The Battle of East and West

MANILA, Philippines – Short and sweet.

Manny Pacquiao’s astounding two-round shortwork of the supposedly bigger, stronger and meaner Ricky Hatton was actually Pacman’s shortest winning match since his one-round stoppage of his challenger for the IBF super bantamweight crown back in 2002.

Guns ablaze, the 30-year-old Pacquiao stunned Hatton with powerful right and left hooks all throughout, sending the Hitman down twice in the first and putting him to sleep in the fateful second.

The shortened “Battle of East and West" megafight lasted a total of five minutes and 59 seconds, Pacquiao’s quickest work since annihilating Thai Fahprakorb Rakkiatgym in only 2:46 to retain the 122-lb strap seven years back.

Throughout his career, the hard-hitter from General Santos City had finished off six of his foes within a round while seven others fell in two, including Hatton for the IBO light welterweight title, Jorge Elicier Julio for the IBF superbantam belt, and Reynante Jamili for the WBC International superbantam strap.

Pacquiao’s shortest demolition of a marquee fighter came against Mexican legend Erik “El Terible" Morales, who went down at the 2:57 mark of the third in their 2006 superfeatherweight gig
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Against Hatton last Saturday in Las Vegas (Sunday in Manila) Pacquiao was probably at his meanest in years.

Even before the protagonists climbed the ring, trainer Freddie Roach said a KO win within three rounds was inevitable for the Filipino superstar.

How come, Freddie?

Hatton, he said, had an onrushing style and a glaring doughnut hole on the defense – a perfect fit for his faster ward.

“Everytime Ricky throws his left hand, he pulls it back, he cocks it and he’s wide open for a short right hook in the inside from a southpaw stance," Roach said in a post-fight interview posted at Skysports.com.

“We worked on that everyday in the gym, the timing of every shot and it just worked beautifully," he added.

And worked beautifully it really did.

With Pacquiao landing his newly-developed right hooks to set up his vicious lefts, the Filipino pound for pound king took the lights out of Hatton with a stunning one-punch TKO in the second round.

The all-Pacquiao show started right at the opening bell when he sent Hatton to the canvas not once but twice, the first with a left-right-left combo and the next with a jarring right just before the first canto ended.

It was essentially over from there, if you ask Roach.

“I knew it’s over because Ricky doesn’t have the ability to adjust. He fights the same way over and over again. I watch him (on video) for 2-1/2 months, I knew him pretty well," he said.

He actually predicted a three-round KO, a round more than how long the actual fight lasted but Roach had no complaints. After all, it was still the same result; his pupil just added extra sugar coating to an already sweet triumph. –GMANews.TV

The Best Gift Ever - TIME !

The importance of things can be measured by how much time we are willing to invest in them.

The more time you give to something,

the more you reveal its importance and value to you.

If you want to know a person's priorities

just look at how they use their time.

TIME is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it.

You can make more money, but you can't make more time.

When you give someone your time,

you are giving them a portion of your life that you'll never get back.

Your time is your life.

That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.

Source: The Purpose Driven Life - Rick Warren

Drive me!!!

Can You Keep a Secret?

Of Course I have secrets.

Of Course I do. Everyone has a few secrets. It's completely normal.

I'm not talking about big, earth-shattering secrets. Not the president-is-planning-to-bomb-Japan-and-only-Will-Smith-can-save-the-world tpe of secrets. Just normal, everyday litte secrets.

Like, for example, here are few random secrets of mine, off the top of my head:

1. My Kate Spade bag is a fake.

2. I love sweet sherry, the least cool drink in the universe.

3. I have no idea what NATO stands for. Or what exactly it is.

4. I weigh 128 pounds. Not 118, like my boyfriend, Connor, thinks. (Although, in my defense, I was planning to go on a diet when I told him that. And, to be fair, it is only one number different.)

5. I've always thought Connor looks a bit like Ken. As in Barbie and Ken.

6. Sometimes, when we're right in the middle of passionate sex, I suddenly want to laugh.

7. I lost my virginity in the spare bedroom with Danny Nussbaum while Mum and Dad were downstairs watching Ben-Hur.

8. I've already drunk the wine that Dad told me to save for twenty years.

9. Sammy the goldfish at home isn't the same goldfish that Mum and Dad gave me to look after when they went to Egypt.

10. When my colleague Artemis really annoys me, I feed her plant orange juice. (Which is pretty much everyday)

11. I once had this weird lesbian dream about my flatmate Lissy.

12. My G-string is hurting me.

13. I've always had this deep-down conviction that I'm not like everybody else, and there's an amazingly exciting new life waiting for me just around the corner.

