Ten Photographs of Salma Hayek's Photogenic Breasts

I have no desire to turn this blog into a leering lad's-mag kind of site. The thing is, though, that any simple Google image search of Mexican-American actress Salma Hayek will demonstrate that it's all but impossible to look at a picture of her without your eyes being drawn, quite involuntarily, towards her rather spectacular rack.

See the thing isn't merely that Salma Hayek has great breasts: it's that she has remarkably photogenic breasts. They just photograph well. It's not their fault. Here are ten (or I guess twenty, technically) examples. Clicking on any of the tiny little pictures will reveal massively larger pictures (in most cases).

1.	SALMA HAYEK IN RED WITH A PLUNGING NECKLINE: A palate cleanser of sorts, before delving in further. I think this is on the set of a movie or something. Can't guess why else she'd be wearing this particular piece of clothing.
2.	SALMA HAYEK IN WHITE WITH ACRES OF CLEAVAGE: This is from some press conference, I think. One that was amply photographed, it seems, because any mere Google of Salma Hayek comes up with several pictures of her in the same dress at the same table. I can't guess why this press convference is so important. Might have something to do with the word 'ample' I used above. In these photos, Hayek's breasts are simply incredible. I can't imagine a person in the audience heard a word she had to say that day.
3.	SALMA HAYEK'S SIDEBOOB: This photo is paparazzi trash in extremis, from some E! show or something. But sideboob is one of the greatest gifts God bestowed on humanity, and when it's Ms Hayek's sideboob, you know God is great.
4.	SALMA HAYEK IN A STUDDED BLUE DRESS: This dress has to have been custom-made to fit her particular dimensions. Or else maybe it just wraps on, like cling film.
5.	SALMA HAYEK IN WHITE ON A BEACH: This is a seriously attention-grabbing picture. I can't see anyone, straight, gay or a-, looking at this picture and not finding their eyes magnetically drawn in a single direction. She's on a beach, though I don't blame you for not noticing.
6.	SALMA HAYEK IN RED ON A BEACH: Seriously, this woman should stay away from beaches. She's a drowning hazard.
7.	A YOUNGER SALMA HAYEK COVERING HER BREASTS WITH HER ARMS: She looks kind of Egyptian or Greek or something in this 'classic' picture - not quite of a prehistoric vintage but clearly from a younger era. For all this below-the-neck salivating, I should also point out that Salma Hayek is a beautiful woman as well.
8.	SALMA HAYEK IN A BLACK BRA ON UGLY BETTY: America Ferrera is also a beautiful woman, making a lie of the TV show's name. Still, it's rather unfair to subject the poor lass to this kind of competition, isn't it? Incidentally, those are two of the most perfectly round breasts I've ever seen.
9.	SALMA HAYEK BREASTFEEDING AN AFRICAN BABY: It turns out Hayek is a breastfeeding advocate - perhaps she just likes having the opportunity to talk about breasts to an eager audience. Here she is in Africa apparently breastfeeding a child whose mother was unable to. This child will grow up to realise how blessed he truly has been.
10.	SALMA HAYEK'S BREASTS AS A WORK OF ART IN FRIDA: And here they are au naturel, though I don't really feel the need for an 'NSFW' label, as they've been painted up here , into the works of art the world already knows them to be. This is from the movie Frida, where Hayek plays the titular role, as Frida Kahlo, the monobrowed Mexican artist.

Ten Albums Whose Title Tracks Aren't On Them

When an artist releases an album, they can of course give it pretty much any name they want. Many an artist goes the 'self-titled' route (some, like Elvis Presley and Duran Duran do that more than once), some give their albums abstract titles with no real connection to, well, to anything. Some (say Fiona Apple for example) give their albums ludicrous names that make them laughing-stocks or some (say Led Zepplein) give them glyphs as names and are seen as eternally cool as a result.

By far the most common way to name an album is to give it the same name as one of your songs: in most cases, that song itself is released as a single, and the resultant 'synergy' (I hate that word) helps the success of both the single and the album. The average punter, interest piqued by a hit song on the radio, knows exactly which album to buy in the store. Er, well, most of these albums go back to the 70s, 80s and 90s. You know, when that's how people consumed music.

