Rhapsody 2010

Finally.
A *proper* gig. All Metal. After ages! Or, what seems like ages, really!
The Calcutta Medical College organized a competition for the Underground Metal bands of the city. In the last 3 months or so, there were scattered gigs most of which we failed, because, well, let's face it they weren't worth much.
This one as an end to *that* phase, hopefully. The ambience was good(dark dark audi, the crowd was, well, near-good(coz there *were* some poser 'Metalheads' attending) and the music was good. Word has it that the 'new' bands have *some* potential to speak of... and we wanted to check them out. :P
There were around 20 bands in all, and Evil Conscience was declared winner. I mean, like duh. Look who plays guitar. *MY* boyfriend. :prances around proudly:
On a less retarded note, though, it was *really* good to see them play after quite some time. I missed their last performance and was mightily pissed coz of the absurd time fuckup thingummy at Someplace Else, The Park.
After the guys were done playing, I grabbed my guy's sleeve and kissed him right in front of the entire auditorium. Make that *packed* auditorium. And went out immediately to grab a bite. That was my way of congratulating him without taking up too much of his post-playing time, coz I was sure there'd be more of his fans/friends/admirers waiting to speak to him. What he told me afterwards made me roll around laughing for some time. Apparently, two of our previously mentioned 'poser metalheads' confronted him a while later and asked him if he gave guitar lessons. When he'd said he did, they actually asked him who the 'random' girl who'd kissed him right after he'd appeared in the auditorium(after having played) was, and why she'd kissed him, and what it was all about, and they were 'forced' to ask him all of this crap because hey! they were 'curious'.
:D What would *you* have said if you were in Pritam's place?

He told them I was his girlfriend. But that isn't the point. The point is all of this made me think. Is the guitar really seen as a 'random-girl'-attracting device and no more? Firstly, in a crowded auditorium, there were around a hundred guys and just about 10 girls. That's the guy:girl in the Calcutta Metal scene ratio. Approximately.
And, secondly,
THIS. heh.

Soy Is The Devil, And Not In A Fun Way

The mythology of the Devil is actually pretty fascinating.  I'm not going to spend an hour recounting the entire etymology of the word Satan, the historical concept of the Devil, or pantheistic demonology, though I assure you, that shit is tremendously interesting.  Once you've followed every link you can from that one, you'll have a clear understanding of what the Devil represents- pure evil.  Across every Mediterranean-based religion since ancient Egypt, however, there's existed a malevolent energy or god with which people then and now have concerned themselves.  Innumerable methods have been articulated for ridding themselves of this evil, ranging from exorcisms to jihad to a hell of a lot of prayer.  I'm not advocating any of that, and I'm informing you about a much greater evil than the entity who is conventionally referred to as the Devil- I'm referring to soy.  Would an exorcism help?  Likely not, but there are some executives at Ralston-Purina and DuPont who could do with some stabbing.

The devil in a fun way.

For those of you who are unaware, there's currently a massive push to get soy into the diets of Americans, allegedly due to the magical health-improving effects of the soybean.  Apparently positing that the American diet is bereft of soy, and that the Chinese and Japanese can fly, live to 200 years of age, and never get cancer due to their constant inhalation of so, various special interest groups have funded studies alleging this bean's magical properties.  This is, of course, utter horseshit.

1. Americans eat far more soy, per capita, than any other people on Earth.  In 2005, Americans ate 25,261,750 tons of soy.  That breaks down to 0.0852255847 tons of soy a year (25,261,750/296,410,404), or 170 lbs a year.  The Chinese, by comparison, ate only (50957450 / 1315844000) 0.0387260572 tons per person, or 77 lbs.  This is fucking retarded.(Swivel for the soy, and Wikipedia for the population)
2. According to health activist and occasional kook Joseph Mercola, soy may increase the risk of breast cancer in women, brain damage in both men and women, and abnormalities in infants, contribute to thyroid disorders (especially in women), promote kidney stones, weaken the immune system, and cause severe, potentially fatal food allergies. (Mercola)
3. Soy contains isoflavones, plant hormones that have been shown to have an estrogenic effect on the body (it mimics the actions of estrogen, which reduces test levels and inhibit muscular hypertrophy. (Nutrient Timing, 128)
4. Biological changes in the function of sex glands, central nervous system, and thyroid are attributable to soy isoflavones.  Soy also contains phytic acid, an anti-nutrient that blocks the uptake of calcium, zinc, and magnesium.  Low zinc throws copper levels out of balance, and high levels of copper can depress thyroid function. (Crazy Makers, 81-82)
5. Many beans contain toxic compounds designed to dissuade animals from eating them, and soybeans are no different.  Raw soybeans contain antienzymes, hemagglutinin, phytates and goitrogens, which will have varying effects on people based on the biological individuality, but are toxic nonetheless.  (Neanderthin, 56)

