After going through the D&D 4th Edition books again, and reading up on a few articles, we had a chat with our Wednesday D&D group, discussed all the options, and it looks like we'll be sticking with D&D 3.5, albeit with some modifications (like switching to a spell-point system).

Some of the reasons for this are:

• The reliance of 4E on battle mats and figurines during combat, and the precise character positions etc. during combat is going to be a problem for our easy-going group.


• 4E breaks compatibility with older versions of D&D; it's essentially a new system, and if we have to change systems altogether, why 4E over something else? We have years of experience in D&D ranging from Basic to 3.5, all of which had the same basic ethos, and it makes sense to leverage that. 4E is a system taken from MMORPGs.


• The constrictions in 4E seem irritating - stuff like the skills one can use, and the requirement for parties to have each of the four major foodgroups roles represented. We like it casual.


• Increased complexity in powers etc. I like the idea behind it, but it sounds like it'll be a real problem for our group to keep track of. We're into the role-playing more than the roll-playing.

I do want to give the spell-point system a try; that might resolve one of my bugbears in 3.5, the whole thing about "memorising" spells every day. I know it's based on Vance's books, but it seems strangely out of place in a fantasy world, and it does mean a fair bit of housekeeping on daily spell selections if you want to do it right.

I do like 4E's "at will" and "per encounter" powers for the various classes; it may be nice to do something like that in 3.5, especially for the spell-casting classes (certain cantrips?).

This fucked-up story was amusing...

( Cut for large image )

From icanhaschzbrgr:

I saw a couple of movies recently.



Amelia is a biopic about Amelia Earhart, her relationship with George Putnam, and her last flight. I must admit, I found it rather boring. Hilary Swank got Earhart spot-on, in looks, at least, but Richard Gere was badly miscast; he was channelling Billy Flynn from Chicago. From an authenticity point of view, Amelia looked really, really good, but sadly, that didn't rescue it.

One interesting factoid: while I was watching it, I was admiring the South Seas island scenery, and thinking how much it looked like the scenery around our holiday home in Kei Mouth. I later found that those scenes had been filmed on the Wild Coast, while is across the Kei River from Kei Mouth. The hotel the cast and crew stayed at was in fact just across the river!



I also saw Inglourious Basterds a few weeks ago, and didn't like it much. The first part was a bit of an "if only" wankfest; the rest was more interesting, but somewhat choppy and not very satisfying. Brad Pitt overacted ludicrously. I must admit, I don't get Tarantino movies, and it's hard to criticise them, because if you do, you're told that that's the way Tarantino intended the movie to be, and it's a homage to such-and-such.

Here's a little picture spammery.

This is a picture of a little pool formed in one of the holes of a face brick on top of a wall. It seemed to me to be almost a little microcosm, a tiny fantasy swimming pool for strange creatures.



Here's a picture of the slightly eclipsed blue moon on New Year's Eve last year.



This is what's been done to Johannesburg's Hillbrow Tower in preparation for the Soccer World Cup this year.

We've had a few spiders around the house lately, and I took a couple of pics.

( Pics cut for the arachnophobes )

So, it finally dawned on someone that the less-primitive-looking dowsing rod being used in Iraq to detect explosives doesn't work. What a surprise.

The military personnel responsible for approving and buying this "gadget" should be court-martialled, and the creator should be hammered by the law as far as possible. This device, by essentially being a non-functional mock-up, has been responsible for people dying in Iraq.

( Bomb detector may be useless )

How true is this one?

From XKCD:

From I Can Has Cheezburger (icanhaschzbrgr), a new version of Gone With The Wind:

If you've played D&D, you may remember the artwork in the Races chapter of the Player's Handbook, showing male and female examples of the various D&D races.

Well, Matt Jarrett has done something similar, except with the characters being totally nude. Here they are (warning: the pics are probably NSFW):

Male D&D character races
Female D&D character races

I quite like the way he's emphasises the differences in the races.

Here's a bit of interesting stuff for Friday.

