DATING: The process of spending enormous amounts of money, time, and energy to get better acquainted with a person whom you don’t especially like in the present and will learn to like a lot less in the future.

EASY: A term used to describe a woman who has the morals of a man.

EYE CONTACT: A method utilized by a single woman to communicate to a man that she is interested in him. Despite being advised to do so, many women have difficulty looking a man directly in the eyes, not necessarily due to the shyness, but usually due to the fact that a woman’s eyes are not located in her chest.

FRIEND: A member of the opposite sex in your acquaintance who has some flaw which makes sleeping with him/her totally unappealing.

INDIFFERENCE: A woman’s feeling towards a man, which is interpreted by the man as “playing hard to get.”

IRRITATING HABIT: What the endearing little qualities that initially attract two people to each other turn into after a few months together.

NYMPHOMANIAC: A man’s term for a woman who wants to do it more often than he does.

SOBER: A condition in which it is almost impossible to fall in love.

ATTRACTION: The act of associating horniness with a particular person.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: What occurs when two extremely horny, but not entirely choosy people meet.

LAW OF RELATIVITY: How attractive a given person appears to be is directly proportionate to how unattractive your date is.

In the eye of a hurricane, you learn things other than of a scientific nature. You feel the puniness of man and his works. If a true definition of humility is ever written, it might well be written in the eye of a hurricane”- Edwad Murrow

Hurrican Ivan continues to ravage the gulf coast states with might and ferocity that has never been seen in several decades.

The geography of the Earth plays such an important role on the economic, and therefore political standing of cities and sometimes even of nations. Countries in Western Europe never had to endure earthquakes, hurricanes, erupting volcanoes, and tidal waves, enabling them to live their lives uninterrupted.

In contrast, countries like the Philippines, Cuba, Japan, etc, have to accept natural calamities as a fact of life, and have to take losses in life and resources on a regular basis.

Coming home from a particularly long day at work, I was elated to receive a correspondence from Birkbeck, University of London containing the following message:

Dear Student, Due to an inputting error the Notification of Result you previously received for Course Code: FFMN008P - Management in Practice/The Capable Manager is incorrect. Please find enclosed an amended Notification of Result.

The confusion has been caused by human error and has now been amended on our database. The enclosed notification is your final grade for this course and any previous information should be discarded.

My previous marking was amended up by 15 pts—a significant increase indeed!

At times of melancholy, we sometimes see (or hear) the things around us a different way. Last Tuesday, I had that experience while listening to the ‘The Earth’ from the The Gladiator soundtrack. I swear I have previously listened to it a thousand times but something in that cold breezy morning evoked an unusual feeling of grief and despair in me. This is the not same kind of emotion you feel when you lose a pet cat, or even a bike for that matter . It is something more intense, more overpowering.

Anyway, for three days now, I have sort of made it my early morning ritual to play on 5 tracks from Hans Zimmer’s superb masterpiece. Certainly beats yoga by a mile.

—
As an aside, I must mention that Hans Zimmer also wrote very powerful musical scores for the following films, among others:

• The Lion King
• Pearl Harbor
• The Last Samurai
• The Thin Red Line
• Black Hawk Down
• Pirates of the Carribean
• and the list goes on and on…

My bike got nicked–AGAIN!

Just a couple of years ago in Frankfurt, some daring thief cut the chains off my bike in my office’s garage. That thief must have followed me here in London because I lost my bike again in the basement of my office.

Now, should I buy another bike and risk being thrice unlucky?

As I watch the late evening news on BBC detailing the gruesome end to the school siege in Belsan, I can’t help feel mortified that those ‘bandits’ have the stomach to use children, and hundreds at that, as pawns for their deadly struggle.

I have a very Machiavellian attitude towards life but nothing in my sytem can possibly justify their actions, no matter what their cause is, or no matter what losses they have endured in the past.

The parents of those children who were not fortunate enough to live through the incident must feel terribly devastated. Once Belsan resident who lost a 7 year old child summed it up best when he said “It is not right for a parent like me to have to bury my child. As a parent, I should die first”.

On the greater scheme of things, we should instrospectively ask how to prevent such things from happening again. While I believe that a certain amount of chaos and disorder is necessary to create a system of balance, it would not be right to have to see a similar incident unfold again in say, a years time.

I got a call this morning from the Scotland Yard. Actually, its the second call I got from them in 3 months. This is in connection with the fatal stabbing of an American artist named Margaret Muller one Monday morning in February 2003.

The gruesome murder happened a stones throw away from where I used to live in Bow. Apparently, it happened just as I was about to go to work. Probably because I was in a hurry to get the office for our regular start-of-week meeting, I was not as observant as I normally would have been, and I do not recall seeing or hearing anything that would’ve indicated a crime was being committed.

Anyway, its been more than 18 months now, and I like to give credit to the Metropolitan Police for their unrelenting work on this investigation. That their still on the case following up on even the smallest leads just makes you (a little bit) safer.

For more information on this murder, click here .

If you think you know anything about this incident, please inform the Metropolitan Police to nail the sicko that did this dastardly crime.