I realize that at this point, half of you are scoffing at these claims, having eaten soy your entire lives, and immense amounts of it.  Before you get too haughty, consider this- Americans are fatter, less libidinous, weaker, and more pathetic than ever, and we're eating unprecedented amounts of soy.

Why are we eating so much soy?  Because agribusiness is filled with evil assholes who hate you, and they line the pockets of politicians who also hate you and are looking for ways to make you more dependent on them, so that the politicians will do what they'd do on their own a little more quickly.  According to Joseph Mercola, soy began in the US as a product that in 1913 was listed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an industrial product, rather than a food.  (Mercola)  Although the soybean was introduced in the US a couple centuries prior to that, it didn't really carry much weight until is was picked up by none other than Henry Ford as a super-bean he primarily used to make plastics and textiles- Ford bragged that two bushels of soybeans went into each car he sold, and even wore a suit made of faux silk (made of soy) on a daily basis. This fiber never really caught on, having been beaten by DuPont's nylon, but illustrates the fact that soy was initially considered to be primarily for industrial use.  Ford's experimentation with soy milk eventually led to Ralston-Purina's widespread use of soy in animal feed, due in large part to the fact that soy is incredibly cheap to farm and process.  

18 year old, hot as fuck Swedish chicks could kick most American males' asses.

As the years passed, and soy made its slow transition into the American diet, that industry received a welcome boost from the findings of the Club of Rome, a global think tank who focusses on political issues, and wishes "to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public."(Wikipedia)  The Club produced their seminal work in 1972, called the Limits to Growth, which was essentially a dire prediction that the Earth's industrialized societies would collapse under their own weight and the combined scarcity of petroleum and food.  This book was an outgrowth of the Malthusian catastrophe theory of Thomas Malthus, which "was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production," and it led to a variety of well-received and well-regarded works of Malthusian dystopic fiction.  The two best-known works in this genre are The Wanting Seed, by Anthony Burgess, and Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, both of which depict a future Earth plagued by overpopulation.  Both books are fucking awesome, by the way, if you like dystopic fiction, and Harrison's book was made into the epic Soylent Green.  From works like these, people picked up the notion that meat would eventually be impossible to come by or unbelievably expensive (see just about any science fiction novel written in the last 30 years for evidence of this) and nearly all of which prophesied that soy would be the meat of the future.

In I Come In Peace, Dolph protects us from a likely soy-loving evil alien.

This momentum made it easy for companies like Ralston-Purina and DuPont to ramp up their soy production, and start fleecing the fuck out of our politicians.  The politicians, greedy, soulless sacks of shit that they are, eventually changed the protein rating systems to make soy look good, which afforded those companies the opportunity to make ridiculous claims about the bioavailability of soy.  (Body Opus, 76)  Lobbyists are the reason there are so many different rating systems for protein- not scientists.  To wit, there are the following rating systems for protein:


Biological value (BV)
Net protein Utilization (NPU)
Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER)
Nitrogen Balance (NB)
Protein digestibility (PD)
Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS)

Just within BV, you can get two different rankings for protein, one of which places soy at the same level as whey for bioavailability, and another that ranks it at about 3/4 of whey.  PDCAAS is the newest, and thus ranks soy on par with egg, whey, and casein, while NPU, one of the oldest, ranks whey at 92 and soy at 61.  Suspicious?  I sure as fuck am.

Up next- Will soy make men's cocks fall off and have them grow tits, and will it make women even womenier?  Studies have shown that it might...

