oh my god. The second picture, with the tiger in front of the orangutan is the cutest thing.

Maybe the waiter misting thing isn't really port, but is like Binaca or some other breath thing?

Rich people with halitosis who require dessert captains to keep them minty fresh?

perzactlly! It's all a result of lighting and smoking $100 bills.

None of this may be logical or supportable, it's just something that makes me feel a little sick

I think it just has to be supported by the fact that it makes you feel sick.

Part of me believes that the misting might enhance the taste sensation (my line of food-fetishising is much earlier than yours, and has to do with lowering the caloric content of foods when so many people are not getting enough calories in the first place), but getting someone else to do it is silly, and why is the atomiser worth so much money?

why is the atomiser worth so much money?

It's crystal... and it gets its power from the souls of orphans?

I hope these are hard-to-find orphans, because, in general, they're neither hard to obtain nor create.

not orphans then...37-year-old virgins.

So apparently, believing that a ghost is watching you makes you less likely to cheat.

At first I thought you meant "cheat" sexually. And I thought, well, yeah, it would be a mood-killer.

From that article:

The "representational concern" theory of the purpose of supernatural agents predicts that participants primed to think about a dead graduate student in the room will act as though someone is watching them, and therefore be less likely to cheat than participants in the control or in memoriam conditions.

I'd have been more interested if they had had 3 groups: one with the regular test, one with the in memoriam message, and one with the message and the ghost story. Because honestly, that little message by itself reminds people that the test is the result of someone's hard work. I think that makes a lot people less likely to cheat. It's the opposite of the "it's okay to steal from a faceless corporation" effect.

And looking at the study, all of the participants were students in an intro to psychology class. If none of them guessed that it wasn't REALLY a spatial intelligence test, I'll be quite depressed.

I'd have been more interested if they had had 3 groups: one with the regular test, one with the in memoriam message, and one with the message and the ghost story.

They did, actually. It was only the "message and ghost story" group that had significantly less cheating.

Oh, oops. Then... never mind! Ghosts made me skim!

I'll look at the paper again.