What else is new?

When are women going to learn that man flu, really is a lot worse then any kind of sissy girly flu they might have had in the past!

A manly runny nose is in fact worse then child birth, and when combined with a nasty cough is like giving kryptonite to superman! Although the symptoms may appear on the surface to be like any other strain of flu, I can assure you that man flu is like flu extra strength “now with added mucus”. It’s nothing like the common cold; it doesn’t even bear relation to the regular influenza. And should be reclassified as such! This is a class A; viral, we are not putting it on, or acting up for attention! We are at war with the beast, and are doing everything in are power to prevent more innocent men being infected with it! So that’s why we refuse to move, and going out of the house is out of the question!

Getting the most out of your man flu,

1, sighing, it’s important to sigh as loudly and as often as possible, this not only is away of forcibly expelling your germs a greater distance, but also has a satisfying sound. This can also help raise the sympathy stakes

2, runny nose, this feature should be welcomed, as it’s not only is it a visible sign of illness, its away of making wiping your nose on your sleeve, acceptable (use it while u can) plus with practice you can create huge snot bubbles from your nose

3, coughing, the tickler the cough, the better. Nobody wants to waste there time with some sissy single cough, not when u can have whole coughing fits that can be used in conjunction with sighs for extra effect (see tip1) Remember after coughing, if your eyes are not watering, you didn’t do it right!

4, sleeping, while the actually act of sleeping is useful for gaining a little extra energy, its not actually worth doing unless u can combine it with any of the above symptoms. Your better of sprawling across the couch, with a quilt wrapped round you. This way nobody will have time to forget how ill you are, and the TV remote control is still firmly yours!

5, alcohol, not that any real man needs an excuse to consume hard licker before breakfast, Its nice to have a whole arsenal of old wives tales and urban myths relating to how drinking can help relive the above symptoms. Use it while you can, hot toddies, Irish coffee’s, and straight shots of the hard stuff are all acceptable as traditional remidys. Dont let that stop you making up storys regarding tequila's remarkable healing properties

6, tissues, although not totally needed during this near death experience, they can provide some entertainment. Seeing how far you can throw the snot filled balls, and then seeing others struggling to pick them up without touching any of your free flowing nastiness. At this point you can use the now perfected sighing to deflect any evil looks that might be given to you by your offical carer. note: only man flu can create huge mountains of used tissues from one small box.

So now you have no excuse not to get the sympathy you deserve!.. Girls ringing your friends and relatives up and announcing we only have a cold, is not only dangerous to other male visitors, it’s a complete lie! I don’t know who you think you’re helping by committing such crimes!

Choose chav
Choose wearing your collar turned up high. Choose balancing your cap on the very top of your head. Choose hoodies. Choose wearing every piece of jewellery you have at all times, making sure as much as possible is visible by hanging your cheap chains on the outside of your t-shirts. Choose buying your clothes from a man on the estate. Choose talking with Jamaican or American accent depending on your taste. Choose smoking cheap weed on street corners. Choose to swing your arms when you walk in an effort to make yourself look bigger. Choose stealing cider from the local shop. Choose to tuck your jogging bottoms in to your socks or rolling one leg up. Choose buying the exact same things as everyone else in your group. Choose social disorder. Choose benefit fraud. Choose believing that knowing all the words to the latest Eminem album is better than knowing the alphabet. Choose dirty looks and losing fights in pubs. Choose visiting cash converter’s twice a week. Choose fake or stolen designer clothing (or by the time it gets to your estate stolen fakes).

Choose Goth
Choose wearing black clothing. Choose hanging chains from your pockets. Choose burning candles while writing down how much the world hates you and you hate it. Choose listening to dark music with virtually no understandable words. Choose painting your lips and nails black. Choose avoiding the sun. Choose sitting in a darkened room, walking around with your head down and sighing at every given opportunity. Choose smoking Marlboro Reds, while wearing pants that have the legs strapped together by tethers. Choose crying in your closet where nobody can see you because you think nobody understands you. Choose listing to the most out dated music you can find and believing that people don’t like it coz its to hardcore for them, Not because its utter shit!

Choose geek
Choose dungeons and dragons and star trek. Choose IRC. ÇHöö§Ë måkîñg üþ ¥öü® öwñ üßË® |ËËt Hå×ö® §þËËk. Choose comic books, mint limited editions. Choose Linux. Choose UNIX. Choose any nix. Choose Warcraft 1. Choose asthma. Choose random spouts of hyperactivity 0MFUG!1!! L0L!!!!1111!1shift111!!one11!!!! Choose pwning your foe. Choose watching Star Wars movies in you perants basement untill your 50. Choose chronic masturbation.Choose being really anal about the slightest detail in the most pointless of subjects.