When an artist names an album after a song, you presume (quite rightly) that the song will actually be on its namesake album. That's not always the case, though, and here are ten artists going against the grain. In each case, there is a song. And there is a namesake album. But the namesake album is not, for whatever reason, where you find the song. Just to confuse people, I guess.

1.	COLOUR BY NUMBERS BY CULTURE CLUB: With decades of hindsight to dismiss Boy George and Culture Club as 80s pap at its worst, it's a pleasant surprise to actually listen to this album again and hear with your own ears how excellent it actually is. You won't find the title track there, though: for that you'll have to look on the b-side of album track 'Miss Me Blind', which incidentally includes 'kissing to be clever' in its lyrics: making it a kind of title track for the previous album, which had no proper title track.
2.	SCREAMADELICA BY PRIMAL SCREAM: Primal Scream's 'great leap forward' smiley-face classic managed two different versions of the same song ('Higher Than the Sun') but somehow didn't find place for the ten-minute would-be title track. The dance track was sung by Denise Johnson, not normally a member of the band but the lead singer of one track that did make the album, 'Don't Fight It, Feel It'. The song 'Screamadelica' got release a few months after the album on what is titled the Dixie-Narco EP but is effectively the single of album track 'Movin' on Up'.
3.	HOUSES OF THE HOLY BY LED ZEPPELIN: Led Zeppelin composed this song, one of their better songs, as the title track of their then-current album Houses of the Holy. The story goes, however, that they felt the song didn't fit in with the other material on the album, and decided to shelve the song instead, leaving the album, Led Zeppelin's first to have a conventional title at all, with no title track. When the sessions for the next album, Physical Graffiti, produced more music than could fit on a single vinyl record, the decision was made to release it as a two-record set, padded out with outtakes from the previous albums. Thus was this track dusted off and finally released. In the end, no Led Zeppelin studio album would ever be released with a title track on it.
4.	ALMOST BLUE BY ELVIS COSTELLO: Confounding Elvis Costello's audience at the time, Almost Blue, the album, was a collection of cover versions of Country & Western songs. 'Almost Blue', the song, was an attempt at a self-composed jazz standard. So obviously, the latter didn't fit on the former, coming out instead on the follow-up album Imperial Bedroom. Interestingly, Elvis Costello also wrote a song called 'Imperial Bedroom', which - you guessed it - didn't appear on that album. It's since been included as a bonus track on reissues.
5.	WAITING FOR THE SUN BY THE DOORS: Waiting for the Sun was the Doors' third album, but it was the first one not made up of songs the band had composed before even getting a record contract. As such, 'composing on the spot' was new to them, and they found themselves unable to finish what should have been the title track. It was cast aside half-finished, only to be revived two albums later on 1970's Morrison Hotel.
6.	FRANKS WILD YEARS BY TOM WAITS: Swordfishtrombones, from 1982, was Tom Waits's first album for Island Records and his first album to ditch lounge-band arrangements for what is frequently described as 'avant garde'. 'Frank's Wild Years', from that album, is a beat-poetry telling of a suburbanite's midlife crisis. A few years later, Tom Waits took the title and adapted it into a play, which he then adapted into an album - one that did not feature the track in question. Note that this is a rare case on this list where the song's release predates the album's release. Note also that for want of an apostrophe, the song and the album don't have the exact same title.
7.	SHEER HEART ATTACK BY QUEEN: This particular would-be title track, like 'Waiting for the Sun' started but unfinished during sessions for the album it shares its name with, sat on the shelf for fully three albums until it was finished for 1977's News of the World. In this particular case, the delay was perhaps fortuitous, as by then punk had exploded onto the musical scene, and Queen was able to rewrite the lyrics to transform the song into a criticism of the genre Queen were not fond of.
8.	BRAIN SALAD SURGERY BY EMERSON, LAKE AND PALMER: At a mere three minutes, this stupidly-titled song might have seemed like a strange choice for the stupidly-titled album that is primarily given over to renditions of Blake's 'Jerusalem' and thirty-minute songs. It was recorded during the sessions for that album, but came out as a b-side and later was tacked onto the floor-sweepings album Works, Volume II
9.	FRANCES THE MUTE BY THE MARS VOLTA: Frances the Mute, from 2005, was the second album from the incredibly prolific Mars Volta. The album contained only five extended suite-like songs, but lacked the fourteen-minute title track, which was released on the 'The Widow' single (as the first track, before the a-side). Fans apparently consider this a part of the album proper, playing it as the first track, preceding the album in its released form. Apparently, doing this allows for a very natural-sounding segue.
10.	DRY BY PJ HARVEY: PJ Harvey's critically-acclaimed début album did not feature its title track, which instead showed up as a b-sde to her début single 'Dress' (for whatever reason, it also showed up on sophomore album release Rid of Me). This particular gambit seems to have been quite popular in 1990s 'alternative' music since, in addition to the examples above, it also applies to Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, Pulp's His 'n Hers and Beck's Midnite Vultures among others.

