YGTV Editor's Blog

Sunday May 20, 2012

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Gibraltar Espanol

It’s a well-known fact that the Spanish love their seafood. It is also a well-known fact that the Spanish fishing industry gets massive EU handouts to prop up what the Spanish fishing industry says is an industry in decline.

It is a well-known fact that the Spanish fishing industry uses methods to rape the sea, that have been largely been made illegal. Even though it has been estimated that the Spanish fishing flotilla has been almost halved since Spain joined the European community, from some 21000 boats to about 11000 today, they still get subsidies to the tune of eight billion euros. That’s right EIGHT BILLION EUROS.

The EU is financing these pirates to go wherever they please and fish using illegal methods. Locally things are heating up faster than a junkies spoon and its no longer about a few boats coming in and breaking Gibraltar law.

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Budgie Smuggler?

With the bathing season just around the corner, I was left with the very difficult choice of selecting what I will be wearing when I hit the beach this summer.

There are loads of different types of male swimwear and I have always kind of gone for the same thing, functional, black and allowing a certain amount of modesty.

My usual choice is for a short board short, as these seem to complement my stocky body and chunky legs, but because I feel slimmer this year I have been looking at other options.

So what’s available out there? Lets start at the beginning, when I was bought my first pair of swim briefs by my mother, branded with the words speedo on the side. When one was young, one could easily wear these and not attract the same kind of revulsion held for the middle aged German, who normally sports a pair of sandals, a beer gut and white socks, all while keeping their genitalia packed in a sliver or electric blue material.

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Gymnasium

I have two words for you today, (you have to say them in an Austrian Accent) ‘Gym Nasium’. Ok, I know Gymnasium is one word, but every time I hear the word it is always the great Arnold Schwarzenegger that I think of, strutting around calling all us lesser mortals ‘girly men’ and telling us that he will cover us and for us to go to Da Choppah.

The name gymnasium is derived from the Ancient Greek term ‘Gymnos’, which apparently means naked. The related verb ‘Gymnazo’, whose meaning is to train naked. Now that awkwardness is out of the way, a bit of history.

The Greeks would compete nude so that other people who were not fitness inclined would appreciate the naked male body and the athletes themselves would be offering their bodies as tributes to the gods.

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Left Handed?

Did you know that left-handed people only make up about ten percent of the population?

But it seems to me that I have a high proportion of left-handed friends, with more than half of those lefties being women. I tried to make a correlation of all this and I am left scratching my head. In reading I have noticed that left-handedness in women is rarer than in men by almost four percent, so why do I have so many female friends that are?

I am not alone in my inability to rationalize this. Scientists have also been perplexed and the mystery surrounding left-handed people has led to a whole plethora of spurious assumptions, such as links to criminality, dyslexia, schizophrenia, devil worship and witchcraft.

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Is it Time?

Life is short, I have heard this statement uttered a 100 times, no it isn’t. Life is the longest thing you will ever do.

But life span is surely a matter of perspective. Consider any number of creatures whose life span is measured in hours or days; do they think life is too short? The Sunland Baobab has been carbon dated to be 6000 years old, as trees go this is the upper scale but there are several examples where the average age is around a 1000 years, do trees think life is short, or do they not have any inkling about the passage of time?

We do a lot with our time as a species; we can save, waste, make, steal, lose, share, bend or gain time. Our obsession with time is almost at the top of our preoccupations, along with sex and money.