Archive for November 2008
Sex during the spin cycle’s a big hit on screen, but in a grimy apartment laundry room where an elderly neighbor might walk in?
An old sexual trend is new again – washing-machine sex. On television, in movies, even in ads on the subway, appliance sex is causing a spin-cycle commotion.
Sadly, this is one exploit the apartment-dwelling ladies of New York City will have a difficult time enjoying. I learned this in my own laundry room.
But while Davidson specializes in fearless sex, there’s a lot of anxiety to account for when getting dirty while cleaning.
A full wash and a spin cycle takes about an hour. The ideal time to maximize the vibration level of your appliance is about 40 minutes into your cycle. Timing is key.
Sure, the idea of a spontaneous romp on a whirling washer sounds supersexy, but in practice, it really is too much trouble to do your delicates in the laundry room.
Problem No. 1: New Yorkers have communal laundry areas. These are usually in the basement of your apartment building, an area that abounds with mice and roaches and God knows what else. One look at my grimy ground floor and the mood was quickly squelched.
Problem No. 2: Lots of New Yorkers do their laundry at night, so if you think you can sneak downstairs for a quickie around midnight, you just might run into your 65-year-old neighbor washing his sheets. That was awkward.
Problem No. 3: New York City washing machines are usually stacked with dryers to conserve space. You can perform a careful lean, and some creative yoga positions, while the clothes are tumbling, but you can’t exactly maximize the vibration effect.
And while the thought of throwing your girlfriend down on the washing machine and going at it with abandon may seem like a fantasy right out of the “Stepford Wives,” some guys seem to have an irrational fear of the spin cycle.
As we considered taking the plunge into appliance sex, my partner in crime, already skeptical of the communal laundry room in my basement, raised another concern.
“Men don’t like things that vibrate,” he said matter of factly. “We are scared of them.”
Why is that?
“We just don’t want them anywhere near our (privates)!”
And that was the end of that. Ladies, if you want to get it on on the Maytag, move to the suburbs and find a guy who isn’t afraid to give his boys a shake.
Though, come to think of it, the woman who works at the drop-off Laundromat is probably the cheeriest lady on my block. Maybe there is something to it.
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Apple Exec Hired From IBM Ordered to Stop Work – News and Analysis by PC Magazine
Posted on: November 9, 2008
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A U.S. District court has ordered an Apple employee recently hired away from IBM to immediately stop work amidst fears that he might disclose IBM trade secrets.
Mark Papermaster “will immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc. until further order of this court,” according to a Friday ruling from the U.S. District Court for Southern New York.
Apple announced Tuesday that Papermaster will serve as its new senior vice president of devices hardware engineering, replacing iPod innovator Tony Fadell.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Papermaster is a 26-year veteran of IBM and most recently served as vice president of IBM’s blade development unit, which designs IBM’s blade-model servers. In June 2006, Papermaster signed a non-compete agreement in which he agreed not to work for an IBM competitor for at least a year if he ever left IBM, according to court documents.
He informed IBM of the Apple job offer last month. On October 20, IBM offered him a pay raise as well as the option to accept one year’s salary if he promised not to go to a competitor, but Papermaster submitted his resignation the next day.
On October 22, IBM filed suit.
Papermaster is “in possession of significant and highly confidential IBM trade secrets and know-how, as well as highly sensitive information regarding business strategy and long-term opportunities,” according to IBM’s complaint.
Apple competes with IBM in the sale of servers, personal computers, and microprocessors, including Apple’s Xservers and Apple’s recent acquisition of California-based semiconductor company P.A. Semi, according to IBM.
IBM contends that Apple will use Papermaster and its stake in P.A. Semi “to design microprocessors for incorporation in a variety of electronic devices, including handheld devices.”
“IBM will be irreparably damaged” if Papermaster works for Apple and “inevitably” discloses trade secrets, IBM said.
That is “absurd,” according to Papermaster’s rebuttal.
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CNN has made a groundbreaking discovery and a huge progress when it comes to live field transmissions. Except for the fact that on Tuesday, the Presidential Eelection was won by Barack Obama, making the Democrat Senator the nation’s 44th President and the United States’ 1st African-American President, CNN used pioneering technology to share the information with the millions of Americans watching.
Wolf Blitzer was responsible with introducing the novelty item to the world, warning the audience that “you’ve never seen anything like this on television.” Almost immediately, CNN’s political correspondent Jessica Yellin made her appearance in the studio, just feet away from Blitzer. In fact, Yellin was physically still in Chicago, Illinois, where she continued to follow Barack Obama’s campaign and the gargantuan rally on Tuesday night.
So how was that possible? CNN is apparently using holograms now! The “Star Wars” references were of course inevitable, as Yellin herself stated “It’s like I follow in the tradition of Princess Leia. It’s something else. Jay Leno of course had some fun with the similarity between Yellin’s apparition, surrounded by a blurry, blue haze and the “Star Wars” scene.