Ten Political Moustaches

Here in Canada, we're only days away from a federal election. What's really shaking up the scene is that for the first time in ages we'll have a leader who might well have been inspired by Stalin or Lenin... not in his politics, I don't mean, but in his facial-hair decisions. That, by the standards of 2011, is revolutionary.

1.	JACK LAYTON: Asked recently about the reason for his surge in popularity in Québec, Jack Layton apparently quipped, "je ne sais pas... moustache?" He's not far wrong. Whether or not Layton radically changes the electoral landscape of Canada next week, it's already a guarantee that he'll change the relationship the voting public has with political face fur.
2.	HAROLD MACMILLAN: After all, to find a moustache in the PMO, in the UK at least, you have to go all the way back to the early sixties and the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Macmillan was Prime Minister during the first rush of Beatlemania, that's how long our leaders' upper lips have been shorn. A quick scan of Wikipedia suggests he was a decent man, best-known for decolonisation in Africa. And for saying, 'events, my dear boy, events'.
3.	THOMAS DEWEY: In the United States, you have to go back much further. The last time a moustache was a serious competitor for the White House was all the way back in 1948, when the Republican candidate was Thomas Dewey, bizarrely best known for not defeating Truman, whatever the newspaper said that day. His historic loss was so tragic that a soup strainer has ever since been seen as a curse on the President. Okay, not really.
4.	MOAMMAR GADDAFI: It's probably folks like this who have put the moustache into disfavour. To be fair, Gaddafi hasn't been rocking a moustache very long, but God knows it's a hideous addition ot a hideous person. He doesn't seem fully capable of growing a moustache or a goatee, so I'm not sure why he tries. Especially when the curly locks are, in contrast, quite striking.
5.	R. TAYYIP ERDOGAN: The moustache is perhaps more common in that approximate area of the world. In Turkey, for example, it's the rare Prime Minister or President that doesn't have a small animal on his top lip. Here's the current PM, Erdogan, but it could have been almost any of them.
6.	LECH WALESA: After all, the moustache is the symbol of liberty, of workers overcoming the aparattus of the state. Or of grandfatherliness. Both work in the case of cuddly-old-guy Lech Walesa, who could donate some of that full and manly moustache to Gaddafi and never even notice.
7.	V.I. LENIN: This very photogenic gentleman, after all, created a vogue for facial hair and a vogue for revolutionary workers' communes. "Let me in, let me in", cried the Mensheviks. "Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin", replied Lenin.
8.	JOSEF STALIN: And then we get Stalin. I only had room for two moustachioed mass-murderers on this list, so the famous Hitler you-missed-a-spot gets cut (ho, ho, ho). But Gaddafi gets in, and here is the fearsome 'stache of the post-Lenin era in Russia. Stalin's moustache was so loathed that Brezhnev's destalinisation was also effectively a demoustachisation, as no subsequent Soviet leader wore one, excepting of course Brezhnev, who had two above his eyes.
9.	EMILIANO ZAPATA: Wikipedia will tell you that Emiliano Zapata, the turn-of-the-century Mexican revolutionary who sought to overthrow the quasi-feudal state of affairs there, is best known for his (admittedly cool) aphorism, "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." However, the truth is that Zapata is best known for one of history's most awesome moustaches this side of Salvador Dalí. It might not do much for the fight against Mexican stereotyping, but it does plenty for the fight against boring facial hair.
10.	CHESTER A. ARTHUR: Something Zapata had in common with the 21st President of the USA, who might, like Jack Layton, have been Canadian (take that, birthers!), who was a 'Stalwart' Republican, and who had truly fearsome muttonchops joined by a healthy moustache.

