I’m trying to master the art of taking a shower while chewing gum. Unfortunately I’m not quite there yet, as I’ve got a slight soapy taste in my mouth.

The most demanding part is putting soap (or washing detergent or whatever it is you freaks use, it’s none of my business anyhow) on your face and scrubbing it. In order to succeed, one needs to simultaneously breath through one’s nose while not inhaling water and keeping one’s mouth shut but still chewing uninterrupted.

I think I could make a career out of this.

Case number 1: Ali G as Boris, the Austrian fashion TV reporter asked some fat American male in a ”Pro-America Convention” what the man thinks about freedom. Obviously the obese git was all for it. Then Boris told him that in Austria freedom meant he could walk down the street holding hands with his boyfriend. ”Well,” the hick said, his overweight facial features horribly contorted, ”I’ve got no problem with what you do in the privacy of your own home.” That’s good ole American freedom for you.

Case number 2: From The Guardian Weekend’s Reader’s letters column: To claim that straight culture has absorbed a gay practice and ”grafted it on to heterosexual couplings” is wishful thinking. Never mind the fact whether you disagree with the original claim (men pay more attention to women’s butts) or not, but does he really think there’s some sort of gay illuminati out there trying to bend good, straight people into illicit homosexual acts?

From The Times Magazine’s Readers’ Notes (10.5.2003):

In John Clarke’s The Romans and Their Conquests (April 26) he stated that ”what we call normal sex is a creation of our own culture”. Really? If that’s the case, how is it that circa 56AD, the Apostle Paul who live in Rome described the sexual excesses of non-Christians as ”unnatural”.

Well, maybe because ”our own culture” is pretty much based on Christianity, especially the stuff that deals with sexuality? Alas, the writer had meant this only as a rhetoric question and therefore answered it himself:

It is not that ”normal sex” is a creation of our own culture but that it is a creation of God.

I must say I’m a bit disappointed with the Times. This piece of logic and argumentation wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of, say, Karjalan Heili, the free weekly newspaper of my beloved home town Joensuu, but on the pages of the Times… O tempora, O mores!

An engineer called George Bible (!) was seen in a documentary exclaiming ”Isn’t she lovely?” about an airplane wing.

You know that selling condoms only became legal in Ireland a short while ago, don’t you? Well, I’ve wondered what tourists had to do in pre-condom times if they wanted to have sex in Ireland. Did they raid pharmacists like others raid banks? Was there a black market for condoms? Did you have to show your passport at the pharmacist’s to prove you’re not from around here? Fascinating indeed.

In New York there have been, on average, more than one and a half bank heists a day in the first four months of 2003 (courtesy of the New Yorker) and over 12,000 tigers are kept as pets in the US (courtesy of the Sunday Times Magazine).

BMW is promoting its new car like a movie. The soft-top isn’t even in stores yet and still they’re running commercials everywhere. And they’re exactly like movie teasers: just small glimpses of the car, a new version every couple of weeks and a simple slogan, arriving 16 June (or something).

Like advertising wasn’t irritating enough already.

But most people know you won’t get SARS simply by drinking Sars. (source)

I’ve still got one more story about today’s Guardian, for it was accompanied by a wonderful little advertisement titled ”Discover Finland”. How lovely, I thought, they’re finally noticing us.

Well, yes and no. See, Finland has actually been voted the readers’ favourite European Country. Twice. In a row! Now that’s something to be proud of. I guess. Sadly the contents are nothing to go wild about. Helsinki City Tours, a quick pop to Turku and Lappeenranta (whatever, dudes), skiing in Lappi.

But there’s one delicious twist left. The pamphlet was put together by ”the Scandinavian specialist” … Norwegian Coastal Voyage Limited.

Okay, so the company is actually owned by the Guardian. But it’s still funny as hell.

A whole lot of people don’t seem to grasp what IQ is about. And I don’t even mean that defining or measuring intelligence is a bitch, but that the concept of IQ is often misunderstood. It’s not an absolute measure in the way that height or weight (or rather mass, if we’re being picky – and we are) are, but relative. It’s called ”intelligence quotient” for a reason. Failing to understand this basic premise results in sentences like the ones found in an article on gene manipulation on the Guardian Weekend (3.5.2003).

An ex-editor on Science is quoted in the article as saying If a child destined to have a permanently low IQ could be cured by replacing a gene, would anyone really argue with that? It is a short step from that decision to improving a normal IQ. Errors of this ilk are quite common but it gets worse.

A passage such as Of course, the problem is that if everyone’s adding 30 IQ points, then having an IQ of 150 won’t get you any closer to an elite university than you were at the outset shows exactly what the confusion is about. For IQ is defined in such a way that the median of all people will have an IQ of 100, meaning that if ”everyone adds 30 IQ points”, the resulting median still won’t be 130 but 100 and therefore talk of IQ points is quite useless, even misleading.

There is a possibility that this could be understood to be analogous to percentage points, but this theory can be easily debunked. Note how the author writes about adding 30 IQ points and thus resulting in an IQ of 150, not 150 IQ points. It’s the same as saying ”by adding 20 percentage points, the result is 150 percentages”, which is utter nonsense.

I’m not worried about possible mistakes I’ve made with statistical terms and concepts here, for I know I have an avid reader who’ll surely point out my possible shortcomings in no time.