14. I have no idea what this guy inthe gray suit is going on about.

15. Plus, I've already forgotten his name

Some interesting Trivias

1. Just how dead is the Dead Sea?
The Dead Sea is so called because of the high salt content of its waters. That spells instant death for fish that happen to wander in, as they occasionally do from the Jordan River. In fact it kills most animal and plant life--with the exception of tourists, who love the property of the salt water that makes it so easy to float on.
Bacteria survive in the Dead Sea, though, as do brine shrimp and a class of plants called halophytes that love salt water. So it's not entirely dead, although not exactly a wild and crazy place, either.
(Sources: The Handy Science Answer Book)

2. Do fish drink water?
The answer is yes, they drink it. Saltwater fish do so under duress. Gulp! The greater concentration of salt in the water outside their bodies is constantly drawing the less salty fluid inside them out through their skin, a porous membrane, through the process of osmosis. Therefore they have to be drinking constantly to replace that lost fluid. Freshwater fish don't have this problem and don't need to drink, but they take in some water anyway when they open their mouths to eat.
(Source: "Do fish drink water?" by Bill McLain)

3. Does a person's life really flash before them when they're dying?
So many people have described this phenomenon -- which makes it real enough -- that scientists have been compelled to try to explain it. Two theories have been proposed. The first holds that a threat as traumatic as that of imminent demise from any cause, not just drowning, automatically triggers the release of memories that one always retains but usually doesn't recall. The other explanation points to hardware breakdown. Cutting the flow of oxygen to the brain makes its electrical impulses go haywire, catapulting long-stored memories into one's consciousness helter skelter.
(Source: "Reader's Digest Did you know?")

4. What causes jet lag?
The funny thing is that the cause most people would point to, a change in time zones with the accompanying confusion with meal and bed times is apparently not the only answer. Many people flying North to South, without changing time zones, also suffer from jet lag. So what else could be the cause? Most likely it's the pressurized cabin with its low humidity, the plane's vibration, engine noise, and radiation from the high altitude. In other words, your body is being assaulted while you sit there with your seat belt fastened. The solution? Drink plenty of water, move around the cabin, and take vitamin supplements.
(Source: "Reader's Digest Did you know?")

5. How do snake charmers do it?
Snake charming is so old that it's mentioned in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (I can't think of a more likely profession that would get you into that book!) Westerners have always had a morbid fascination with the practice, witness how often the image of the guy with the flute, basket and (ech!) cobra appears in paintings, films and novels.
So how do they do it? Who said "carefully?" You're right. Only a moron would get too casual with a cobra. We can eliminate the flute as a factor. It's a prop: cobras don't have ears. Instead the charmer, who has been trained for the job since childhood, simply knows how to annoy the reptile enough--say, by waving his hand in its face--to make it rear up, but not so much that it will strike. It's show biz. That's all.
(Source: How do they do that? by Caroline Sutton)

6. Why don't people go zebra-back riding?
The reason people don't go cantering around on zebras is that zebras are critters that would just as soon kick you in the teeth as transport you from here to there. It's a matter of how they evolved. You wouldn't try to pet an ocelot just because you live with a house cat, would you? Accept that this is a horse of another color--and another temperament. Admire it from a distance.

So what, really, is this thing called LOVE

Scientists say that the brain chemistry of infatuation is akin to mental illness—which gives new meaning to "madly in love."



In the Western world we have for centuries concocted poems and stories and plays about the cycles of love, the way it morphs and changes over time, the way passion grabs us by our flung-back throats and then leaves us for something saner. If Dracula—the frail woman, the sensuality of submission—reflects how we understand the passion of early romance, the Flintstones reflects our experiences of long-term love: All is gravel and somewhat silly, the song so familiar you can't stop singing it, and when you do, the emptiness is almost unbearable.

We have relied on stories to explain the complexities of love, tales of jealous gods and arrows. Now, however, these stories—so much a part of every civilization—may be changing as science steps in to explain what we have always felt to be myth, to be magic. For the first time, new research has begun to illuminate where love lies in the brain, the particulars of its chemical components.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher may be the closest we've ever come to having a doyenne of desire. At 60 she exudes a sexy confidence, with corn-colored hair, soft as floss, and a willowy build. A professor at Rutgers University, she lives in New York City, her book-lined apartment near Central Park, with its green trees fluffed out in the summer season, its paths crowded with couples holding hands.

Fisher has devoted much of her career to studying the biochemical pathways of love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and wane. One leg casually crossed over the other, ice clinking in her glass, she speaks with appealing frankness, discussing the ups and downs of love the way most people talk about real estate. "A woman unconsciously uses orgasms as a way of deciding whether or not a man is good for her. If he's impatient and rough, and she doesn't have the orgasm, she may instinctively feel he's less likely to be a good husband and father. Scientists think the fickle female orgasm may have evolved to help women distinguish Mr. Right from Mr. Wrong."

One of Fisher's central pursuits in the past decade has been looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine. Fisher and her colleagues Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown recruited subjects who had been "madly in love" for an average of seven months. Once inside the MRI machine, subjects were shown two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one.

What Fisher saw fascinated her. When each subject looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure—the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus—lit up. What excited Fisher most was not so much finding a location, an address, for love as tracing its specific chemical pathways. Love lights up the caudate nucleus because it is home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which Fisher came to think of as part of our own endogenous love potion. In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don't.

Source: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/