Ten Things That Come in Groups of Seven

"All seven and we'll watch them fall," Prince once said, "They stand in the way of love and we will smoke them all." But Prince was already well on his way to becoming a raving lunatic. A brilliant one, sure, but a raving lunatic all the same.

Still, there's a reason he named his song "7" and not, say, "11". Seven is a 'signifying' number, filled with all kinds of supernatural significance. But it's awkward and lopsided; it's the first prime number to really feel like one, defying all attempts to comfortably break it up into smaller pieces. Additionally, if you need proof that mathematicians are insane, seven is a 'happy number', it's the base of the 7-aliquot tree, and n = 7 is the first natural number for which the next statement does not hold: "Two nilpotent endomorphisms from Cⁿ with the same minimal polynomial and the same rank are similar." Er, sure. Whatever.

More importantly, there are many things that come in groups of seven. Like these.

1.	THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD: The patron saint of websites such as this one, Herodotus (484 - 425 BCE) would be amazed at how his best-of list, scrawled perhaps on a placemat over a pint or two with drinking buddy Callimachus of Cyrene, has survived 2500 years despite being a woefully adequate list of by-now-forgotten oddities located int he eastern Mediterranean region (and thus as representative of the 'world' as baseball's 'World Series'). The truth is it hasn't really survived, both in that no manuscripts of the era exist, meaning we know the list only through hearsay, and in that the average person, if asked to name them, will confidently spout off a completely random list of seven places that will probably share only the Pyramids of Giza with the actual list. Mind you, that list (perhaps containing the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, those big heads on Easter Island...) will be superior to Herodotus' (the Mausowhat?).
2.	THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS: We have Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey to thank for permanently turning this list into horror-show memories. But it's an odd list, really - the same religion that gives us 'all sins are equal in the eyes of the Lord' gives us a list of seven that are, well, superbad. Oh, there's also the Ten Commandments, which overlaps this particular list only slightly. I mean, it doesn't have sloth. Or gluttony.
3.	THE SEVEN DAYS OF THE WEEK: Where the day is based on the earth's rotation on its axis, the month is traditionally based on the moon's revolution around the earth, and the year is based on the earth's revolution around the sun, the week seems to be based on nothing more than superstitions about the number 'seven'. Not quite a quarter of a month, a week seems most closely connected to the Judeo-Christian creation myth. Yet seven-day weeks existed in other parts of the world too, in addition to all kinds of variants such as the ten-day week of the French Revolution, the five- and six-day weeks in the early years of the USSR, or the five-day week still used in Indonesia, where (get this) it is used overlapping with the Gregorian seven-day week in 35-day cycles. Also of note is the eight-day week used in Liverpool in the mid-1960s.
4.	THE SEVEN HILLS OF ROME: Here's a curiosity: The city of Rome attaches significance to the fact that it was built on seven hills. People talk about the 'seven hills of Rome', all east of the river Tiber, in the heart of Rome. Now, Rome is a city that likes its creation myths: recall it was founded by a pair of twins that were raised by a wolf. But what's stranger is there are fully fifty-one cities that claim to be situated on seven hills, from world cities such as Barcelona, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mecca, Moscow and Tehran to humbler world-city aspirants such as Dunedin, New Zealand; Kampala, Uganda; Thiruvananthapuram, India; and Yonkers, USA. There doesn't seem to be anything much impressive about having eight hills in your city.
5.	THE PLEIADES: The Pleiades of Greek mythology are a group of seven nymphs also called 'the Seven Sisters', since they were all born to Atlas (who seems to have been quite prolific). In sculpture and art, they tend to dance a lot and tend to be naked a lot. Zeus had his way with three of them, and Poseidon with two. Clearly they got around. So Orion, the big bad guy of the story, decided to hunt them down after daddy Atlas got stuck holding the earth and Zeus decided to protect them by turning them in to stars, which is why a star cluster exists in the night sky called the 'Pleiades'. Orion's up there too, not all that much of a hunter after all, it would seem.
