A new study has been performed by the University of Michigan, which proves conclusively that any old idiot can get a research grant at an American university. If you like, you can read the full article [archive].

Dr Frank Stafford, the researcher responsible for the study claims that women do indeed do more housework than men. He says:

It's a well-known pattern. Men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor.

This is indeed a well-known pattern, but it's not this blindingly obvious remnant of traditional values that mainstream media has latched onto. This mind-bending study offers some oddly pejorative numbers to support this view. According to the article:

Having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework each week for women, according to a new study.

For men, tying the knot saves an hour of weekly chores.

"YEAH!" I hear women squeal as they finally get irrefutable scientific confirmation of something they've long suspected. It's astounding how much of a burden men are on women in the household, but lets break the numbers down a little.

So, wives save their husbands one hour a week, while spending seven hours doing so. How efficient of them.

There's a statistic I'd be proud of as a woman. Now I finally understand why they're so invested in disseminating this information as much as possible.

If I were a woman I'd be pushing to to dismiss this Dr Stafford on grounds of innumeracy and lack of common sense.

The most unfortunate thing about actors passing away is the wanton airing of their cheapest movies on every television channel.

These 'tributes' make me sick. Depending on how you look at it they're either capitalising on the death of a really nice person, or they're glorifying a real prick. In the case of Charlton Heston I feel it's the latter.

This man was more obsessed with attention than your average myspace whore. He thrived as an actor in a time when horribly theatrical over-acting was considered desirable. Fueled by his self-adoration and the lust for fame he found his only solace in a large audience.

In a time when racial segregation was taking hold, he spoke out against it because that guaranteed him adulation amongst his more liberal peers and fans. When more liberal viewpoints became mainstream and he could no longer incite applause by spouting empty rhetoric he changed his political affiliation from democrat to republican and began his attention-seeking chest-beating once again. This time though, he'd found a home for himself amongst redneck America.

If you've read the second amendment to the US constitution -- and most gun nuts have not -- then you probably already know that it's being abused by gun rights activists simply because it was poorly written, and even more poorly thought out at the time of writing. Here it is in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Worst sentence ever. Worse than any of mine and I'm not writing the basis for laws which will be used to place instruments of death into the hands of people who can barely read. I don't care where you put the commas, that's still a really shitty sentence.

I'm not going to debate the meaning of the word 'militia' nor will I try to define 'the people' or ask you to put yourselves in the frame of mind of those who wrote the amendment way back when. Frankly it doesn't matter to me what they were thinking since they were clearly smoking too much of that peace pipe when exercising that kind of grammar.

I also don't believe it would matter to your average gun-nut whether the second amendment said something like:

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.^®

They would still claim gun ownership as their birthright because that's what gun-nuts do, and Charlton Heston was their angry screaming poster-child.

Rednecks will worship anyone who beats their chest about gun rights, and Heston beat his with passion and was worshipped for it by the millions of members of the NRA of which he was president from 1998 to 2003.

What isn't being widely reported is that Heston actually campaigned against gun proliferation (rather, in favour of gun control) while he was at the height of his career and following the deaths of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 60s.

Unfortunately as his desirability on celluloid decreased, his descent into megalomania and self-worship drove him to disregard logic and his better judgement in favour of the emotional rantings of redneck America.

I won't deny that Heston was an intelligent and articulate man with many extremely valid points of view, but that simply can't excuse one of those views being that little NRA gem: that every citizen should be allowed encouraged to carry concealed firearms because this would deter criminals from resorting to gun violence.

A healthy brain inside an otherwise intelligent individual simply cannot ever draw that conclusion. It's completely ridiculous to purport to solve criminal gun violence but simultaneously exponentially increase the incidence of gun death.

It's also impossible to make a credible and logical argument about gun rights while protesting gun restriction by hoisting a rifle above your head and yelling something maniacal like:

...from my cold, dead hands!

There's nothing at all respectable about the weight and credibility he offered an organisation which is eerily close to being the political wing of American domestic terrorism, and whose political and social clout is responsible for a significant part of America's gun violence.

At least we can take that gun now, Charlie.

This story is about a good friend of mine. We'll call him Ross (because that's his name).

Please bear with me while I set this up.

Ross is unquestionably Australia's biggest fan of the Idol franchise. Not only does he own all the merchandise, but he's moderated the Australian Idol forums and maintained a successful independent blog on the subject. He loves Idol so much he even loves the idols that aren't idols.

His Crush: Ricki-Lee Coulter

During the second season of Australian Idol back in 2004, Ross became enamoured with a sassy young Idol hopeful named Ricki-Lee Coulter. His interest in her was amplified when she was expelled from the show in a controversial elimination which left thousands of teenage girls SMSing their friends through a shroud of tears.

Ross, of course, was one of them. :)

Caught up in the injustice of it all, Ross joined a team to launch Ricki-Lee Forumswhich has since become her biggest semi-official fan-site. This caught the attention of her team, and soon Ricki-Lee was making regular appearances on the forum and inviting Ross and the forum folks backstage at her gigs.

While I would normally argue that contestants on Australian talent shows don’t really qualify as celebrities, Ricki-Lee has certainly made a real splash in the Aussie market. She's had substantial chart success as well as becoming a sought-after commodity for cross-promotional media and events. Her name and her music are featured more often than almost every other idol, including the winners.

