The Green Man Pub in Wellington offers the 30ml shots for a princely sum of £12 - and apparently it's going down a treat with regulars.

The gastro-pub serves the drink chilled fresh from a Christchurch stallion farm and each shot contains about 300 million individual horse sperm cells.

Green Man pub co-owner Steven Drummond is to blame for the grimace-inducing drink, which he explained is knocked back by both male and female customers.

He advises his customers to shoot the sticky horse semen back in one gulp rather than attempt to sip the bizarre concoction.

He came up with the idea when trying to invent a new drink to spice-up a local food challenge.

Included amongst the millions of people interested in miniatures was Colleen Moore, a silent film star whose career fizzled a bit when the talkies came out. But movies weren’t her only passion: a love of miniatures was passed down to her from her father, and in 1928, she enlisted the help of a set designer friend to make a remarkably detailed eight-foot miniature “fairy castle.”

This is not your average dollhouse, folks. It's Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle. Here’s a small sampling of the massive treasures contained inside:

Cinderella's Drawing Room

Great Hall

The Dining Room

No, she's not in a state of shock, nor is she hunting for plankton -- she's simply waiting for the dentist to polish her pearly whites, just like any other conscientious robot. Known as the Showa Hanako 2, this humanoid was originally developed last year as a tool for dentists looking to practice new procedures. Now, engineers at Japan's Showa University have updated their dental denizen, adding a motorized head and replacing her PVC skin with a more realistic silicon coating. She also boasts speech recognition capabilities and can execute freakishly natural movements, including blinking, sneezing, coughing and, under more unsavory circumstances, even choking. See her in action for yourself, after the break.

Children are golden rays of sunshine. They are our pride and joy, our reason for being, the icing on the cake of life. They are also soul-sucking parasites that will rob you of your youth, energy, and hard-earned money. Perhaps this sounds crass, but there’s truth to the conventional wisdom that having kids changes everything. Suddenly your life is no longer your own. So while you’re footloose and child-free, here are thirteen things, from the general (travel) to the specific (ride a mechanical bull), you should do before spitting one out.

1. Travel for an extended period of time. Kids, as lovable as they are, impede mobility. Get a Eurorail pass, book a last-minute airfare deal, and set your auto-response. If a backpack is involved, all the better.

2. Ride a mechanical bull. There is an unspoken rule of motherhood that says, “Thou shalt not put your lady parts on a mechanized beast of burden after birthing another human being.” Imagine your mother on a mechanical bull. See?

3. Invest in some self-exploration. Whether you’re reflecting through therapy, meditation, or an endless bowl of pappardelle, the important thing is to get in touch with the deepest parts of yourself before those parts are drowned out by the midnight screams of a colicky infant.

4. Devote a year to your career. While these days many women seem to have it all, it’s extremely hard to give both parenting and your career the full attention you’d like. Careers need nurturing just like children do. Before you start a family, consider spending a year focusing on clarifying and advancing your career goals.

5. Learn how to cook. The reason for this is twofold: 1) cooking can be a relaxing, enjoyable, and even luxurious activity when you have the time for it; 2) it will come in handy when your four-year-old decides she will only eat foods that are white.

6. Do something dangerous. Diving out of planes, running with the bulls, and climbing Mt. Everest should not be something you have to discuss with your life insurance agent.

7. Get a degree. Chances are if you wait until after you have kids to go back to school, you’ll never do it. Telling your kids to do their homework is a lot less effective when you’re procrastinating on your own.

8. Sow your wild oats. Whatever that means to you. No judgment.

9. Go to a topless beach. Even if you manage to avoid the pancake situation that follows breast-feeding, unless you’re Heidi Klum, your post-baby body is going to look like a mean joke compared to your pre-baby body. Take the girls out now before they start to feel like udders.

10. Learn a second language. If you think you’ll have space in your brain to learn Spanish, Japanese, or even pig Latin when half of your gray matter is devoted to things like your child’s classmates’ food allergies and what time ballet ends on Tuesdays in the summer, bless you.

11. Take an epic road trip. It will be a lot more fun for everyone involved if there’s not a Greek chorus of “Are we there yet?” coming from the backseat.

12. Quit your job. Living on ramen noodles for three months while you search for a job you like better is heroic. Making your kids eat ramen noodles for three months while you search for a job you like better is child abuse.

