Hello Kitty, kiss your 4$$ Goodbye

I hope that removing the image I linked from here to this post of mine, traffic on this website will not be driven any longer by people looking for the pretty jap-cat... Let's see if it works...

I am a genius.

This morning, I open facebook instead of starting to work straight away. Bad guy...
I notice that a friend, who seems to have the typical feminine passion for tests, has just taken the IQ tests. I've always been skeptic about the definition of Intelligence tested by such tests, yet after lunch I have not much to do, and I start it. I see that it only gives you 15 minutes. Panic. but the questions are mostly boring math in textual form, so start picking them randomly... Out of four answers I will at least answer 25% of them correctly, no? So,l if they're difficult (and should be if they want to test your intelligence), you stand a good chance of getting a decent score anyway... I only stop (ten seconds each) to answer the one with pictures, unless they're too complicated... otherwise, random for those too...

Hit the submit button that there's still 9 minutes plus left. The machine asks me if i want to share the results with my facebook friends. Uhm, I don't think i want to share a 78 with anyone... so no, thank you. Skip it.

Here's the result: 119!!! Definitely above the average!!!

Now, either I really am a genius, or I have a big reserve of good luck (stored in my fat abdomen), or may be the results are not really objective. I start thinking that being facebook populated by americans, they would never return a number lower than 100 for fear of being sued by all the lawyers or lawyer-capable rich dumbasses who may get it. me included. Well, no, i would not sue them. I am not going to waste my hard earned cash this way...

Anyway, it was fun... Albeit quite silly.

When will we come to a decent definition of 'intelligence'? Such as "the ability of a men to whoosh a girl into her bed by the use of any possible mean, either verbal, vocal or corporeal".

Italians are quite honest, after all

The Economist publishes a summary graph detailing how often european people use undeclared labour to purchase goods or services.
Quite surprisingly, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden come to the first places... Rather than, say, Italy. Is iot that we really buy less 'grey' goods and services? Or just that Italian don't even perceive buying sunglasses from the senegalese street-kiosk and paying the car's mechanic cash without fiscal receipt as 'the same kind of thing'? Me thinks the second one is more correct...

Finally, house prices start to fall...

The bane of every young couple, their ability to buy a house to live in without wasting money on the monthly rent, has been getting worse and worse for the past years everywhere in Europe. Luckily, things are starting to change, with a contraction of prices close to 2% in most European states. If it continues that way, may be in a couple of years' time I'll start considering buying one - by that time hopefully we (marie and me)should be more financially stable and able to take advantage of an eventual free fall of prices.

Dog eats mobile phone

It happened to a friend of mine.

I am so tempted to give her a ring or two... :-)

Evolution

Here is my new Xmas present:


Evolution, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu (Auteur), Patrick Gries (Auteur), Jean-Pierre Gasc (Préface). I was in a library in Liege and saw it cover, a snake skeleton, and had a look inside. It contains a huge amount of beautiful photos of different vertebrates skeletons, shot in black and white against a dark background. Just wonderful. It's 50EUR, but what the hell...