Questions of the Week

1. Should breathalyzers be made mandatory in cars?
Added by: kickass9

2. Which of the following pictures do you find more annoying: a picture of a young girl making a kissy face to the camera, or a boy taking a picture of himself in the mirror/usually with shirt off?
Added by: dots

3. Of the IMDB top 250's top 10, how many of the films have you seen?
Added by: wislakrakow1

4. If you're a vegetarian, is it rude to bring your own food to parties?
Added by: C.C.

5. Can a female be so attractive that it turns a homosexual male straight and a straight woman lesbian?
Added by: x-funeral

1. Which Nintendo Series' Antagonist Are You?
Added by: Tezmata

2. What Musical Instrument Are You?
Added by: T-Bone_Top

3. Would you survive the titanic?
Added by: aneres1

4. What Super Heroine Are You?
Added by: Maggzz

5. Are you a stalker?
Added by: patrizzle

Funniest Comments of the Week

From a Thread titled 'German Brothels Offering Unlimited Sex':
Courtbebe: Really? Flat-rate sex is an "outrageous violation of human dignity?" Normal prostitution is okay, but flat-rate prostitution violates a prostitutes dignity?
theBSR: I prefer the cheaper rate with roll-over minutes.
Abzurd: I like it when they charge by the second.
Pantala: You must get off real cheap.

In a Music forum thread titled "Does anyone listen to a korean band called big bang?" :
travbowman: I have a theory about them.
Abzurd: Isn't that band, like, very old?
travbowman: Some will say that they've been around for millions of years. Others argue that it's closer to a few thousand.
Abzurd: And several of their fans think that before them, music was just chaos.

In a News thread titled " AT&T reportedly block 4chan" :
chips2001: Shenanigans are still being called by Moot, main 4chan guy, as AT&T claim to have contacted him to discuss the matter and he denies this happened.
pinkconverse: Who gives a sh*t about moot?
Abzurd: the point.

In a thread about a gym shooting in Pennsylvania:
Abzurd: We had a guy in 89 who had women issues as well. He went into the engeneering pavillon of the University and killed 14 female students. This is giving me the same bad taste in my mouth.
Dacash: Are you a zombie?

From a Journal about visiting the gyno. :
menfearme15: Isn't there like a, home test one could take? I don't wanna go to the lady doctor, and have my stuff on display!!!
chips2001: Dude, just get your ladygarden checked out. It's not pleasant, but it's not horrific. Unless you have a periscope and a medical degree, you're sh*t out of luck on the home test front.
Journs.: They need to make a Ladygarden kit for home. Periscope, leafblower, tampons, pH tester, seeds, garden gnomes, douche.
chips2001: Industrial hedge trimmer?

Joke of the Week

Guys; want to find out whether your girlfriend or your dog loves you more than the other?

Lock both of them in the trunk of your car for an hour and see which one is happy to see you when you open it back up.

Member of the Week

The member of the week is cmychinchila. A member since March 2004, cmy recently finished in the top half in July in her first month playing YT trivia. congrats!

JoeInterview's Member Feature

This week's interview features glennh70. This interview was conducted by travbowman and Angi.

JoeInterview: First off, how did you find YT?

glennh70: I mostly used to go to a quiz website where they did trivia quizzes; there were two teams called Awesome minds and Notable zone and you automatically joined one depending on whether your username was A-M or N-Z.

It just seemed to vanish one day and I think the URL has since been replaced by something different so I just started searching for 'quizzes' and came here. Only I never seem to use quizzes!! I probably got stuck in a creatonism versus evolution type debate and kept coming back to see what people said.

JI: What would you say is the biggest reason you keep coming back for more?

GH70: hmm well questions I suppose. I was always interested in the evolution stuff and I'm not sure that I ever realised how many people disputed it all and took creationism quite seriously.

Also all the science threads and things about language variation although I was frustrated that asking how you say things in various countries was put on the 'retired list' on the old YT. and of course when you say something you have to come back every half hour to look for the answer- - it's like crack!

JI: Describe your profession to us.

GH70: my profession huh? That sounds posh. Well I am a PhD student now in the English department at Liverpool University and I look at strings of language in informal conversation. It's about where vocabulary and grammar meet and why people say one thing when they could have said another.