Another pic of the above chick- Sarah Bäckman, Swedish National armwrestling champ, and painfully, ridiculously hot chick who would rip your arm off and beat you to death with it, given a reason to do so.

Sources:
Joseph Mercola.  http://mercola.com/2004/jan/21/soy.htm
Ivy, John.  Nutrient Timing
Simontacchi, Carol.  The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Hurting our Children.
Audette, Ray.  Neanderthin.
Duchaine, Dan.  Body Opus.

Enough Already- Sex and Baddassery Are Definitively Interwined, Part 2.

Never before have I been so pleased at my ability to sow the seeds of discord as i have been with this series of blogs.  Frankly, I thought that everyone could agree that we should all fuck more and masturbate more, since getting off is pretty much the best fucking thing to happen in the history of forever.

Apparently, I was wrong.  Some of you, it appears, find that it saps you of your will to live, or something, which is as hilarious as it is sad.  Still others are deeply convinced by a study done in China that cumming more than once every seven days is less than optimal.  That's understandable, I suppose, because recent studies have shown that 9/10 of the people on Earth suck really fucking hard, and 19/20 of the people on the planet suck anywhere between a lot and really fucking hard.(Study I just made up)

First, a logical argument for constant sexual stimulation.  It's been definitively proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that libido is heavily dependent on testosterone in both men and women.  For both, supplemental testosterone is positively indicated to treat hypoactive sexual desire, which would indicate that more testosterone creates more sex drive.  For evidence of this, you merely need to google it- I'm not going to post citations to the dozens and dozens of studies that corroborate my statement.  Should you feel the need to do so, feel free- I assure you that this is for all intents and purposes an incontrovertible fact.  Given that this is a fact, it would stand to reason that engaging in sexual activity would not negatively affect your sex drive, as to do so would defeat the purpose of the rise in testosterone in the first place.  Additionally, it would defy the biological imperative towards procreation, and diminish one's interest in sexual activity, which would indicate that one's genetic material would not get passed on to subsequent generations.  Thus, the idea that fucking or jerking off would lower test levels is fucking absurd.

Casting logic aside, as so many people appear to do when it comes to sex, let's continue to look at the science.  First, a recent study has shown that optimal sexual performance requires hormonal changes that are best developed through regular sexual activity.

"Our results showed that a 9-day training period was not sufficient for some male rats to acquire a good level of sexual performance. While 42.5% of the rats displayed excellent sexual performance during the training sessions, 17.5% showed adequate performance, 7.5% had low sexual activity, and 32.5% of the rats did not display any sexual behaviors whatsoever. Additionally, after 4 days of training, rats with excellent/adequate performance showed a significant decrease in ejaculation latency relative to the first day of training. The rats with low or no sexual activity had lower progesterone levels relative to those displaying the highest sexual performance after 9 days of training. Testosterone, in turn, was also significantly reduced in animals with low/no sexual performance compared with excellent/adequate rats."(Tufik, et al.)

This means that fucking/jerking off a great deal will reduce your downtime, make you a better lay, and will raise your testosterone levels.  Given that it's my supposition (backed by science) that sexual activity raises testosterone levels, this is fairly compelling- not only does it raise your test levels, but it provides you with the necessary biological response to get you laid more, rather than less (as the obliquely cited Chinese study above would assert).

Built for sex.

As an aside- practice makes fucking perfect with sex.  There are entire books devoted to helping you train to be a better lay (like Built for Sex and Nate Green's book), and everyone from urologists to sex therapists recommend that masturbation is the perfect way to prime the pump for people with low libidos.  Additionally, for those of you who might be a little quick on the draw, there's some evidence that compulsive levels of masturbatory activity will increase your staying power and your turnaround time. That's just a little icing on the cake for you.  If knights in the Middle Ages would practice fucking goose down with 30 lbs of weights attached to their hips so they could fuck without removing their armor, you people can spend a few hours a week jerking it like you mean it so you're not firing the second you get out of the gate when some broad finally gets naked for you.

Ready to fuck his way through his codpiece, if need be.

