An article by our friend Paul.

Thinking back to when I was in my early 20s, I honestly thought I knew everything about everything. I giggle as I think about it now that I would stand in the shower and the door would fog up. I would stand there and write down the names of the girls that I was seeing at that time. Maybe I wasn’t necessarily dating, but a call every second day with a weekly get together to have some casual sex was expected. It reached its craziest point when I forgot one once in the shower. I was drying off and it hit me that I forgot Rebecca. Are you kidding me? — Made me question whether I was doing something wrong or was my memory failing. I decided to go with the latter seeing that I had this notion that I was awesome and unstoppable—and then I saw Rebecca the next day. Not to mention, there was a girl on her way that very night.

Becca was this fine Italian girl who smoked wayyyy too much. She had these disgusting Indian cigarettes called NATIVE’s and she chain smoked. She’d light a new one with the one she was smoking. Everytime she would answer her cell she would light up a new one. Luckily she was young but now years later her face must look like a lizard or an old used leather glove. Her friend was the worst—this chick would smoke all the time—even worse than Becca. She was what I call chugly. Cute but ugly. She was kinda chubby. A big chewsie—someone who would be hot if she lost some weight ( say like 50 lbs ). Don’t get me wrong, I have woken up next to some swamp donkeys before when the pickings are slim and the night is ending. Anyways, I’m getting away from the point!  22 years old and smoking a pack and a half a day.  Eventually, like every story us men like to recount I got caught. SO REDHANDED it would blow your mind. The typical passing out from a night of drinking copious amounts of alcohol and the cell phone rang in my pocket. One girl answers the phone and they suddenly become best friends–with the common dislike of your cheating ass. Do I regret it?—honestly; No. I just regret getting caught. I think that’s where the thrill is. Juggling it all until it blows up in your face. And it isn’t about being able to have sex with beautiful women all the time or woman you think are beautiful because you’re so overloaded with Jeiger; the truth is the ability to get away with it. Think about it   In retrospect, I am sure it always has something to do with having your cake and eating it to (with your finger)—and it doesn’t stop there!! You want to have your cake, eat it too and fuck it as much as you can like Jim in American Pie–you want it to last and savour it until that last little bite. And why stop with one cake. All baked goods are tasty—maybe a peach cobbler or even a raisin bagel.

My boy Rico said something the other night which cleared up my own understanding by having the hamster begin it’s jogging in my head—this whole thing of dating comes down to the male ego. That’s all that it’s about. It isn’t even about whom you date; it’s about who you are going to date that you can put up with. Let me be even more specific. The person’s qualities or attributes has nothing to do with you dating the person but more about your own ability to put up with yourself. The person will either project yourself back unto you or bottle it up inside making you feel good about yourself—UNLESS of course you like yourself which is not the case for more than half the population. Even when I got caught cheating, I continued to lie digging a hole so deep that it became my new home. All cause my ego wouldn’t let it go. In fact, it became a challenge in my head at whether I could get my stupid self out of it. I laugh because I think I have everything figured out, when I really don’t know shit. I am more advanced in some ways. I would actually think that I am doing the girl a solid by not telling her the truth. The lie is soooo much better. I don’t want to hurt her. I can honestly say that I wasn’t one of these “wanna-be” players that we see so much these days. I was more of the university hipster but not too artsy. There are so many douchebags out there and it makes me laugh. All the talk talk talk about fucking hot chicks when the best they can do is a girl who may or may not be missing more that some of her teeth. Or a broad that makes you think about that whether that’s a rash or pimple on the inside of her thigh. I didn’t fuck supermodels but they did have all their teeth and weren’t skanks that would make you want to punch them everytime they would open their mouths or chug a bottle of drano. I laid down the groundwork building on some bullshit about how I’ve been hurt in the past, some funny quirk about being a successful guy and then play them a song with my guitar. This would take 2 dates, and by the end of it, she would gladly be falling going down for on me.  The other night, I was out with Rico having a pint or two or 8—needless to say we were pretty shit faced, and we were walking home. I would have drove home, but I couldn’t seem to remember which pedal was to go and stop so we figured it would be better to walk. We decided to have a slice of pizza at a nearby 24 pizza place, to which we enter and see the biggest douchefest you have ever seen.