Notes: Of course these are just high exaggerated stereo types, but we all know whot they are. For are US viewers a chav I guess is a cross between trailer park trash and wiggers. Goths can come in many forms some more extreme then others, but all from the same bloodline. Geeks…. Err we all know what a geek is!

In my experience, many people believe that New Yorkers are smarter than other Americans, and this may actually be true. The majority of people who live in New York City were not born here. Indeed, more than a third were not born in the United States. New Yorkers, then, are people who left another place and came here, looking for something, which suggests that the population is preselected for higher energy and ambition.
Also for a willingness to forgo basic comforts. Compare that with California, where even middle-income people have a patio on which they can eat breakfast and where almost everyone has a car. In New York, only upper-income people enjoy those amenities. The others would like to share them. I sometimes get into conversations with taxi drivers, and since most of them are new to the city, I often ask them what they miss about the place they came from. Almost always, they name very ordinary pleasures: a slower pace of life, a café where they could sit around and talk to friends, a street where they could play kickball without getting run over. Those who miss these things enough will go back home. That means that the rest of us, statistically, are more high-strung, hungry and intent on long-term gains—traits that quite possibly correlate with intelligence.
But I think it's also possible that New Yorkers just appear smarter, because they make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It's hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
It is said that New Yorkers are rude, but I think what people mean by that is that New Yorkers are more familiar. The man who waits on you in the delicatessen is likely to call you sweetheart. (Feminists have gotten used to this.) People on the bus will say, "I have the same handbag as you. How much did you pay?" If they don't like the way you are treating your children, they will tell you. And should you try to cut in front of somebody in the grocery store checkout line, you will be swiftly corrected. My mother, who lives in California, doesn't like to be kept waiting, so when she goes into the bank, she says to the people in the line, "Oh, I have just one little thing to ask the teller. Do you mind?" Then she scoots to the front of the line, takes the next teller and transacts her business, which is typically no briefer than anyone else's. People let her do this because she is an old lady. In New York, she wouldn't get away with it for a second.
While New Yorkers don't mind correcting you, they also want to help you. In the subway or on the sidewalk, when someone asks a passerby for directions, other people, overhearing, may hover nearby, disappointed that they were not the ones asked, and waiting to see if maybe they can get a word in. New Yorkers like to be experts. Actually, all people like to be experts, but most of them satisfy this need with friends and children and employees. New Yorkers, once again, tend to behave with strangers the way they do with people they know.
This injects a certain drama into our public life. The other day I was in the post office when a man in line in front of me bought one of those U.S. Postal Service boxes. Then he moved down the counter a few inches to assemble his package while the clerk waited on the next person. But the man soon discovered that the books he wanted to mail were going to rattle around in the box, so he interrupted the clerk to tell her his problem. She offered to sell him a roll of bubble wrap, but he told her that he had already paid $2.79 for the box, and that was a lot for a box—he could have gotten a box for free at the liquor store—and what was he going to do with a whole roll of bubble wrap? Carry it around all day? The clerk shrugged. Then the man spotted a copy of the Village Voice on the counter and laid hold of it to use it for stuffing. "No!" said the clerk. "That's my Voice." Annoyed, the man put it back and looked around helplessly. Now a woman in line behind me said she'd give him the sections of her New York Times that she didn't want, and she began going through the paper. "Real estate? You can have real estate. Sports? Here, take sports." But the real estate section was all the man needed. He separated the pages, stuffed them in the box and proceeded to the taping process (interrupting the clerk once again). Another man in line asked the woman if he could have the sports section, since she didn't want it. She gave it to him, and so finally everything was settled.
This was an interesting show, to which you could have a wide range of reactions. Why didn't the box man bring some stuffing? If the clerk hadn't finished her Village Voice, why did she leave it on the counter? And so on. In any case, the scene sufficed to fill up those boring minutes in line—or, I should add, to annoy the people who just wanted to read their newspaper in peace instead of being exposed to the man's postal adventure. I won't say this could happen only in New York, but I believe that the probability is much greater here.
Why are New Yorkers like this? It goes against psychological principles. Psychologists tell us that the more stimuli people are bombarded with, the more they will recede into themselves and ignore others. So why is it that New Yorkers, who are certainly confronted with enough stimuli, do the opposite? I have already given a few possible answers, but here's one more: the special difficulties of life in New York—the small apartments, the struggle for a seat on the bus or a table at a restaurant—seem to breed a sense of common cause. When New Yorkers see a stranger, they don't think, "I don't know you." They think, "I know you. I know your problems—they're the same as mine—and furthermore we have the same handbag." So that's how they treat you.
This belief in a shared plight may underlie the remarkable level of cooperation that New Yorkers can show in times of trouble. Every few years or so, we have a water shortage, and then the mayor goes on the radio and tells us that we can't leave the water running in the sink while we're brushing our teeth. Surprise! People obey, and the water table goes up again. The more serious the problem, the more dramatic the displays of cooperation. I will not speak of the World Trade Center disaster, because it is too large a subject, but the last time we had a citywide power failure, and hence no traffic lights, I saw men in business suits—they looked like lawyers—directing traffic at busy intersections on Ninth Avenue. They got to be traffic cops for a day and tell the big trucks when to stop and when to go. They looked utterly delighted.
Another curious form of cooperation one sees in New York is the unspoken ban on staring at celebrities. When you get into an elevator in an office building and find that you are riding with Paul McCartney—this happened to me—you are not supposed to look at him. You can peek for a second, but then you must avert your eyes. The idea is that Paul McCartney has to be given his space like anyone else. A limousine can bring him to the building he wants to go to, but it can't take him to the 12th floor. To get there, he has to ride in an elevator with the rest of us, and we shouldn't take advantage of that. This logic is self-flattering. It's nice to think that Paul McCartney needs us to do him a favor, and that we live in a city with so many famous people that we can afford to ignore them. But if vanity is involved, so is generosity. I remember, once, in the early '90s, standing in a crowded lobby at City Center Theater when Martin Scorsesy walked in. Everyone looked at him and then immediately looked down. There was a whole mob of people staring at their shoes. I was glad that we had been polite to him.
Of course, the rule with celebrities, which forbids involvement, is different from the other expressions of common cause, which dictate involvement. And since few of us are celebrities, the latter are far more numerous. As a result, New Yorkers, however kind and generous, may also come off as opinionated and intrusive. Living with them is a little like being a child again and having your mother with you all the time, helping you, correcting you, butting into your business. And that, I believe, is another reason why New Yorkers seem smarter. Your mother knew better, too, right?

