Alexander's

I like reading scientific articles not related to my subject of research. Especially if they are about good looking women and how to bewitch them.

So of course The Porsche effect: Why racy women turn a man to racy cars, an article in the British Daily Mail about a recently published study, caught my attention.

The article explains that men tend to think more about luxury goods and less about necessaries when they see a well dressed (and therefore attractive) women.[^1] It's important to point out, that the women do absolutely nothing to enforce this behaviour. It's all in the head of the men!

A controversial topic, so it's no big surprise that sixteen readers left comments, which I tried to summarize in the following table:

comment topic | comments ---- | :----: Women only want the guys money | 7 Humor (having an old car and no girlfriend) | 2 Reply / Flame | 2 The research is trivial | 2 I like my horse better than I like my wive | 1 Women in nice cars turn men off | 1 Women are not interested in money | 1

It seems like most of the people that commented on the article did not understand the article at all. This research was about the effects beautiful girls have on the minds of men. The effectiveness of showering a women with high value presents was never discussed.

Yet almost all of the comments only revolve around the effects expensive presents allegedly have on women and totally ignore the presented research.

Which make me wonder: Do most people have problems understanding a simple newspaper report?

[^1]: I do really hope this is not true for women as well, since my girlfriend always seems to think of food when she thinks of me.

The typical Austrian male has many peculiarities. Most of these stem from the early days of childhood, when it was still considered fun to play tricks on each other.[^1] One of the more gruesome ones is called feuchtes Fuzzi.[^2]

For this especially abhorrent technique one person licks his pinky and then tries to insert the still dripping wet, but ideally ice cold finger into the ear of his unsuspecting victim.

But enough of the totally unrelated excursus about my culture, let's jump right into the story.

For the last week or so Christof has been sick at home. This weakened him so much, that when he picked up his toothbrush this morning, he strained his back quite badly. Yet, being the honor student he is, he bravely soldiered on to university to do some light studying -- only so one of his friends, that already missed him dearly, could sneak up from behind and shake him a bit.

A classic greeting ritual amongst adolescent males in Austria and also great for the back!

Nonetheless upon returning home his back pain was so grievous, that he could hardly stand straight. Moved by his sheer unbearable suffering I decided to offer him one of my precious Japanese hot spring bathing salts. It clearly helped a lot -- in fact so much, that after only fifteen minutes of soaking in the hot water, he could return to his game of World of Warcraft instead of just lying around whimpering from the constant pain.

And whenever Christof plays Georg likes to watch. Both of them silently staring at the flickering screen is one of the most peaceful scenes I know. The monotone clicking sound of the mouse only adds to the serenity.

But today Georg got bored fast -- most likely because Christof decided to play a character Georg doesn't like -- and so he decided to do the only sensible thing in this situation.

I will end this entry with two words for you to meditate over:

primal scream

[^1]: Ok let's be fair here it's always fun to play tricks, but most of my practical jokes have matured a bit over the last few years. [^2]: This is somewhat hard to translate. A Fuzzi is an especially dainty person that makes much ado about nothing and feucht means wet. So basically it's an expression for wet obnoxious person, but the onomatopoetics also play an important role.

About once a month I get a package full of Japanese food and I always enjoy it very much.[^1]

Apart from the distinctive flavour is the packing and presentation of Japanese food. I can never tell what is about to assault my taste buds just from looking at the package design. Since there are many things that might be a bit hard to stomach for an unaccustomed European,[^2] I devised a super simple rule:

Things that look scary are usually somewhere between eatable and very tasty, but totally innocent looking food can be really challenging.[^3]

This time my food parcel contained, amongst other things, two packs of カレー (karee) -- curry, who's originally Indian taste is just as modified to accommodate the intrinsics of Japanese culture as the word itself.

I'm not saying it's bad -- far from it! Japanese curry is actually really good. The taste just diverges from the things I've eaten in India -- home of the original curry.

This curry came in a bright yellow package, that reminded me of a hazardous waste bag. Definitely not something I'd expect to find in a care package -- unless you really want to take care of things.

Given the strong likeliness of the packaging to bags for radioactive waste, I was convinced it would taste excellent. And true to my rule it turned out to be one of the best japanese curries I've ever eaten.[^4] Just the presentation might be a tad hard to stomach for the average European.

[^1]: The fact that I continue to gain weight probably has to do with this, but my European friends keep telling me I look healthier now. So really it can't be as bad as my scale tells me it is. [^2]: Be especially weary of anything that is advertised as traditional food or you might end up eating 納豆 (natto) or 梅干 (umeboshi)! [^3]: The big exception here is 納豆 (natto) that not only tastes horrible, but also looks non appetizing and has a consistency of well chewed microwaved gum. [^4]: It was great even though I committed the atrocity of combining it with the bad European style Basmati rice.