13. Sleep in. Get it while you can.

When legendary sex symbol Bo Derek appeared on Oprah a few months ago, Oprah kept pressing her to tell the world something profound about being a beautiful woman, and Bo kept brushing off the questions, saying, “It’s just about the way the bones line up.” That felt pretty profound to me. In our culture, the standard of beauty is narrow, and every day we face countless reminders of the ways we fall short. When it comes down it, though, our society’s definition of beauty is simple and unromantic: it’s high cheekbones and a button nose and long legs and a small waist and so on and so on. We can only congratulate or punish ourselves so many times for the way our bones line up. Here are 50 vastly different definitions of beauty that I know to be true…

1. It is beautiful to speak another language. It is beautiful to try.

2. Beauty is long hair, and short hair; brown, black, pink, yellow, or white. Beauty is a smooth bald head.

3. If you have been to hell and back, your resilience is beautiful.

4. Asking questions—especially “why?”—is always beautiful. Why? Because curiosity is beautiful.

5. You are beautiful when you are afraid to do something, and you do it anyway.

6. Flat stomachs are beautiful, sure, but big, soft bellies are beautiful, too.

7. If you can string words together into a sentence, and you’re brave enough to let someone else read it, that’s beautiful.

8. Beauty is putting paint on canvas, or strumming a guitar, or baking bread, or dancing with your eyes closed.

9. Creating is always beautiful.

10. Your bare face in the morning is beautiful. Ask the person who loves you. It’s true.

11. Beauty is the slightly horrifying realization that you still remember all the lyrics to your favorite song from 6th grade.

12. Remember the time your best friend called you crying? Because only your voice could calm her down? That was beautiful.

13. Beauty is laughing so hard your eyes are watering and your stomach hurts and you’re yelling, “Stop, stop! Seriously, I’m peeing!” (Yes. Peeing your pants can be beautiful.)

14. Beauty is telling a teenage girl that she’s going to be OK.

15. Beauty is calling someone out for saying something hurtful, even if you weren’t the one getting hurt.

16. Your legs are beautiful. No, really. They are. Look at the curve of your calves, the muscles in your thighs, the peaks and valleys of your knee.

17. Letting go of a toxic relationship? Ah, what a beautiful relief!

18. You are beautiful when you rock out so hard at a concert that your neck is sore the next day.

19. Intelligence is beautiful.

20. Worldliness is beautiful.

21. Compassion is very, very beautiful.

22. Beauty is wearing an outfit so fierce that when people compliment you on it you say, “I know, right?” and then, “Oh, I mean, thank you.”

23. Strong opinions are beautiful.

24. Respecting other people’s strong opinions is beautiful too.

25. Beauty is your hometown, whether you love it or hate it, because it helped make you who you are.

26. Beauty is telling a dirty joke and laughing so hard nobody can hear the punchline.

27. Women who never wear makeup, whatever their reasons, are beautiful.

28. Women who always wear makeup, whatever their reasons, are beautiful.

29. Floating in the ocean is a beautiful feeling.

30. Your eyes are beautiful. Nobody else has eyes like yours. They are deep and inquisitive and instantly recognizable.

31. The way our bodies tell the truth—we blush when we are attracted to someone, we blink twice when we lie—is beautiful.

32. Orgasms are beautiful.

33. Beauty is being comfortable enough with someone else to be silent. As a character in the movie Best In Show put it, “We could talk or not talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”

34. Beauty is being able to walk gracefully in high heels.

35. Beauty is digging your bare feet into the sand.

36. Beauty is sitting very still with your thoughts.

37. It is beautiful to find the strength to ask for help when you need it. We all feel like we’re drowning sometimes, and we would all be glad to pull you from the rapids.

38. Beauty is loving your pet as much as they love you.

39. Beauty is a fresh flower in your hair.

40. The physical remnants of our life experiences—wrinkles, stretch marks, scars, and sun spots—are beautiful.

41. Wisdom is beautiful.

42. Humility is beautiful.

43. Beauty is the sweaty satisfaction of a hard workout.

44. It is beautiful to finally tell someone your secret.

45. It is beautiful to turn the worst night into the funniest story.

46. Beauty is being able to truly enjoy the food you eat.

47. It is beautiful to be grateful to all the strong women who came before you: the ones who raised you, the ones who fought for your rights, the ones who were burned at the stake because they were too powerful.

48. Giving birth is beautiful. (Messy, but beautiful.)

49. Freedom is beautiful. You are free to fill your life with the things that make you happy.

50. Happiness is beautiful.

Morocco is renowned for its colors, with its cities awash in vivid shades of red, purple, green and gold. But things are a little different in Chefchaoen, a town in the northwest nestled among the Rif Mountains. Take a stroll through Chefchaoen’s streets and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that isn’t painted a particular shade of blue.