1. In Seattle, a fifty-six-year old man died last Thursday after being refused a liver transplant because he had followed his doctor's recommendation to use marijuana to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C. From the Associated Press story:
His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class…
The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates.
At some, people who use “illicit substances”—including medical marijuana, even in the dozen states that allow it—are automatically rejected. At others, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months.
The cruelty and stupidity of this beggars belief. This patient did not need “drug treatment.” He was already undergoing drug treatment. Nor did he need to get “clean.” He was already clean. It’s the drug war that’s dirty. (H/t: John Leone.)
2. Until about a week ago, Marie Day Walsh was a hyper-respectable fifty-three-year-old housewife living in suburban comfort in Del Mar, California, near San Diego, with her husband of twenty-three years. They have two grown daughters and another still in high school. Then came a knock on the door. She was arrested and carted off to jail.
The back story: In 1975, when she was a nineteen-year-old hippie in Saginaw, Michigan, and her name was Susan LeFevre, she got arrested for peripheral involvement in a heroin deal. While awaiting trial, she took college courses. Hoping for mercy, she pleaded guilty. The judge, full of righteous wrath, sentenced her to ten to twenty years in prison. After a year or so, she walked away from a prison work site, escaping as she had offended: nonviolently. She had never been in trouble before and has never been in trouble since. Now she will probably be extradited to Michigan and imprisoned until she is in her sixties. Take a look at her and see if you think she is a menace to society - http://www.knbc.com/news/16082632/detail.html.
3. Two years ago, a large-scale study by Dr. Donald Tashkin, of U.C.L.A., a pulmonologist whose previous studies of marijuana had been used by drug-enforcement authorities to support their view that pot is dangerous, unexpectedly concluded that there is no connection between marijuana smoking and lung cancer, even among heavy pot smokers, which he defined as people who had smoked more than twenty-two thousand joints, i.e., a joint a day for sixty years. The study, which was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, further suggested that pot might actually have some preventive effect.
The story didn’t get a lot of publicity, though the Washington Post did run a story on page A3 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html?nav=hcmodule). It will not surprise you to learn that it has had no effect on the nation’s drug “policies.”
Dr. Tashkin reiterated his findings last month before an audience of doctors and nurses. According to Fred Gardner's detailed report (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html?nav=hcmodule),
Tashkin and his colleagues at U.C.L.A. conducted a major study in which they measured the lung function of various cohorts for eight years and found that tobacco-only smokers had an accelerated rate of decline, but marijuana smokers—even if they smoked tobacco as well—experienced the same rate of decline as non-smokers. “The more tobacco smoked, the greater the rate of decline,” said Tashkin. “In contrast, no matter how much marijuana was smoked, the rate of decline was similar to normal.” Tashkin concluded that his and other studies “do not support the concept that regular smoking of marijuana leads to COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease].”
On the other hand, imprisonment, disqualification for organ transplants, and the activities of the federal drug harassment industry remain hazardous to your health.