For those ladies out there, personal experience and some studies I failed to cite gave compelling evidence that masturbation is pretty much essential for your sex drives and markedly increase your chances of cumming during sex (although overuse of pocket rockets seem to desensitize the clit like no other, so take it easy with those things).  As I cited in the last blog, orgasms raise female test levels as well, and will thus make you stronger, leaner, and generally more awesome in just about every way, so start giving it up (at least to yourselves, if not to anyone else).

Next, there's no evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that orgasms from sex or onanism in any way have a negative physical effect on athletic performance, and there is some evidence showing that sex within 24 hours of competition actually improves it.  (BFS 205, and Discovery News)  There's anecdotal evidence, however, that the psychological affect of sex can have an either positive or negative effect on athletic performance, but it's unknown whether this is due to some particular psychological makeup, or if it's simply a placebo effect.  I'm inclined toward the latter, due to the fact that many people appear to convince themselves that certain activities or supplements will result in a given effect and create the perception of the effect simply by willing it to be so.  If your body can reduce your perception of pain due to the expectation of a reduction in pain (Mind Matters), then it would stand to reason that you could either suck or kick ass in athletics from the placebo effect as well.

Finally, and in direct relation to the title of this blog- there's direct evidence that badassery and a prolific sex life are intertwined.  One really needs to look no further than Genghis Khan, who was both the penultimate badass and the most impressive sexual athlete of all time.  There's really no evidence of a dedicated masturbatory schedule for Genghis, but this is likely due to the fact that he was far too busy fucking and killing to have a spare moment for masturbation- .5% of the people in the world trace their lineage to Genghis (34,336,748.6 people on Earth can honestly call him their super-great-grandpa) and the Mongols are credited with the deaths of 40 million people.  Additionally, he was credited with having "great physical strength", so any idea that he was weakened by sex can be discarded.

Right up there with Genghis was Rasputin, proud owner of a cervix-destroying 13" Godzilla cock, the ability to control the weather, massive physical strength, and the only libido on Earth that could match Genghis's.  He fucked every broad on whom he laid eyes, including the Empress of Russia, and survived be poisoned, shot multiple times, stabbed, and strangled, only to die of drowning after he was tossed into a river.

He might seem like a douche, but this "bad boy" gets more ass than a toilet seat at NASCAR... and he fucks Keira Knightley.

At this point, it should come as no shock to you that bad boys (who demonstrably possess more testosterone than "nice guys") get far more ass than "nice guys".(Nice Guys)  I would attribute this to a variety of factors, but they all boil down to testosterone in the end- guys with more test have more masculine facial features, better bodies, harder and bigger cocks, and smell better (due to their heightened immune system), all of which increase their attractiveness to women. (I have no specific citation here, but check out the Anatomy of Love, the Anatomy of Sex, and sundry Discovery Channel and TLC programs on this)

The Jewish god killed Onan because he refused to knock up his brother's wife, not because he jacked it or blew his loads on her back.

If you're unconvinced, at this point, that extraordinarily frequent orgasms are hormonally essential and indispensable for your overall health, you're either dyslexic or a fundamentalist Christian.  In the first case, seek medical attention, and in the latter case, you need to reread the Bible and investigate the definitions of words like "adultery" in the historical sense.  You'll be pleasantly surprised at what you find.  For the rest of you- get off as much as you can, and not only will you be some ridiculously happy motherfuckers, but you'll see positive changes in body recomposition, overall wellness, and athletic performance.

Let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

Sources:
Alvarenga TA, Andersen ML, and Tufik S. Influence of progesterone on sexual performance in male rats. J Sex Med 2010;7:2435–2444.

Grayson, A.  Why Nice Guys Finish Last: New Research Points to Biological Reason Why Girls Like Bad Boys.  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5197531&page=1
Hays, Scott.  Built for Sex.  NYC: Rodale, 2005.

Mirsky J.  Expectancy and the Placebo Effect: How Cognitive Processing Utilizes the rACC to Alter the Perception of Pain.  Mind Matters: The Wesleyan Journal of Psychology; 2007:2 19-28.

Sohn, E.  WORLD CUP 2010: CAN ABSTINENCE AFFECT ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE? http://news.discovery.com/human/world-cup-soccer-abstinence.html