I began to laugh as I see these coiffed jersey shore looking mother fuckers lining up, stumbling around with white gators, sporting ed Hardy with rhinestone ( I mean, what the hell is that!?)  looking like someone who should be in a gay pride parade next to a dude wearing ass-less leather chaps with a hat that says “leather daddy”. Boasting on how they had some chick rub up against them all night on the dance floor, meanwhile instead of taking them home like all good movies ( specially skinflicks) like a person should, they were left right there on the dance floor with a semi-strong erection ( softer cause of the amaretto sours) and a smell resembling tuna, are in a pizza place at 4 am about to scarf down 3 slices, go home, fall asleep halfway through jerking it to streamsex.com, before they wake up the next morning, do nothing all day but talking about the night before, spray Axe all over and do the same shit over again . The lesson is here is that sometimes trying so damn hard doesn’t make everything worth your wild. It’s about your ego. Putting yourself in the toughest situations of pleasure and selfishness and seeing if you can get yourself out. If you can, you’re kick-ass, a fuckin champ, you’re awesome. Those who judge you are jealous because they’re stuck with no one or are too much of a pussy to get themselves out of their relationships revolving around watching gossip girl together and lying to his friends ashamed he has retired his cock and grown a vagina. Anyone who sits there telling you what your problem is, is wrong because it’s not a problem if you’re good at it If you don’t turn into a pussy, you’ll keep doing your thing because your male ego will make you. The male ego is like the penis in your brain. Make it grow and you’re popeye on spinach.

It has only been a couple of weeks since the devastating earthquake and Tsunami hit the North Eastern part of Japan, but many blogs, sites, and low grade newspapers are already screaming that the world is about to end.

Sure, many of them are just bandwagoners, who jump on the idea simply because lots of others are promoting it. At the same time, the number of articles on this topic has been increasing over the past 10 years at an alarming rate. In addition to that, a vast number of people who promote the idea of the end of the world, claim to be not regular everyday citizens, but actual scientists, researchers and experts on the topic. One of the biggest claims they are making, is that the number of natural disasters has been drastically increasing and will keep doing so in the years to come.

Let’s see if we should really be getting increasingly scared, or maybe, not so much, since in this day and age, the biggest and most powerful bandwagoner could in fact be the Internet.

First of all, let’s look at the earthquakes which happened since the beginning of the twentieth century. Going further into history will only deviate our results, since our ability to record information was still an embryo. Earthquakes, there have been many of them. First – 1905 Kangra earthquake in India. Roughly 20 000 dead. It was followed by a similar death toll in the Earthquake in Chile, in 1906. That was only one year later. Then two years later, on 28 December 1908, the worst European earthquake in recorded history hit Messina, Italy. A 40 second earthquake was followed by a 12!!! meter Tsunami which literally washed away all coastal towns in the area and left 95% of the town of Messina completely flat. The death toll was around 200 000. Then in 1915 – another earthquake in Avezzano, Italy. 30 000 dead. So far, I have only been mentioning very large and significant earthquakes. That is not to say that those were the only ones at the time, there were roughly 2 -3 major earthquakes per year with thousands of lives perishing.

Next, December 16, 1920 – Haiyuan earthquake in China. A 7.8 magnitude disaster fell on a highly populated area, 2 cities lost almost 100% of all the buildings. One village was completely buried by a landslide. According to USGS, the death toll estimates were around 200 000. It was followed 3 years later by a devastating earthquake in the South East of Japan, that took a 140 000 lives.

                Since we are living in the world of short attention span, the rest will be in a list:

