unusual".

There may be a good reason for this - the German sausage bears the scars of having been used to knap flints, and was reassembled from 14 fragments. Despite this abuse, and in a delicious leap of imagination, Conard speculates that the life-size member may have been used as a prehistoric sex toy. As he suggestively notes: "It's highly polished."

Those interested in the sex lives of our distant ancestors will be able to cop an eyeful of the Hohle Fels phallus when it goes on show at a Blaubeuren prehistoric museum exhibition entitled "Ice Art - Clearly Male".

Worldwide Internet Art Project "The Sudden Morning"

Everyone take a photograph at 8.15 on August 6 to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima.

In these dark times, it is important that right-minded people express their desire for peace world-wide and commemorate on of the most horrific acts of war ever perpetrated.

The Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 am on August 6, 1945. Just 60 yeas after that what scenes are we going to see on 2005, on the very same day and on the very same time that the A-bomb was dropped?
We may see a family at the breakfast table, business people hurrying for work, a newborn baby, people preparing for a wedding or just a quiet harbor.
So many scenes will be laid before us.
This project will give us a chance to see the different views worldwide on the 8:15 am of August 6th this year through the net.
Looking at how people all over the world spend this ordinary morning, we will share some kind of feeling about that sudden morning in Hiroshima. We believe that this will help us genuinely think of what real peace or happiness is all about.
The project is supported by Hiroshima citizens mainly consist of IT engineers. We fully welcome your participation in this project.