The Binge
Jessica Zafra
“Pain and damage don’t end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back.” — Al Swearengen
SMOKERS and people with chronic respiratory illness, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases have a greater risk of catching pneumonia.
By Richard Roeper
WHEN JULIA ROBERTS’ Jess is told by a friend, “You look like you’re a million years old” in Secret in Their Eyes, there’s not a speck of insult in the observation.
PUERTO LOPEZ, ECUADOR — The sight of thousands of whales surfacing, jumping and playing off the coast of South America as they migrate toward their breeding grounds is one of nature’s most majestic displays.
“It’s not just breast cancer that kills women,” said Dr. Maria Adelaida Iboleon-Dy, chairman of the cardiology department at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon city.
By Richard Roeper
AS I’M TYPING THIS, a bearded Jimmy Kimmel is on the muted TV to my left — dressed as Princess Leia and hyping a special Star Wars: The Force Awakens edition of his program, which will have aired by the time you read this.
By Noel Vera
DAVID LYNCH and Mark Frost’s murder mystery/spiritual horrorshow/police procedural/goofball soap opera Twin Peaks debuted on ABC Network April 8, 1990 and television hasn’t been quite the same.
HOLIDAY shoppers aren’t just abandoning crowded stores in favor of shopping online. They’re also putting aside tablets in favor of pushing the buy button on bigger smartphones such as Apple, Inc.’s iPhone 6 Plus.
Online spending via smartphones surged more than 75%, surpassing purchases made on tablets for the first time this Thanksgiving weekend, according to data from International Business Machines Corp. That suggests bigger screens, easier payment options combined with revamped retail Web sites, and shopping applications customized for phones are changing consumer behavior.
Smartphones accounted for 17.1% of all Cyber Monday spending as of 3 p.m. in New York, compared with 11.1% on tablets, according to IBM. Last year, smartphone purchases made up 10.5% of all online sales compared with 12.5% on tablets.
“It’s a pretty big shift in consumer behavior,” Jay Henderson, IBM’s marketing cloud director, said in an interview. “Retailers are making it easier for people to shop on their smartphones, the devices are bigger, and consumers are getting more comfortable purchasing on small devices.”
As cellphones begin doing most of the tablet’s job, the lines are blurring between the two, and the pocketable phone is coming out on top. Worldwide tablet sales are expected to drop 8.1% this year to 211 million devices, according to IDC. Smartphone sales, meanwhile, were up 6.8% to 355 million in the third quarter.
“A lot of this is the popularity of the iPhone, since so much retail traffic is from iPhones as opposed to other devices,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, analyst at Forrester Research. “There hasn’t been much innovation in tablets.”
The shift in the most popular mobile shopping device comes as consumers increasingly abandon stores in favor of online shopping. More than 103 million people shopped online over the four-day weekend, which started Thursday on Thanksgiving and continued with Black Friday, according to an annual survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation. That compares with fewer than 102 million who ventured into traditional stores, the trade group said. — Bloomberg
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
THE BORACAY of simple nipa huts and backpackers’ dreams is long gone.
BERLIN — A German court Thursday barred a condom manufacturer from advertising its product with the promise that a pack of seven contraceptives “equals up to 21 orgasms,” calling the claim misleading.
The slogan could give consumers the wrong impression that condoms should be used more than once, ruled the court in the western city of Duesseldorf, upholding an injunction against condom maker Einhorn (Unicorn).
The company had argued the slogan was obviously light-hearted as it stood alongside advice about “calories burnt in 30 minutes of sex” and a small-print warning that the product “may contain traces of fairy dust.”
But the court was not amused, noting that among youths especially, “there is a continuing strong need for clarity on the correct use of condoms and a high risk of misleading them with ambiguous statements.”
Because the package also contained serious information, such as about half of proceeds going to charity, consumers may not realize the comment on the “sensitive issue of multiple orgasms” is humorous, the court ruled. — AFP
WASHINGTON — The stench of clogged toilets fills the air at the US capital’s wastewater treatment facility. And for good reason — it’s one of the world’s largest projects to transform human waste into electricity.