Within this area I look at Korean people speaking English as their second language cos i lived there for 8 years and got really interested in phrases the students used like 'I might marry next year' rather than 'I might get married'. More subtley I just found that my volunteers seem to use very prototypical nouns after the string 'have a' which might be influenced by education.

I also teach a few hours a week which is really interesting.

JI: Are there particular English phrases from other countries that still stump you when you encounter them?

GH70: I can't get over some North Americans who say 'it just about went in (like a goal or something)' when they mean it missed. 'Just about' in the UK is pretty much always 'successful' but by a narrow margin.

And in some Asian communities they would answer yes/no questions in an unusual way. If I say 'you're not married?' to an English speaker I would expect a single person to say 'no' but some Asian speakers would say 'yes'. That can be really hard to get used to.

US university stuff can be weird. I just about worked out Freshman, Sophomore etc but all that cum lauda stuff confuses me!

Textbooks don't always help either. I remember one book said that if you say 'l'll take an umbrella in case it rains'. The books said that in America that means 'I'll take an umbrella on the off chance' but in the UK it means ' i only take an umbrella when it rains' which is ridiculous (as far as I know).

JI: How did you and your wife meet?

GH70: we were in a bar in Daejon, Korea. There's a game called killer that you play on a pool table and everyone in the bar puts in a pound or a dollar or whatever and you have to sink a ball on every shot- - when you lose three lives you're out.

So all the pub were playing killer and my wife and I were doing well, top three I think and we ganged up on the other guy to get him out. She thought I was gay cos I had tight jeans and big earrings though!!

JI: What's the secret to making your relationship work across continents and cultures?

GH70: I suppose communication and understanding is a massive thing. There are so many little things we do or say all the time without realising how much information it carries and Koreans and Westerners often miss or confuse these signs and get upset or angry when they talk.

I saw one guy, for example, get really angry in a bar because he was drinking a lot and doing funny stuff; everyone liked him and a big group of us were getting along fine until an Irish friend called him 'crazy' almost as a compliment.

Now when you translate that into Korean it's more like a massive insult and they nearly had a fight without either one of them knowing what was causing the problem. It's stuff like that... when you realise that not many people really want to upset you for no reason and look into communication issues you can solve a lot and that certainly helps my wife and I get along well.

The food's great too, I had to sort of train myself to eat kimchee and sushi but now I can eat most stuff with my wife's family and they really like it compared to the stereotypical 'foreigner' who just spits everything out!

JI: What was the teenage version of GlennH like?

GH70: er hmm that was a long time ago. I always did well in school and was seen as a bit of a swot by many people I think but I played my hand well I think and got on well with all the right people. I liked school, all the social stuff just as much as the learning so I suppose I'm quite lucky.

I was a bit of an early entrepreneur too. A lot of people I meet remember me selling cakes in the playground. It was pretty good way to 7 quid a day when I was quite young! For a while when I was sixteen I was doing three jobs: a trainee dental technician, a pizza/kebab chef and washing taxis all weekend daytime. I got a car when I was 17 so that was great and gave me a lot of freedom and chances to annoy teachers when I took the last parking space.

Probably quite obvious that I wasn't using the Internet when I was a teenager ..

(we just got email addresses at university and barely knew what they were for) Considering that it was funny that a lot of our teachers would communicate with us through letters in our pigeon holes. I can't imagine that now that I think about how many emails I send for college. I always like to think that I would be a really cool Internet teenager and do all the right stuff without looking stupid but it must be a hard trick really to get the right 'Internet image'.

I also had a load of pets. I got in well with some of the tough kids by letting them see my rats!! And that's not any kind of weird code or anything.

JI: What's the best way to spend a weekend?

GH70: so many choices... ideally I would be near a tropical island and go scuba diving during the day and then have a few beers every night.

In more realistic terms I would like to go hiking in the mountains if I was in Korea - - now for England....I don't want to waste the whole weekend in a pub but it is very tempting. I wouldn't mind scuba diving in the UK if I had the right equipment but more down to earth I'd go to the zoo with my wife and a few friends.

