Note: The older the entry, the unlikelier outside links are to work.

Recently there's been some talk in the media about a group of scientists predicting that the average lifespan will soon increase to 180, and eventually "natural causes" would disappear as a cause of death. In other words, no one would die of old-age or disease anymore, but increasing amounts of people would get run over by geezers in their 240's not being able to see whether they're driving on a road or through an open-air street market. Obviously, living for hundreds of years wouldn't be much fun if you weren't in prime condition, so it should be taken as a prerequisite that life-extension technologies would allow for a fit body and mind throughout the years. Once that's gotten out of the way, I don't see anything bad in being able to decide for yourself when you've seen it all and want to die. I would just love to have all the time in the world. Maybe even I would get tired of living after a few centuries, but it sure would beat the measly 80 years we can expect currently. I for one am keeping my thumbs up that this Immortality Institute gets somewhere in its search.

Still, it seems like bachelors have little to worry about, at least if cancer is a big worry and these reports turn out to be accurate. You see, scientists are saying that pizza and masturbation help to prevent cancer. So you don't have to feel guilty about those sunday afternoons anymore: you're just preventing cancer.

If you missed out on your chance to win a free meal with Tero, here's another little competition for you. No prizes awarded expect for a higher understanding of the world (meaning you'll just get confused). The exercise consists of three parts:

1) Find out whether this book tells the truth about the Middle-East Conflict (ok, so the question is a giveaway). Extra points for the most opposite views found on the book.

2) Find out whether this website is satire. If in doubt, check out their online store (I'm still not sure about this one, though).

3) Find out whether this book is fair and balanced (gotta love that title!)

After quite a long quiet period on my behalf, I am glad to be back in civilization and back in kekkuli world with my mind-blowing literaturial contributions. Not even sure if such a word exists, literaturial, but hey, spending so long away from even such basics as a daily newspaper to read, ones brain and literaturial skills must suffer some. Another excuse I could make is that I can't write proper english, but that would be just boring. Anyway, while I was away somebody did something devastating. Somebody had the great honor and priviledge of being the 6666th visitor on kekkuli.com, for it sure wasn't me. Therefore I would like to announce a competition. The person who can somehow prove (enough proof: "It was me") to have been the 6666th visitor on our site, will win a dinner in Helsinki on my expense. So let me know. My email is above. In case it was Jani, he will get the $2.99 supersaver meal I owe him anyway.

And while on the topic of dining or going out, next time before you order a drink in public, you should read the following and keep it in mind! Seven New York City bartenders were asked if they could nail a woman's personality based on what she drinks. Though interviewed separately, they concurred on almost all counts. The results were:

Drink: Beer
Personality: Causal, low-maintenance; down to earth.
Your Approach: Challenge her to a game of pool.

Drink: Blender Drinks
Personality: Flaky, whiny, annoying; a pain in the ass.
Your Approach: Avoid her, unless you want to be her cabana boy.

Drink: Mixed Drinks
Personality: Older, more refined, high maintenance, has very picky taste; knows EXACTLY what she wants.
Your Approach: You won't have to approach her. If she's interested, she'll send YOU a drink...

Drink: Wine (does not include White Zinfandel)
Personality: Conservative and classy; sophisticated yet giggles.
Your Approach: Tell her you love to travel and spend quiet evenings with friends.

Drink: White Zinfandel
Personality: Easy; thinks she is classy and sophisticated, actually, she has NO clue.
Your Approach: Make her feel smarter than she is...this should be an easy target.

Drink: Shots
Personality: Likes to hang with frat-boy pals and looking to get totally drunk... and naked.
Your Approach: Easiest hit in the joint. You have been blessed. Nothing to do but wait, however, be careful not to make her mad!

Drink: Tequila
No explanations required - everyone just KNOWS what happens there.

THEN, there is the MALE addendum - The deal with guys is, as always, very simple and clear cut:

Domestic Beer: He's poor and wants to get laid.

Imported Beer: He likes good beer and wants to get laid.

Wine: He is hoping that the wine will give him a sophisticated image to help him get laid.

Whiskey: He doesn't give a damn about anything but getting laid.

Tequila: He is thinking he has a chance with the toothless waitress.

White Zinfandel: He's gay

So Cheers, Kippis and Salud to everybody and have a merry and sunny summer!!

Personally, I don't see any way out for record producers from the internet piracy-dilemma. I don't think people are going to change their habits (even illegal ones, especially when illegality seems victimless) and I doubt even more that any technology could be invented to make it impossible to download music. But even if the worst happens, it doesn't seem likely that great music will stop being created. Real fanatics can rather easily make records, the bottleneck will be to make it into popular awareness.

What's more interesting is will the same thing be happening to movie producers once broadband becomes more common and still faster? Making your own movie is a bit different from your own music album. Just compare your home videos to the Matrix. We'll just have to wait and see, and in case something does come up that will stop all this piracy, it'll be fun telling your grandchildren that you were part of that early internet when anything and everything could be gotten for free. What anarchy.