6.	THE SEVEN SAMURAI: Akira Kurosawa's three-and-a-half-hour 1954 samurai epic has to go down as one of history's most-praised films. A cornerstone of the Japanese film industry and of the action movie, it was a huge success domestically and, rare for the era, internationally. So well-received was it internationally that it was immediately nicked and rewritten in Hollywood as a western, The Magnificent Seven, which was still a huge success, both at the box office and in the critics' columns.
7.	THE GROUP OF SEVEN: I don't mean the "G7", which is what the G8 used to be before there were eight of them and can still be played on a guitar in the position 320001. I mean the 'Group of Seven', a group of Canadian artists who no Canadian can remember any of the names of. They painted landscapes of Canadian trees, grass, rver and leaves, and are famous in the government-endorsed way most 'famous Canadians' are famous. Tommy Thompson and Emily Carr, two Canadian landscape artists from the era people actually can name, weren't part of the Group of Seven.
8.	THE HARRY POTTER SERIES: J.K. Rowling, currently unemployed, must now be banging her head against the wall regretting her early rash decision to limit her record-breakingly successful Harry Potter epic to only seven volumes. Warner Brothers might bang her head against the wall too, though at least they've managed to squeeze out an eighth movie. Seven volumes for seven years of Hogwarts, and there are several other sevens popping up in Rowling's magical world. Most obviously, it's the number of horcruxes Voldemort makes. Though I guess technically that's a spoiler.
9.	THE SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN'T SAY ON TELEVISION: George Carlin has gone down in infamy largely for swearing a lot on stage. In his defence, the infamous routine, "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television", is not merely about the shock value of those very words: it's more a discussion about why those words are so shocking, and it's pretty intelligent entertainment. The list is imperfect - 'tits' and 'piss' are relatively tame, and certain worse words are absent from it. But I guess that's the point - language evolves, and our 'dirty words' evolve right along with it. Oh, and I should point out this really refers to broadcast television. If it's a cable-only channel, everything goes.
10.	THE SEVEN CHAKRAS: In short, the chakras are seven areas of the body that, in Hinduism, are... well, energy..., um, places... and... Okay. I give up. I've read explanations of chakras over and over again, and I understand nothing. It's something connected with Hinduism, it's got all kinds of cool pseudo-psychedelic illustrations like the one here, and... well, that's is. I can list the seven chakras, if you want: the first is in the ovaries or prostate, the second in the last bone of the spinal cord, the third in the navel, the fourth in the heart, the fifth in the throat or neck, the sixth in the pineal gland (whatever that is) and the seventh on the top of the head. You know, it's no sillier than the seven deadly sins.

Ten Country Domain Names Rarely Used for Their Real Purposes

I bet, with the benefit of hindsight, if they could redesign the internet, there's a lot they'd probably do differently. We're so used to seeing urls now that we've forgotten how silly and clunky they are, with 'www' stuck on the head and 'com' stuck on the tail. I guess 'dot-com' is supposed to mean 'commercial', but that's silly too. Just as silly as 'country codes', wherein a German-based site, for example, could use '.com' if it wanted to, but if it wanted a bit of a nationalistic twinge, it could go for '.de' too.

They're going all sorts of places with these country codes. If you're based in Russia, you might have a website that dates from the Gorbachev era, and it might end with '.su' ('Soviet Union'). Or it might have come along later and been '.ru'. Or it could be newer than that and have a country code of '.рф', the brand-new Cyrillic country code for Russia. Or rather 'top-level domains', as people in the know call them.