Firstly, here's a scan of the menu from a Wimpy (for non-South Africans - an eat-in burger restaurant) from 1983. I don't know what exchange rates were like then - probably around R2 to the US$, but currently the rate is about R7.40 to the US$.

( Cut for large image )

Secondly, here's one of the Grade 12 final mathematics papers for 2009. Apparently something like 60% or so of the students writing this exam failed it. I thought it was relatively easy, especially considering the students had a formula sheet in the exam.

Mathematics P1 November 2009 (warning: the PDF is 4MB in size)

What do you think? Too easy?

I got a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Beta at work, and I've been running that for a week or two. Pretty nice so far; it seems a fair bit quicker than Office 2007, the toolbar ribbons are customisable, and there are a few nice feature improvements. Outlook now uses the ribbon, it supports threaded conversations (though they can be annoying at times - not as nicely done as GMail's), and it has something called "Quick Steps", basically mini-macros that let you do stuff like reply to an email and then delete it, or forward to your manager, etc. So far, 2010 has been really stable too.

I also came across a release of BlackBerry OS 5.0 for the BlackBerry Bold 9000, so I loaded it. It's got a bunch of new features, especially in the look of various settings; things like: a bootup logo and progress bar; separate mailbox for BES; a file manager (not nearly as good as FileScout though); threaded SMS conversations; changes to the media player and picture viewer; and a search bar on many screens. Generally, very nice improvements. What I do like is that I can now run the Wallpaper Changer app, which required OS 4.7 or up; I really like having a different wallpaper every 15 minutes. The upgrade itself wasn't difficult, though I did have to re-enter all my app passwords. On the downside, OS 5.0 seems to use a lot more memory, and it seems to run out every now and again, presenting an hourglass for a couple of minutes. Hopefully a later revision will sort that out.

This is the TEST shipment you asked for

lj-security: twitter
lj-tags: twitter

08:55 People shouldn't leave their cars parked at work when they go away. #fb tweetphoto.com/8683459 #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

I found a copy of the Pocahontas Dances with Smurfs Avatar script on the net. Here it is:

( Cut for image )

Last night we went off to see Sherlock Holmes. I must confess, it was better than I expected, but it was also somewhat disappointing. I thought Jude Law did a decent Watson, but Robert Downey Jr. seemed way overplayed; at no point did I feel he was anything other than Robert Downey Jr. The late 1800s London was nicely down, and I liked that a lot. The plot was somewhat convoluted, and it showed no cleverness at all; I really would have liked to see a clever Sherlock Holmes adventure.

Worst thing about the movie: Hans Zimmer's score. The main theme was quite nice, but it was repeated over and over and over and over again, and he felt the need to fill every single scene with Westerny background guitar twang or strings. Most irritating indeed.



Today we saw Invictus. I'm no big fan of sports movies in general (or sports, for that matter), but the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Nelson Mandela's involvement was a pretty important moment in the history of the new South Africa. I quite got into the film; I thought it was really well done, and it captured South Africa pretty well. Morgan Freeman did Nelson Mandela pretty well; not perfectly, but Mandela is very difficult to mimic. Matt Damon did a surprisingly good Francois Pienaar, and his South African accent was really good. Clint Eastwood did, at points, try too hard to capture emotional moments, and it felt a little forced there; the 747 overflight, for example, tried to create false tension. The movie could have done with 20 minute or so being cut. By and large, the 1995 milieu felt authentic, and I think it'll remind South Africans of the event, and perhaps give some insight to non-South Africans. (Non-SA people, let me know what you thought of it!)

Blasphemy is now illegal in Ireland. Based on the quotes in the article linked here, it is presumably no longer legal in Ireland to publish certain books or sayings by Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Pope Benedict XVI, nor to publish the Bible or Koran.

Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes

This journal is semi-locked. Any entries of a personal nature or that are work-related are locked, and viewable only by LJ friends or specific filters.

If anyone's interested in seeing my Twitter posts here on LJ, please let me know, and I'll add you to the appropriate groups. Obviously, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, it'd be kind of redundant.

I have a few arbitrary posts, but also links to interesting articles and sites.

