StarHub's New Sports Price Plan

Football fans in Singapore, unhappy with the new price hike by cable TV provider StarHub, will get a dedicated English Premier League channel this month. StarHub recently announced this as part of its new Sports package. From The Postman:

StarHub today announced that it will add two more channels - Goal TV 1[1] (Channel 107) and Goal TV 2 (Channel 108) to its cable TV Sports Group package from 11 August 2007. Together with its new dedicated Barclays Premier League channel – Football Channel (Channel 27), these additions bring the number of channels available in the Sports Group from four to seven.

Taking Hubbing to a new level, StarHub will also stream Premier League matches on Football Channel ‘live’ via its broadband and mobile platforms, notching another first for the company and for sports fans in Singapore. Customers of StarHub Digital Cable’s Sports Group can watch Premier League matches ‘live’ on i.View[2] and MobileTV Xtra[3] at no extra charge till the end of the Premier League season in May 2008. i.View and MobileTV Xtra are StarHub’s value-added services for its broadband and mobile customers respectively.

StarHub will air 370 matches this season, and will offer viewers up to 10 Premier League matches weekly, whereby up to eight of these matches will be aired ‘live. Most of the matches will be televised on Football Channel, with the simulcast matches to be aired on StarHub’s other self-packaged sports channels, SuperSports (Channel 22) and SuperSports Plus (Channel 21). Up to three ‘live’ Premier League matches will be aired concurrently on Saturday evenings - a first for sports fans here.

A total of four ‘live’ and two delayed matches will be aired on Saturdays, with another four ‘live’ matches to be scheduled on Sundays and Tuesdays. In addition, fans can also look forward to supplementary Premier League programmes that will add depth to StarHub’s Premier League coverage.

I guess football fans will generally be happy with this new offering from StarHub since we have more matches to watch this season, despite having to pay more to subscribe to the Sports plan. I've said it before in an earlier post. We have no fucking choice since StarHub now owns the rights to broadcasting the English Premier League in Singapore. I'm just hoping they won't be increasing the price again next year.

Previously:
Malaysian sports cable TV viewers get the best deal
Consumers United Against StarHub Petition
StarHub cable TV subscribers to pay more from July

Soviet Movie Posters 1921-1973

There are a lot of really beautiful movie posters in this Soviet collection. All the posters are from 1921 to 1973. If you like them, you can also contact the site owner to request for high resolution copies of these posters. But only for teachers and researchers, I think.

Smile nicer with the Beauty Smile Trainer

I was looking at my photos when I realised that I don't really show my teeth when I smile for the camera most of the time. Maybe I need the Beauty Smile Trainer, another wacky product from Japan. Wearing it often supposedly gives you the perfect smile. It also has the ability to give one a face lift, tones the facial skin and muscles and reduces sagging. Worth a try?

It kinda reminds me of another Japanese invention - the HanaHana:

Read about it here.

(Thanks Kitaro)

Optimus Prime Birthday Cake

Dude gets a superlicious Optimus Prime cake for his 30th birthday from his wife. Another pic here. I'm feeling jealous. I want one for my birthday too!

(via Boing Boing)

20 years of Mega Man in 5 minutes

For the 20th anniversary of Mega Man (aka Rockman in Japan), Capcom created a cool video summing up the last 20 years of the popular Japanese video game. I remember playing Mega Man on my Nintendo as a kid and it is such great fun watching all the different Mega Man games in this video.

(Thanks GeekGod)

Harry Potter books in China

I blogged about Harry Potter and the Big Funnel recently, a fake Harry Potter book published in China. Apparently, there are more of such books available in China. From International Herald Tribune:

The zest with which the Potter series has been copied can be seen in the titles available for sale in China.

These include "Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince," whose name in Chinese closely resembles a genuine title in the series, as well as many others that are pure inventions, blending everything from story lines lifted from J.R.R. Tolkien, to plots and snippets taken from famous kung fu epics and characters from Chinese literary classics, like "Journey to the West."