Every country gets one - and many places that aren't really technically countries. Many barely use their TDLs at all, and a handful of them have been lucky enough to have a country name that could be shortened to a commercially-viable two-letter combination, with the result that a domain name designed to represent a country winds up being used for any of a variety of reasons - few having to do with the country in question.

1.	.tv: You might be surprised to learn that Viacom-owned, Mark Knopfler-coveted one-time music channel MTV is based in the USA, not the tiny island nation of Tuvalu (population 10,500, area 26 square kilometres). How, then, do they have the url http://mtv.tv? Well, Tuvalu really launched the genius idea of selling a country's top-level domain to a world hungry for unusual web addresses. The dot-tv country code has been a runaway success due entirely to the country of Tuvalu and the medium of television sharing two letters. The domain name is now one of Tuvalu's main sources of revenue, and the sadness of this sentence from Wikipedia is so complete that I have to quote it directly: "Domain name income paid most of the cost of paving the streets of Funafuti and installing street lighting in mid-2002."
2.	.fm: The Federated States of Micronesia have been able to follow Tuvalu's lead, selling domains with its country code to radio and streaming-based music sites, most notably the UK-based last.fm. Wikipedia observe that the TLD gets "much use related to FM radio; little related to (Micronesia)".
3.	.am: Poor Armenia, of course a much bigger country than the others on this list, is stuck with a radio format way less cool that Micronesia's. Since the AM dial is mostly limited to religious programming and Rush Limbaugh by now, Armenia has had little success hawking the .am domain to radio stations. The Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am is perhaps relieved to note that his name doesn't seem to be a valid url.
4.	.me: Opportunistic Montenegro decided, unpon independence, against a TLD based around its local name "Crna Gora", going instead for one that uses the first and, illogically, fifth letter of its Italian and English name. This must, of course, have nothing to do with a desire to sell its spanking-new domain to 'Web 2.0' sites hoping to launch sites with names like, say, 'meet.me' or 'love.me'. Apparently 71% of registrations have been to Americans.
5.	.to: Does anyone else remember the days when a url like "http://go.to/mycrapband" was the very height of coolness? Does anyone actually remember Tonga, an island nation of 104,000 people whose main claim to fame is the Gloria Estefan song (oh wait, that was 'Conga'). You don't see that kind of url around much anymore, but there must have been a stretch of a few years there where it made Tongans feel pretty damn cutting-edge.
6.	.cm: I'm sure everyone at one point or another has typed in a .cm url, even if we couldn't find Cameroon on a map (hint: it's in Africa). The TLD is popular for people hoping to capitalise on typographical errors as people attempt to type the much more common .com. McAfee says .cm is the most virus-riddled TLD on the internet.
7.	.nu: Since the only time people ever discuss Niue, population 1400, is to take a stab at pronouncing its 75%-vowel name, they probably don't associate the TLD .nu with it. They probably don't associate .nu with the English word 'new' either, though that's what Niueans were hoping for. Scandinavians use it for news channels, since 'nu' means 'now' in their languages. And the French, though the government of Niue tries to stop them, use it for porn, since 'nu' means 'nude' to them.
8.	.gs: It's tough to see much 'proper' use for this country code, belonging to South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, a British territory near Antarctica whose population of 30 people includes museum staff. What creeps me out more than a group of islands in the middle of nowhere having a population of only thirty people is that same island group having an active and manned museum. Anyway, since they probably spend more time typing sentences over and over again on typewriters and putting holes in doors with axes, the locals get less use from the TLD than blo.gs, a blog-related site with little going for it except a cute url.
9.	.us: Based on the title of this article, I'm not sure about this one, because like Americans themselves, I'm not sure quite what the 'intended use' of the .us domain name is actually meant to be. Americans do just fine without a country code, and I bet a fair percentage of Americans are completely unaware that the .us TLD even exists. The only place I've ever really seen it is for del.icio.us, the bookmarking website that seems to have gotten bored of its random dots and become 'delicious.com'. So now it has no reason whatsoever to exist.
10.	.cx: The practically-unknown Australian possession Christmas Island uses .cx, whose main reason for existing is not in fact to display pictures of men stretching their anuses as wide as possible.