• 1905 – April 4: Kangra earthquake in India. 20,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.8
• 1906 – August 17: Valparaíso earthquake in Chile. 20,000 dead. Magnitude – 8.2
• 1908 – December 28: Messina earthquake in Italy. 100,000-200,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.2
• 1915 – July 13: Avezzano earthquake in Italy. 30,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.5
• 1920 – December 16: Haiyuan earthquake in China. 235,502 dead. Magnitude – 8.6
• 1923 – September 1: Great Kantō earthquake in Japan. 143,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.9
• 1927 – May 22: Gulang earthquake in China. 40 000 dead. Magnitude – 7.6
• 1931 – August 10: Fuyun earthquake in China. 10 000 dead. Magnitude – 8.0
• 1934 – January 15: Bihar earthquake in India. 10 700 dead. Magnitude – 8.1
• 1935 – April 21: Shinchiku earthquake in Taiwan. 3279 dead. Magnitude – 7.1
• 1939 – January 25: Chillan earthquake in Chile. 30 000 dead. Magnitude – 7.8
• 1939 – December 26: Erzincan earthquake in Turkey. 32 700 dead. Magnitude – 7.8
• 1944 – January 15: San Juan earthquake in Argentina. ~ 9 000 dead. Magnitude – 7.8
• 1949 – July 10: Khait earthquake in Tajikistan. ~7 200 dead. Magnitude – 7.4
• 1949 – August 5: Ambato earthquake in Ecuador. 6 000 dead. Magnitude – 6.8
• 1960 – February 29: Agadir earthquake in Morocco. 10 000 dead. Magnitude – 5.7
• 1960 – May 22: Valdivia earthquake in Chile. 5 700 dead. Magnitude – 9.5
• 1968 – August 31: Dasht-e Bayaz and Ferdows earthquake in Iran. 12 000 dead. Magnitude – 7.3
• 1970 – January 4: Tonghai earthquake in China. ~ 15,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.7
• 1970 – May 31: Ancash earthquake in Peru. 66,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.9
• 1972 – December 23: Managua earthquake in Nicaragua. 6,000 dead. Magnitude – 6.2
• 1975 – February 4: Haicheng earthquake in China. 10,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.0
• 1976 – February 4: Guatemala earthquake. 23,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.5
• 1976 – July 27: Tangshan earthquake in China. 242,419 dead. Magnitude – 7.6
• 1976 – August 17: Mindanao earthquake in Philippines. 4,791 dead. Magnitude – 7.9
• 1976 – November 24: Turkey earthquake. ~ 4,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.5
• 1978 – September 16: Tabas earthquake in Iran.  15,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.7
• 1980 – October 10: El Asnam earthquake in Algeria. 5,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.7
• 1985 – September 19: Mexico City earthquake. 9,500 dead. Magnitude – 8.0
• 1988 – December 7: Spitak earthquake in Armenia. 25,000 dead. Magnitude – 6.8
• 1990 – June 21: Manjil-Rudbar earthquake in Iran 40,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.4
• 1993 – September 29: Latur earthquake in India. 9,748 dead. Magnitude – 6.2
• 1995 – January 17:  Earthquake in Japan. 6,434 dead. Magnitude – 6.9  
• 1999 – August 17: İzmit earthquake in Turkey. 45,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.6

As we can see, with a few exceptions, there was one major earthquake with thousands of deaths in roughly every three years during the 20^th century. Now let’s see what happened in the last 10 years.

• 2001 – January 26: Gujarat earthquake in India. 20,085 dead. Magnitude – 7.7
• 2003 – December 26: Bam earthquake in Iran. 27,000 dead. Magnitude – 6.6
• 2004 – December 26: Indian Ocean earthquake. 230,000 dead. Magnitude – 9.1
• 2005 – October 8: Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan. 80,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.6
• 2006 – May 27: Java earthquake in Indonesia. 5,782 dead. Magnitude – 6.3
• 2008 – May 12: Sichuan earthquake in China. 69,197 dead. Magnitude – 7.9
• 2010 – January 12: Haiti earthquake. 92,000 – 316,000 dead. Magnitude – 7.0

In terms of death toll, it certainly does look like the earthquakes are getting worse, yet in terms of frequency and magnitude it looks pretty much to be following the pattern. At the same time we should consider the growing population, since in 1920, when an earthquake in China took 235,000 lives, the population in that country was around 450 million. Today, it is 1.32 billion. Would the death toll be the same if that same earthquake didn’t happen 90 years ago, but did now? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at Haiti. A terrible natural disaster that is probably one of the worst ever in recorded history. But should the significance of it be simply attributed to the earthquake itself? I am not too sure I can say that. Geographically, a small country with its dense population of about 10 million and its major city located roughly 25 kilometres away from the epicentre, the earthquake hit in the worst possible location. What made it even worse is that the structural design of most of the buildings was weak and could not withstand an earthquake. On top of that most hospitals in the area collapsed  and the injured couldn’t receive proper treatment in time.

Now going back in time; another interesting fact, the Population of Messina, Italy, has doubled since the earthquake and tsunami in 1908. What would that mean in the death toll numbers?

So judging by how weak some articles on the end of the world are, and based on the above carefully selected facts,  some people might get tricked and conclude, – “oh well, there is no change, nothing to worry about”. 

It’s not the case. I am not trying to make a point that there is no change in the frequency or strength of the earthquakes, nor am I saying that they have become increasingly worse. I can’t make any conclusion based on what I wrote and researched on this topic. So many parameters have to be taken into account when making a claim, and clearly my article doesn’t demonstrate that. On one hand, my article is posted on a relatively small and unknown website, and won’t be read by a lot of people, some of which could have been more influenced by it than others. And because of that, it won’t get copied and reposted on other sites, where it could have been seen by more and more people, thus creating a chain reaction. But what would have happened if this article was posted on a site, which is read daily by tens of thousands of people? Could it have influenced the minds of let’s say 5000 people? Quite possibly. Would the earthquakes be the topic of many conversations? Possibly. I wonder what would have been the main topic on internet if it existed in 1976?

Anyways, to wrap it up, regardless of the connection to the internet, at some point in our lives, 95% of us will die. Prove me wrong!