Oh a wedding reception or something like that would be a great alternative to a normal night in a pub.

This is all assuming I'm not verging on a great linguistic breakthrough that weekend

JI: When at the pub, what's your drink of choice?

GH70: This interview is making me look very indecisive! until recently I just would have ordered a Carlsberg or a Carling black label (lager that is, not a million miles away from Bud if anyone doesn't know).

I've started testing out real ales a lot more these days so will often try a new ale or any guest ale that the pub has just started selling. Recently it's been one called Summer ale which is nice.

JI: What's the craziest thing you've done whilst drunk?

GH70: Probably going into the wrong room at university and falling asleep under some girl's bed. My arm fell out when she was getting into bed and she thought I was a dead body!!

The room was in the 'same position' as my room but in the wrong building. It looks like I just went in the wrong building and tried to go to bed on autodrive. Lucky the two guys that she called to pull me out were good friends who thought it was really funny.

JI: Whose sense of humour can get you to laugh every time you read/watch/hear it?

GH70: I was watching Ricky Gervais's 'Animals' the other day- - that's the guy from the Office doing stand up. I like quite a few British comedians oh and that American guy in Waterboy. That film cracks me up. The guys on QI make me laugh a lot too, not sure if anyone outside of the UK will know them.

JI: Who outside of family has had the biggest influence on you?

GH70: hmm Darwin springs to mind but really any great scholar or scientist such as Newton, Einstein, Chomsky, Halliday etc. My own PhD supervisor Michael Hoey is a great role model on a closer level and I often count David Attenborough as a role model.

Together they sort of form an ideal, hardworking vision that battle against all the odds to push our human knowledge to the next level.

I wonder how many of these guys the average YTer is familiar with? oh I should add Stephen Hawking too - - I saw him in real life once!

oh and all the great thinkers on YT are no small part. Together they kept me interested and gave me a lot of practise in developing arguments etc.

JI: Speaking of YT, who do you think challenges you the most in developing better arguments?

GH70: oh there have been too many over the years to name names- I'd hate to miss anyone out. Almost everyone as a collective plays a big role. If i say something unclearly or I show bias in something you get picked up by people who see the subject from a very different angle because of their age, culture, language background.

I've really learnt to watch what I write and try to cover all angles which is great for academic writing. I think even the Christians have tethered my atheism to a point; I can scarcely believe that so many people who I agree with on other points can really be so off the mark. Of course they are but it's good to stop and question yourself.

JI: At what point in life did you conclude that you were an atheist?

GH70: It seems funny now but I think I was around 5 or 6- - we studied the bible in school and I remember asking my mum and dad lots of questions about it and heaven and death and at the same time i was very interested in science and nature. It just didn't seem to add up; the former seemed like children's stories.

One of my first memories was asking to be excused from prayers and hymns in school like the children from other religions but my mum and dad kept asking me to give it all another chance!

I'm certainly not a strong atheist in the sense that I claim to know for a fact that there is no God; that seems stupid. I sort of see my self as a scientist trying to cling on to objective thinking faced with a hundred good arguments suggesting that Gods are man-made constructs and no particularly stromg arguments suggesting that Gods are real.

Sometimes I think about using the word 'agnostic' but ah it's as broad as it's long really. My dad suggested I don't use the word atheist because people might react badly but I've never experienced that.

JI: What's the story on the pic of you above?

GH70: That's a lambanana- - kind of an iconic symbol for Liverpool in case you're wondering.

JI: Any final words of wisdom to share with your fellow YTers?

GH70: Words of wisdom are always keep an open mind and be nice to the mods.

This week's article is titled '4 Wis. women accused in lovers' quadrangle plot', and the thread was posted by ShutterBug.

This week's link is titled 'More than 300 cool Google logos', and the link was posted by halzberry.

Best Avatar of the Week	Best Profile Design of the Week
pennywise	"Fire" by Crying_Shame

Featured Article of the Week

Speculative Fiction story
Excerpt: He entered in much the same way as he exited: ungracefully, and against his will. Dragged, kicking and thrashing and screaming, he was rigidly forced into the chair opposite me by the two door guards.

Written by Wubba D

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