Although not exhaustive, the list includes "Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon," "Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire," "Harry Potter and the Young Heroes," "Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter," "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon," "Harry Potter and the Big Funnel," "Harry Potter and the Golden Armor," "Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase," and on and on.

(via GZ Expat)

Transformers NerdyShirts

NerdyShirts has several Transformers t-shirts that will make any Transformers fanboy and fangirls happy like mad. I like their Robots In Disguise t-shirt the best. It has the Autobot insignia with glasses and moustache drawn on it. So geeky! I got to have one.

Related: If you like more t-shirts and other street wear goodies, check out all my posts on Extreme, ALI and ZeroHour here.

Art of the Business Card

Dude shares his collection of cool business cards in his Art of the Business Card photoset on Flickr. Most of the designs are really out of this world. I have never seen anything as creative as those cards before.

Appetite For Destruction turns 20

Look who's on the cover of the next Rolling Stone Magazine. It's Guns N' Roses (the original members)! Rolling Stone Magazine has an excerpt of its feature story on how Guns N' Roses mixed drugs, punk and classic rock to make Appetite For Destruction, their Grammy award winning album of the late 80s and one of the best rock albums ever produced:

On that warm weekend evening in the spring of 1987, engineer Vic Deyglio had set up a top-of-the-line vocal microphone to capture the sounds of Rose and Smith having sex -- and at one point, he had to dash into the booth to adjust the mike as they went at it. "It was like a Ron Jeremy set in there," Deyglio recalls. Smith wanted to get back at Guns n' Roses drummer Steven Adler for cheating on her -- and had always liked the singer better anyway. "I would do anything Axl asked me to do," says Smith, now a forty-year old mom. "He's fuckin' magical." Though she was drunk and giggly that day, Smith eventually gave Rose what he wanted: Her orgasmic moans -- which ended up high in the mix on Appetite for Destruction's final track, "Rocket Queen" -- are for real. But when Adler found out what had been captured on his band's album, the drummer "fucking freaked out," Smith says. She was haunted by her recording session for years: "I ended up drinking and using drugs over this for a really long time, because I had this extreme shame and guilt and stuff."

Appetite was a brilliant album. Sweet Child and Rocket Queen are my favourite tracks and I grew up playing those songs with my band. Ah, those were the days. Happy 20th Appetite! And Axl, I know it's hard to do an album as good as Appetite but just release that fucking Chinese Democracy album already. Please! How long more are you making us fans wait?

Vegansexuals say NO to sex with meat eaters

Introducing the Vegansexuals, vegetarians who refuse to have sex with anyone who eats meat. And their numbers are rising. Now that's disturbing. From Independent:

The centre's co-director, Annie Potts, told the Christchurch newspaper The Press yesterday that she was startled to discover that quite a number of vegans, mainly women, routinely avoided sex with meat-eaters. They explained that they considered the bodies of carnivores to be made up of animal carcasses.

"I have not come across it before," said Dr Potts, who coined the term vegansexual to describe this previously unknown social group. A pescetarian from Wellington told researchers that her boyfriend was a vegetarian, and she could not imagine living with a meat-eater. "It would disgust me to see my boy tucking into a chicken," she said. Another woman, also a vegan, declared: "I believe we are what we consume, so I really struggle with bodily fluids, especially sexually."

One vegan from Christchurch did confess that she sometimes found carnivores sexually attractive, but she said: "I would not want to be intimate with somebody whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance. I wouldn't want to get close to them in a physical sense if their body was derived from meat. For me, this constitutes my very personal form of ethical sexuality."

Office laser printers can damage lungs

Australian scientists are saying that the humble office laser printer poses a health risk similar to a cigarette. From BBC:

The researchers carried out tests on more than 60 machines.

Almost one-third were found to emit ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material, so small that they can infiltrate the lungs and cause a range of health problems from respiratory irritation to more chronic illnesses.

Conducted in an open-plan office, the test revealed that particle levels increased five-fold during working hours, a rise blamed on printer use.

The problem was worse when new cartridges were used and when graphics and images required higher quantities of toner.

Ok I'm staying away from those laser printers from now on.