Chefchaoen, founded in 1471, was once a refuge of Jews and converted Christians of Muslim heritage. They sought refuge in the safety of these mountains after the Spanish Reconquista in medieval times, a period in which Christian kingdoms retook Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian peninsula. The town was painted the powder-blue of tekhelel, a natural dye made of shellfish. In the bible, Israelites are commanded to use this dye to color one of the threads of their prayer shawl.


Though tekhelel is no longer available and the city’s population of Jews has diminished, the tradition has carried on through the centuries. Blue pigment is sold in pots and bags throughout the city, and residents faithfully refresh the paint on their homes, flower pots, balcony railings, doors and practically everywhere else in the community. Even the interiors of many of these buildings are painted blue.


The pigments may vary in color now, ranging from periwinkle to aqua, but the effect is no less spectacular, providing a monochromatic stage from which every other color dazzles, particularly the merchandise hung on walls outside of markets and shops.


Of course, Chefchaouen is known for more than just its unique paint job. The city offers handicrafts that aren’t available in other areas of Morocco, such as wool garments and blankets, and is also one of the main producers of cannabis in the nation. It is often sold in great abundance at stands alongside fruits and vegetables. On holidays Chefchaouen is filled with tourists, especially the Spanish. Perhaps they’re making up for lost time, as the city was closed to European visitors until 1920.

Men and women are equals in the grandest sense of the word, yes. But just as our bodies are undeniably different, so, too, are our minds. This means, as crazy as it may seem, that how you experience the world isn’t necessarily how your wife experiences it. You can’t fight the evolutionary and social causes behind these differences. Trust me, I and much greater men have tried, all in vain. But you can at least recognize these and other differences, which are explained in very readable detail in “The Female Brain,” by Louann Brizendine, M.D. These insights will make communicating with your wife and she with you much easier. In other words, you’ll more often find yourselves of one mind.

1) She Remembers More. The hippocampus, the part of the brain mostly responsible for memories, is larger in women. That’s why women are better at retaining memories, the good ones and the bad ones, like that time you bought her a Thighmaster. If it seems that your wife can recall tiny details about things, such things as your anniversary dinner six years ago, that you barely remember, well, there’s likely a physiologically reason for that.

Lesson: Don’t argue with your wife over details about something that happened months or years ago. Odds are, she’s right.

2) There’s a Reason She Cries. Women’s brains are configured in such a manner that they are four times more likely to cry than men. One reason for this is that to the male brain surprise, it isn’t so hot at picking up subtle emotional cues in others (with anger being an exception). Sometimes tears are the only way for women to get us to take notice of their feelings; otherwise, without any trace of malice, we keep our focus squarely on the night’s episode of “Ice Road Truckers.”

Lesson: If you wish your wife cried less, work harder at paying attention to the small ways she’s telegraphing her feelings. Better yet, make a habit of asking her how she feels.

3) Her Instincts Are Solid. The parts of the brain linked to gut feelings are larger and more discerning in women. In other words, there’s a factual basis behind the much-touted notion of a “woman’s intuition.” Disregard it at your own peril. And, by all means, if you’re going to the race track, it might help to have her along.

Lesson: Pay attention to your wife’s hunches. She may be picking up on things that your dude brain isn’t even noticing.

4) Her Brain Changes. A lot. Because of menstruation and menopause, the female brain goes through considerably more change than our male brain. In fact, during any given month, some parts of the woman’s brain can change as much as 25 percent! Once past puberty, the male brain is largely spared anything akin to the monthly hormone riot that is menstruation, and the dramatic brain makeover that is menopause. Count your blessings, man, count your blessings.

Lesson: If it sometimes feels that you’re talking to a different woman, well, in some ways, you are. Be patient, dear sir. She’ll thank you for it.

5) Her Head Is Filled with Words. When it comes to the language centers of the brain, women’s work differently than men’s. On average, women speak at a rate of 250 words per minute, while men average half that. In the course of a day, a woman will speak some 20,000 words, while we guys utter about 7,000. This is why we husbands sometimes struggle to keep focused on all our wives are saying, and why we sometimes struggle to find the right words, unless, of course, we’re telling fart jokes, in which case the words flow effortlessly.

Lesson: Push yourself to listen ever harder, and to respond aloud with your reaction so that your wife knows you heard her. Above all, recognize that sometimes talking is her way of processing.

Knowing these, and other, differences between your brain and your wife’s, will make you smarter and you both happier.