Dowbrigade

Victim of cannibal agreed to be eaten

To the family next door, Armin Meiwes seemed the perfect
neighbour. He mowed their lawn, repaired their car and even invited
them round for dinner.

Other residents in the small German town of Rotenburg also believed
there was nothing odd about the 42-year-old computer expert, whose
light burned
late into the night inside his creaking mansion. Yesterday, however,
Meiwes appeared in court charged with killing – and then frying and
eating – another
man.

In one of the most extraordinary trials in German criminal history, the
self-confessed cannibal admitted that he had met a 43-year-old Berlin
engineer, Bernd Brandes, after advertising on the internet, and had chopped
him up
and eaten him.

from
the Guardian

Having
trouble deciding who to vote for? Don’t fret, just answer these 17
simple questions and SelectSmart’s
2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector will dial you in
to the correct choice! How scientific! If its on the internet, it must
be true.

Has campaign posturing got your head spinning even before the first
primary? A variety of Web sites can help you find where you fit on the
political spectrum and even which presidential candidate best matches
your views.

from
the New York Times

Mike
Walsh points to this article
on Netscape News about the benefits of regular sex. Or irregular sex,
for that matter. Although psuedo-scientific rumination on reasons sex
is good is perhaps the epitomy of rationalization, some of the reasons
are worth a smile. Number five, for example, states:

5. You’ll live longer (and look younger!). A British
study of 1,000 men found that those who had at least two orgasms per
week had half the death rate of those who indulged less than once a month.

And those who died noted a marked dropoff in orgasms
as well…

Sex can make you look younger, too, according to neuropsychologist
David Weeks,
who
found
that
men and
women
who reported
having sex an
average
of four times per week looked approximately 10 years younger than
they really were.

As Mike noted, there may be a
reverse cause and effect at work here. That is, those seniors
who look 10 years younger could be getting a lot more action….

from Netscape News

We
all know that big-time college football has long ago lost any credibility
as amateur sport or academic adjunct, or in fact as anything but a
wholly owned subsidiary and source of human raw material for Football,
Inc.

Befitting its position as the de facto National
Religion, monopolizing the major media weekly worship on Saturdays
and Sundays from August until January, the Football Field has been
increasingly entrusted to that other proto-sypical American Preisthood,
the Programmers.  From statistical and digital videbreakdown of
every play and player to player and team ratings, a techno-football
has evolved far beyond the comprehension of the average fan. No better
example of this cyber-deification of can be found than the Oracular
BCS computer-generated end-of-season college bowl matchups. And
who better to explain it to us all than the increasingly cyberized
New York Times….

Computers have been cranking out football rankings
for a generation – The New
York Times has published its version for college teams since 1979
– with the notion of injecting some objectivity into a weekly ritual
otherwise based on polls of sportswriters and coaches. For most
of that time (and for pro teams, even now), it has been merely an intellectual
exercise. But since the advent of the Bowl Championship Series
in
1998,
the computer rankings have been a major component, along with the
polls, in determining the matchups of the top four bowl games – and
the split
of about $90 million.

from the New York Times