На всех не угодишь

Шел по дороге старик и вел на поводу осла, на котором сидел мальчик. Люди, которые шли навстречу стали возмущаться:
- Посмотрите, мальчик едет верхом, а старенький дедушка идет пешком!
Поменялись местами мальчик и старик. Идут дальше по дороге.
- Посмотрите,безобразие, старик едет, а маленький мальчик идет пешком!
Сели старик и мальчик вдвоем на осла, едут дальше.
- Посмотрите, бедное животное, взгромоздились вдвоем на осла, как не стыдно!
Слезли старик и мальчик с осла, идут дальше пешком.
- Посмотрите, вот дураки, у них осел есть, а они идут пешком!
...

Russia's Vladimir Putin gets tiger cub for his birthday

MOSCOW - There's no doubt what Vladimir Putin's favourite birthday present is this year - a rare Ussuri tiger cub.

State television showed the Russian prime minister tenderly petting the two-month-old female cub on Friday at his residence outside Moscow. The cub, weighing only about 10 kilograms, was curled up in a wicker basket with a tiger-print cushion.

Putin said a good home will be found for the tiger, presumably in a zoo or wildlife preserve. He hasn't decided what to call her, but is leaning toward Mashenka or Milashka.

Putin refused to say who gave him the cub for his 56th birthday, which was Tuesday.

He called Russian journalists to his country home late Thursday without telling them why. Past midnight, after asking them "not to make noise, make a clatter or squeal," Putin ushered the curious journalists into the room where the tiger cub was waiting.

As president and now prime minister, Putin is known for his tough talk and macho image. But children and animals seem to bring out a softer side.

His dog, a Labrador Retriever named Koni, is often with him, even during meetings with world leaders. He told journalists that Koni has not yet met the tiger cub.

In August, Putin had occasion to pet a full-grown female Ussuri tiger after shooting her with a tranquilizer gun. He was visiting a wildlife preserve in Russia's Far East and shot the five-year-old tiger as part of a program to track the rare cats, also known as the Siberian, Amur or Manchurian tiger.

Once the tiger was asleep, Putin placed a collar with a GPS tracking system around her neck. Television footage showed him patting her cheek like a pet.

Fewer than 400 Ussuri tigers are believed to survive in the wild, most of them in Russia and some in China. They are the largest tiger species, weighing up to 270 kilograms.

Copyright © 2008 Canadian Press

VIRTUAL MIND

http://www.prikols.com.ru/virtualmind.shtml

Audi A4 Launch Event - Oct 8 (Vaughan)

Olympic Themed CP Spirit Train Coming to Canadian Cities

To get Canadians revved up for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games, Canadian Pacific has come up with the CP Spirit Train, which will roll into communities in Canada and spread Olympic spirit and excitement with musical performances, a Canadian Olympic Wall of Fame, the chance to meet Olympians and Paralympians, Aboriginal Celebrations and plenty of other activities. Admission is free for everyone. You can head to cpspirittrain.com for specific event details and locations. Meanwhile, here are the stops the Spirit Train will be making across Canada:

• Saskatoon - October 2
• Winnipeg - October 4
• Thunder Bay - October 8
• Sudbury - October 11
• Mississauga - October 13
• Smiths Falls - Octover 16
• Montreal - October 18

http://cpspirittrain.com/

Девочка с персиками

The instant mood-boost

Can exercise really boost your mood? Vanquish your stress? Improve your sleep? Make your brain bigger? We asked Brian Christie, a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria, to break down the science behind why exercise is good for our mental health.

Exercise makes us happy

Serotonin is a chemical in our brains that regulates our mood, appetite and libido, makes us less sensitive to pain and regulates our sleep cycles. When we exercise, our brains use serotonin more efficiently, which boosts our mood and alleviates depression. We sleep better, have more energy and generally feel happier. Another neurotransmitter that’s activated by exercise is acetycholine, a chemical that’s robbed from the brain by Alzheimer’s disease, which is one reason why exercising regularly may delay the onset of that disease.
Rigorous exercise, the kind that gets your heart rate up, floods the brain with endorphins, the “feel-good” chemical. Walking isn’t enough to activate this hormone, but running is, which is where the term “runner’s high” comes from. (Alternating between jogging and walking can help you ease into running.)

Exercise lowers our stress levels

This may seem like a contradiction, but when we first start exercising, our brains experience a rush of stress hormones, called glucocorticoids. So why is that good for our stress levels? Because, in the long run, exercise trains our brains to better deal with stress. In studies, animals who exercise are less anxious in stressful situations, are more likely to find a solution to a problem, such as a maze, and are less likely to lose track of the goal.

Exercise makes us smarter

Walking three hours a week for only three months makes so many new neurons that you can measure the difference in brain size. That’s because exercise increases our levels of neurotrophins, chemicals that promote the creation of new brain cells. Exercising regularly also enhances our memory and ability to learn new tasks, whereas stress impairs neurogenesis and can impede your ability to learn. Anyone that has been through a divorce or lost a loved one can tell you how hard it is to remember or learn new things during a stressful period. It’s believed that a combination of reduced neurogenesis, cell loss and changes in remaining cells can disrupt the thought processes. Of course, this takes time to happen, so usually it’s only prolonged stress that has major effects on the brain. Luckily, regular exercise can combat these negative effects, boost your brain power and make you feel happier to boot.