But before movies can be downloaded in a matter of minutes, we still need to go for a bit shorter moving pictures for our internet entertainment. Still, there are boundless choice: from stupid videos to fancy pseudo-commercials to animation. Spending more time in front of a monitor than a tv is no longer any problem at all, even if you just want to see moving pictures.

Man, am I glad this didn't happen to us on our roadtrip through the US. Then again, we didn't stay for longer than one night in any hotel, so the smell wouldn't have gotten unbearable on us. Still pretty disgusting.

You would've thought everything was settled by the end of May, when Bush declared that hostilities in Iraq were over. Yet you can't open a newspaper still today, almost two months later, without the headlines flashing new casualties in Iraq. Looks like it wasn't such a cakewalk after all? Oh well, at least there's one more bad guy in hiding in the world now. Not bad for the amount of money that could've sent people to Mars and back. Or give almost 20 bucks to every person in the world.
And people are already guessing where Dubya will move next. The thing is, if those weapons of mass destruction don't start showing up soon, he will have to cause another crisis to ensure his re-election. Although from what I understand most people in the US don't really give a rat's ass about whether Saddam had nasty weapons or not, so I guess it doesn't make that much of a difference anyway. Still, you have to hold on to any shred of hope that in 2005 there'll be someone else "in charge" at the White House. Like someone aptly commented in a Fark thread on the 25th anniversary of Animal House:
"Remember how we all laughed at the end of Animal House when it said Blutarski, the beer-swilling, (presumably) drug-consuming party animal became a senator? We never dreamed he'd actually become president."

This wasn't really supposed to be a politicized rant, but so much for that. Instead, I wanted to share some Iraq-related humor: absolutely the best piece comes from Google. Type in "weapons of mass destruction" as your search query, hit the "I'm feeling lucky"-button, and read carefully the resulting page, even if your first instinct is to just hit the back button. Or if you're lazy, this is the page that comes up from that procedure. Pretty damn funny. Then there's, of course, the mandatory Onion piece, from sometime back though. And going WAY back, here's proof that the Onion was funny already fifty years ago (not the main story, the one at the bottom of the page).

As you've most certainly been wondering about that swamp football thing ever since I mentioned it a few days back, here's the official home page of the sport for you. The World Champions are on right at this moment, and for some reason, the swamp they're played on is completely mosquito-free. Rather strange for Finland in the summer.

Freedom is a subjective thing, and sometimes it's difficult to judge when somebody's freedom tramples on somebody else's. For now, though, it seems that it's pretty safe to use your freedom of expression to insult people on the net, at least if you're a small-time player like we are and as long as you're just quoting someone else. So as I've always suspected, just mentioning someone's name on a site full of "intellectual pornography" comes nowhere close to being inappropriate. If you don't know what I'm talking about, keep going back in the archives.

This is another type of freedom I kind of like: a program free of any kind of bugs, errors or security holes, guaranteed. How can they be sure? Because the program is 1 byte and is supposed to do absolutely nothing (the program is aptly called NaDa). So download it on your desktop and enjoy one piece of software that works exactly as it's supposed to.

So I've made fun of my new phone that's capable of taking pictures and sending them for ludricous prices. I will no longer make fun of it. Not after my long-sought dream of using my mobile phone as a remote control came true yesterday. Sure, it took us two hours with a friend to set it up, but once it did, wow. I mean sure, the infrared transmitter on my phone is on the side, so you can't hold the phone like a regular remote, but sideways to you, making it a bit slow to operate. And granted, the signal from the phone only works up to a meter, so it's a bit annoying to get up from the couch every time to use the remote. And yes, it's a demo program, so after about ten clicks you have to close and restart the program. But still, wow. After a brief search I think I've found a cracked version of the program so that at least it doesn't have to be restarted all the time, and I'm sure there are some modifications you can do to make the signal stronger. What's most important is that they've finally come up with an application that I would be happy to pay a little bit for, if it wasn't so easy to get it for free on the internet. Along with this irremote program I also downloaded some games and other programs (for using my phone as a GPS receiver, for example). So let's give the phone another chance, shall we?

In case someone else out there reading this has a Nokia 7650 or 3650 phone, here are the sites where I found the programs I downloaded for my phone: Some guy's Yahoo briefcase and Franchesca.org, which apparently is some kind of phone-software heaven. If heaven is this hellishly slow I don't want to know what the worse options are.

Ok, just a little bit of making fun. What's the best application they've come up for the mobile phone-camera so far? mobile asses.com. Once you're done with that, you might as well Rate my Rack and decide whether they're Hot or Not. The end of civilization is nigh.

Oh, and that site I mentioned where I found Gabriel Knight, The Hawk's Place, is back up, and man, I didn't even realize how sweet the place was the first time I visited. TONS of great classic games await you. I just found Aaargh and Rampage from there, both hilarious multiplayer monster games from waaay back. Why don't they make games like that anymore? Now all we have is something silly like GTA Vice City which makes you symbiotic with your computer for days. No negative side effects like that with Aaargh or Rampage, I promise you that.