The internet, as expected, is already full of spoofs, parodies and mash-ups, some of them including Yellin with Carrie Fisher and the Star Wars lines. The “hologram”, however, was not an actual hologram, as CNN had to use both a green screen and overlaying images. True hologram technology implies capturing light and reconstructing it – a very expensive technology.
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Obama’s four-part plan for the economy:
A particularly urgent priority is a further extension of unemployment insurance benefits for workers who cannot find work in the increasingly weak economy.
A fiscal stimulus plan that will jump-start economic growth is long overdue. I’ve talked about it throughout this — the last few months of the campaign. We should get it done.
Second, we have to address the spreading impact of the financial crisis on the other sectors of our economy: small businesses that are struggling to meet their payrolls and finance their holiday inventories; and state and municipal governments facing devastating budget cuts and tax increases.
We must also remember that the financial crisis is increasingly global and requires a global response.
The news coming out of the auto industry this week reminds us of the hardship it faces, hardship that goes far beyond individual auto companies to the countless suppliers, small businesses and communities throughout our nation who depend on a vibrant American auto industry.
The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing and a critical part of our attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
I would like to see the administration do everything it can to accelerate the retooling assistance that Congress has already enacted. In addition, I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America. . . .
Third, we will review the implementation of this administration’s financial program to ensure that the government’s efforts are achieving their central goal of stabilizing financial markets while protecting taxpayers, helping homeowners, and not unduly rewarding the management of financial firms that are receiving government assistance. . . .
Finally, as we monitor and address these immediate economic challenges, we will be moving forward in laying out a set of policies that will grow our middle class and strengthen our economy in the long term. We cannot afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, healthcare, education and tax relief for middle-class families.
On dealing with Iran and answering the congratulatory letter Obama received:
Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable. And we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.
Iran’s support of terrorist organizations, I think, is something that has to cease.
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What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things. (You can make your own nominations in the TierneyLab blog.)
1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.
But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.
If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.
2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.
3. Forbidden fruits from afar. Do you dare to eat a kiwi? Sure, because more “food miles” do not equal more greenhouse emissions. Food from other countries is often produced and shipped much more efficiently than domestic food, particularly if the local producers are hauling their wares around in small trucks. One study showed that apples shipped from New Zealand to Britain had a smaller carbon footprint than apples grown and sold in Britain.
4. Carcinogenic cellphones. Some prominent brain surgeons made news on Larry King’s show this year with their fears of cellphones, thereby establishing once and for all that epidemiology is not brain surgery — it’s more complicated.
As my colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted, there is no known biological mechanism for the phones’ non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent links between cancer and cellphones.
It’s always possible today’s worried doctors will be vindicated, but I’d bet they’ll be remembered more like the promoters of the old cancer-from-power-lines menace — or like James Thurber’s grandmother, who covered up her wall outlets to stop electricity from leaking.
Driving while talking on a phone is a definite risk, but you’re better off worrying about other cars rather than cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.
6. Toxic plastic bottles. For years panels of experts repeatedly approved the use of bisphenol-a, or BPA, which is used in polycarbonate bottles and many other plastic products. Yes, it could be harmful if given in huge doses to rodents, but so can the natural chemicals in countless foods we eat every day. Dose makes the poison.
But this year, after a campaign by a few researchers and activists, one federal panel expressed some concern about BPA in baby bottles. Panic ensued. Even though there was zero evidence of harm to humans, Wal-Mart pulled BPA-containing products from its shelves, and politicians began talking about BPA bans. Some experts fear product recalls that could make this the most expensive health scare in history.
Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.
7. Deadly sharks. Throughout the world last year, there was a grand total of one fatal shark attack (in the South Pacific), according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.
8. The Arctic’s missing ice. The meltdown in the Arctic last summer was bad enough, but this spring there was worse news. A majority of experts expected even more melting this year, and some scientists created a media sensation by predicting that even the North Pole would be ice-free by the end of summer.
So far, though, there’s more ice than at this time last summer, and most experts are no longer expecting a new record. You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic, but you can set aside one worry: This summer it looks as if Santa can still have his drinks on the rocks.
9. The universe’s missing mass. Even if the fate of the universe — steady expansion or cataclysmic collapse — depends on the amount of dark matter that is out there somewhere, you can rest assured that no one blames you for losing it. And most experts doubt this collapse will occur during your vacation.
10. Unmarked wormholes. Could your vacation be interrupted by a sudden plunge into a wormhole? From my limited analysis of space-time theory and the movie “Jumper,” I would have to say that the possibility cannot be eliminated. I would also concede that if the wormhole led to an alternate universe, there’s a good chance your luggage would be lost in transit.
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