Televisualist: Chuck, Plow, And Mosque's Back Now

Monday

Chuck returns, with a storyline wherein Chuck's career as a secret agent ends and he is free to go back to his normal life as a megastore retail clerk. (PSSST GUYS I BET BEFORE THE EPISODE ENDS HE RESUMES HIS CAREER AS A SECRET AGENT! SPOILERZ!) Televisualist is glad to see Chuck return, though, since Adam Baldwin is funny and deserves a regular paycheque, and the show is light, simple fun. (City, 8 p.m.)

Monday night's theme looks to be "return of the awesome shows," since alongside Chuck we also get Life, the fantastic crime drama with Damian Lewis in it, which is like a weird transcendental crime version of House, except that Damian Lewis' fake American accent is a lot better than Hugh Laurie's fake American accent. In all seriousness, though, the first mini-season of Life was damn good television and well worth tracking down if you like good cop shows. (Global, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

"Canada Votes: Extreme Debate." This is not the actual for-real debate, but a ninety-minute thing Newsworld is airing, wherein the political leaders of our fair country will try to convince undecided Canadians to vote for them. Televisualist wishes to announce we are unreasonably proud of not having made a joke about Mountain Dew. (7:30 p.m., repeats at 10)

CFMT airs one of the greatest of all King of the Hill episodes tonight, namely the one where Peggy gets tricked into producing "smoosh" videos for an erotic foot fetish site. Other cartoon shows like Family Guy or South Park might have gone all out with it, but King of the Hill's relatively restrained sense of humour makes the story seem believable, and you really root for Hank to kick the guy's ass. (10:30 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: "Mr. Plow." Enough said. "COME BACK, DIAPER!" (Comedy Network, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

If you speak French, or have a French friend who can translate for you, or maybe you do not speak French, but are sexually aroused when people speak French... look, it's a perfectly normal thing, you don't have to be ashamed of it. Nobody is going to point and laugh at you. We promise. Televisualist knows a girl who can only achieve orgasm when she listens to people speaking German, and she's perfectly nice if you don't mind having Das Boot on in the background every time you want to get busy. Sorry, where were we? Right, French. So the French language debate for the federal election is tonight! Granted, we're not sure who would get aroused listening to Jack Layton speaking French. Well, other than Olivia Chow, anyway. (CBC Newsworld, 8 p.m.)

Little Mosque on the Prairie returns, something that we genuinely appreciate, seeing as how it got genuinely funny over the second season and now stands as the spiritual successor, more or less, to Corner Gas. Rayyan and Amaar's romantic subplot got pushed forward a bit (thanks to a comic subplot involving an arranged marriage), and the episode about the world's first Islamic curling team was goddamned hilarious. We remain hopeful that season three will continue to be funny, in its low-key, occasionally too-polite way. (CBC, 8 p.m.)

Lipstick Jungle returns. We are not sure why exactly it is doing this. (NBC, 10 p.m.)

Thursday

It is debate night! The most powerful politicians in the country (and Elizabeth May) debate the issues! It is your duty as a citizen to watch this! (Canadian networks, 9 p.m.)

Of course, you're not actually going to watch it, because as luck would have it, the Americans have scheduled their vice-presidential debate for tonight as well, at the very same time even, and come on: we all want to see if Sarah Palin accidentally sets her podium on fire. (American networks, 9 p.m.)

Alternately, you could ignore politics altogether and watch a very special episode of Hole In The Wall, where a team of contestants from Flavor of Love compete against a team of contestants from Rock of Love. Again: girls who wanted to have sex with Flava Flav will compete against the girls who wanted to fuck the guy from Poison by playing retarded human Tetris. Why, yes, this is the worst thing television has ever done. Why do you ask? (A-Channel, 8 p.m.)

Friday

The Ex List debuts. This is a "high concept" show, wherein the concept that is high is thus: a woman finds out from a psychic that if she doesn't marry her destined-to-be husband within the year, she will be single forever. Also, the person she is destined to be with is one of her exes! So she must go back through all the guys she has dated, and... did anybody think to themselves, while they were coming up with this show, "How do we make the story last beyond a single season?" (Global, 9 p.m.)

Sanctuary, a sci-horror show about monster hunters, debuts with a two-hour pilot. A friend of mine recently commented, quite astutely, that Lost changed everything because now audiences expect a television show to know exactly where their show is going right from the pilot, and that in turn audiences are now much less willing to forgive a show that stumbles a bit out of the gate. This bodes poorly for Sanctuary's odds, because there's obviously a lot of there there in this show, but the pilot is, charitably speaking, a bit awkward. But it doesn't suck, and Christopher Heyerdahl is really quite good as the mysterious villain person. So maybe sci-fi fans will give it a chance. Crazier things have happened. I mean, people thought Bionic Woman was good. (TMN, 9 p.m.)