The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.

They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.

Via The Dominion Post

I accidentally spilled a glass of Tuscan Whole Milk down the front of this shirt, and my soul was torn from my body and thrown into heaven by a jealous God.

Amazon Customer Reviews for Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

Sales of this shirt have increased by 2300% since internet humorists began competing for who could write the funniest review.  The Tuscan Whole Milk link is pretty boss, too.

I wish this crazy hooker had been a better fighter.  ShamWow guy deserves a good ass kicking.

Also — Is that what $1000 gets you on the hooker scene?  I’m pretty unfamiliar with it but it seems like if you’re dropping $1000 (and does ShamWow Guy really need to pay for sex??) you should get something first class.

pictures via The Smoking Gun and TMZ

Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun. [...]

Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.

Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.

“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”

Oversaving, A Burden of our Time (in the New York Times)

I agreed wholeheartedly with his analysis and found myself nodding to his refusal to participate in a corrupt system.  I’m a concert goer — I’m a ticket purchaser –  I have an expectation that the process be “fair” because of a personal desire to a) sit hella close and b) not pay very much for the tickets.  Why do I have this expectation?  Michael Arrington does a brilliant job explaining the and disspelling this myth that ticketing should be “fair.”

Ticket brokers are really just market makers. They risk capital, hold inventory, and place bets that they’ll be able to make a living on the spread.

Pricing tickets is very, very hard. Demand for an event peaks just before it occurs, then falls to zero as it begins, like food that has gone bad. Changes in the economy have a dramatic impact on ticket prices, too. A good ticket broker is thinking about the quality of the event, the date of the event, the venue, the seat locations and the state of the local economy when pricing tickets. And if they do it wrong, they eat their inventory and take a loss.

Most ticket brokers don’t make much money, particularly when you factor in that they’re putting their own capital at risk. A few, those that have good instincts and the right connections, do very well.

But it’s important to know that everyone is in on the game. Players and coaches who go to the Super Bowl sell their tickets to brokers. Venues sell some of (or all of) their best seats to popular events to brokers. The artists do the same. Everyone along the supply chain gets their cut. Usually in cash, which isn’t claimed as income.

The only people taking any risk are the brokers, who put their money on the line. And when an event turns sour, they take the hit.

Full Article on TechCrunch

Yes, it’s true – Japan’s new Ambassadors of Cute are mainly here to raise Japans profile and combat the threat of China.

These 3 ladies represent an effort to get the world to notice and love Japanese culture. By embracing Kawaii, or cute culture, we then will help Japan gain power in a world which is being increasingly dominated by their neighbors, China.

Shizuka Fujioka dresses as a schoolgirl, Misako Aoki, a Victorian doll in voluminous frilly skirts and Yu Kimura is a singer dressed in a polka dot shirt with a bunny print, offset by bouffant back-combed hair. Her look has made her “a fashion leader in Tokyo teens’ favorite haunt, Harajuku.”

Read the Article at YesButNoButYes and then Kill Yourself.  (Via KFB)

“We are facing an unprecedented economic crisis. The ruling parties should make their utmost efforts to help (the nation) ride out this difficulty,” Aso told top officials from his ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, the New Komeito Party.

Aso’s order for the new stimulus package cheered investors, boosting the benchmark Nikkei 225 index by 371.03 points, or 5.2 percent, to close at 7,569.28.

It comes a day after the government said Japan’s economy shrank at a 12.1 percent annual rate in the October-December quarter, slightly better than the initial estimate of a 12.7 percent contraction, but still its sharpest contraction in 35 years.

AP Article on Japan Working on $900+ Billion Stiumulus Package

Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming.

Continue Reading at the New York Times.

PS: I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FORMAT THIS BETTER.

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control. Can we deny that the infusion of 700 billion dollars into our banks is a magical act designed to make our banks rain credit again? Has it worked yet? Are we discarding our belief in banks and credit as a result? Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices. [...]

In much of the world, magic is not just about miracle and mystery, it is also about questions and answers, means and ends, suffering and healing. It is not just about “what’s up.” It is about “how to.” And magical practice is primarily about the management of risk and uncertainty.

Even anthropologists, experts in the language of ritual, have lost the forest for the trees. Ritual is not primarily about sticks and stones, about making the fields yield grain and women yield children, about making boys and girls into men and women, and about assuring that troubled elders became contented ancestors. It is not just about boundaries and margins, the cycle of the seasons and the passage of human beings through the stages of life. It is about these moments and rhythms, indeed, but it is mostly about risk management. Magic is humanity’s oldest tool for managing the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. We have reduced magic to ritual and ritual to etiquette, to a set of mechanical procedures for lubricating the traffic of social life. Nothing could be a sillier view of magic, which is not about the big things that govern human life. Magic is the set of techniques that human beings have assembled to manage those risks which appear in the zone where the big things meet the little things, and when that meeting goes wrong.

Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.

Image: Uri Geller.