Despite her music being targeted at a younger (typically female) audience, she's become an Aussie household name, and Ross has been there to bask in every minute of her increasing glow of popularity... albeit from the sidelines.

I've known Ross for a couple of years, and over that time I've endured witnessed his endless yet oddly charming gushing about all things Ricki-Lee. I've heard about how wonderful, talented, beautiful and funny she is, and I've taken my fair share of opportunities to make fun of him over it. By comparison, my celebrity crush (mentioned in Part I) barely qualifies as acknowledgement.

He's really bona fide no-kidding smitten, which makes the latest chapter of this story the monumental moment it is.

Who Cares?

I chose to make such a big deal about all of this not because of Ross or Ricki-Lee. This is a story about those once-in-a-lifetime moments you carry with you forever. It's a story about our secret desires and how bittersweet it can be to so thoroughly admire someone, but to know they'll never fully appreciate how you feel.

Most of the time they have no idea who we are, let alone how incredibly easy it would be to warm our souls with a tiny gesture. But what if they did know? What if they were close enough to brand us with a memory that we'd cherish forever in that little spot in the back of our minds that we never talk about with our spouses?

If your celebrity crush could do that, would they?

Ricki-Lee Would

She really would, and she's just so down to earth there's a chance she might not even realise it.

After a recent concert, Ricki-Lee and the gang were heading off to the after-party. Poor Ross takes his job seriously and he absolutely had to be bright-eyed in the morning, so being the idiot responsible person that he is, he declined to attend. He was apparently so adamant that "oh come on" just simply wasn't going to cut it.

Now this part of the story we call 'facepalming'. If someone tells you that their epic crush singer chick invited them to a concert after-party, and their response was "sorry, I have to work in the morning" how would you react?

• Step 1: Open palm.
• Step 2: Insert face.

So that's when Ricki-Lee goes all-in and decides to enhance Ross' masturbation fantasies for the rest of his life. She and her publicist Lauren get down on their knees and beg him to come to the after-party.

There's really not much one can say after that picture, which is why I've forced you to read it all prior. It's just indescribably awesome to have your unattainable celebrity crush engaging in a full-pout beg right there in living colour.

Now, of course it's just a whimsical good-humoured moment, and I'm sure she didn't give it deliberate thought at the time, but I think it's important to acknowledge how little things like this really do stack up on our list of life-experiences. With how completely gaga Ross is over Ricki-Lee, this is going to rate right up there with the best of them.

• Having sex with two (or three) women at the same time
• Pictures of my celebrity crush BEGGING me in public
• Birth of my child
• Seeing Earth from space

I couldn't believe it when he told me that even after all of that, he still chose to go home and masturbate furiously catch some sleep instead of hitting the party.

His poor decisions notwithstanding, I'd like to thank Ricki-Lee for giving lasting joy to my good friend, her biggest fan, and for giving a little hope to the rest of us who might have our own little celebrity crushes.

The celebrity crush is an interesting phenomenon.

Celebrities often have particular talents which drive their fame, but that's not why we love them so much.  The reason we cross the line from enjoying their work to building a shrine for them in our bedroom has nothing to do with fame and everything to do with the everyday rules of attraction.  If they're hot and our perception of their personality is charming or adorable, then their repeated glamorous exposure simply keeps them rattling around in our heads long enough for a crush to take hold.

It's no different to admiring the cutie in the accounts department at work, except that celebrities tend to have the odds stacked in their favour with an increased likelihood of good looks and being professionally photographed all the time.

Unfortunately the public persona they portray is quite often very different to their true nature, so if we're ever lucky enough to chat with our celebrity crush, chances are quite high that it'll ruin a good fantasy.

This is why it's often best to keep these crushes confined to bittersweet daydreams.  The less we really know about someone the more our mind fills in the blanks with what we wish they were like, and consequently the more appealing they become.

Base attraction aside, I've only had one sizable celebrity crush that I've carried with me since I was a teenager, and thank goodness I've never had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with her because as unlikely as it is, I'd really mourn the loss of the fantasy if I found her annoying or stupid or something.

On the other hand, what if you had the chance to spend some real time chatting and hanging out with your celebrity crush and they turned out to be everything you could hope for, only even more intelligent, funny and charming?

I think that for me, it would be even more horrible than finding out I really can't stand her.  After sharing space with my romanticised image of perfection personified, the inevitable rejection would be devastating... after all that's why they call it a crush, right?

Thank goodness this story isn't about me.

Despite striking some trouble with implementation, I've begun uploading photos.

My main issues involved new ways to navigate posts including thumbnail-based navigation of pictures, and making that seem a bit more intuitive and relevant to picture browsing, rather than reading posts.  I installed a fresh copy of wordpress to test on, but the posts and category structure of my live blog were ultimately complex enough to bring some of the new stuff undone by the time it was implemented.

So I'm still working on that and I'll continue the to-do list in my original post, but in the spirit of moving forward I felt it was time for a few pics.

I'm still choosing/editing/resizing etc, so expect more shortly.  In the mean time I should apologise for the watermarks as I too hate them with a passion, but really without them your pictures are all too easily scraped and reposted by automated scripts these days with no linkbacks or credit whatsoever.  It's simply become essential to tag them.  Of course they can still be stolen, but if it requires manual intervention at least then they're more likely to be ripped off by someone who actually wants them.  Not that there's a real danger of that ;)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my photos and I look forward to reading your thoughts as my work evolves.

Also, consider calibrating your monitor, it's easy I promise.