Since I started using my Blackberry for music, I've been using Windows Media Player to manage my music on my PC. Previously, I used to use WinAmp, which has nice features, but the Blackberry sync software supports only Windows Media Player and iTunes. It wasn't a big hassle to move to WMP.

However, since I recently won an iPod Shuffle, I was left with a bit of a problem: the iPod is supported only by iTunes; there don't seem to be any working alternatives. (I thought we'd moved away from this whole proprietary software thing, but apparently not.)

So I had to install iTunes, and I thought I'd see if it could satisfy my needs well enough to replace WMP. After some googling, I exported my WMP playlists to iTunes, and they came in OK. I tried creating Smart Playlists, and they were OK except that you cannot create a Smart Playlist that is based on the path to any particular music folder, unlike in WMP, and I found that really irritating. WinAmp's dynamic playlists are a fair bit more flexible than iTunes's or WMP's, however.

The interface of iTunes is quite slick, but I prefer WMP's "stacked covers" when viewing artists. iTunes is also unable to retrieve album information and album art unless the album's on iTunes with name etc. exactly the same, which seems to eliminate 95% of my music. WMP, by comparison, is really flexible in that respect, and even lets you choose close matches and edit track names appropriately. iTunes seems to only support album art embedded in the ID3 tags, whereas WMP will read the hidden album art files too. It's also easier to add album art in WMP, with a "paste album art" option. Weirdly, iTunes doesn't dynamically update changed music within the music folders, where WMP does; you have to rescan the folders. iTunes does sync really easily to the Shuffle, but that's what I'd expect.

At the end of the day, I prefer WMP; I'll keep iTunes loaded (though I uninstalled Bonjour almost immediately), and I'll export my playlists from WMP to iTunes every now and again so I can update the Shuffle.

During this whole process, I did manage to do a lot of cleaning up on my music, adding album art (since it's supported on my Blackberry), and finding a whole lot of albums that had never showed up (because they had no appropriate ID3 tags). MP3Tag worked very well for mass updates and cleanups of the tags - things like automatically correcting the case of track names.

Merry Christmas! Hope you all have a lovely time.

Faith healers
I read the headline of the article below, and for a moment, thought the quack faith healers were doing something useful by cleaning the country's roads. Sadly, it appears that they're slaughtering chickens and putting snuff and beer on the roads instead.

( Faith healers cleanse city's dangerous roads )

A night in the shop
This was amusing: shoppers at a department store in Britain were trapped by snow, and spent a lovely night in the bedding department. Sounds like the kids had a lot of fun. Nice going by the store management!

( Trapped shoppers take it lying down )

Gmail's "Tree" theme is showing snow (it shows the weather of one's area)! I only wish; all we had was a thunderstorm...

Got these from my sister in Oxford.

( Star Wars Facebook - cut for images )

So, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, our controversial ex-Minister of Health, died. Rumour goes that her transplanted liver rejected her.

I know it's all politically correct to forgive someone after they've died, but I don't have any sympathy for her. Her HIV/AIDS policies in government led to the premature deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of people.

The Treatment Action Campaign, the organisation that eventually forced government to supply anti-retrovirals, called on South Africans to forgive Manto in a rather pointed, back-handed way (something I thought was rather clever):
"We hope that the world and the mothers whose children died or were infected by HIV/Aids find it in their hearts to forgive her", and "She was a cadre who contributed to the liberation of South Africa, although her HIV/Aids policies made her an enemy of South Africans."

Gareth Cliff, a local DJ, made a Twitter post that made some people rather unhappy, including the former Deputy Minister of Health, Renier Schoeman, who called on Cliff to apologise for his "viscous" [sic] comments.

While Manto may have done some good things during her tenure, all that is overshadowed by her policies that caused so many deaths.

We went to see Avatar last night, and saw it in 3D at Cresta (since they have a newly upgraded theatre).

I thought the special effects and 3D were absolutely outstanding; totally seamless, and it felt entirely believable. I simply couldn't tell where reality became special effects. The 3D animations, textures, etc. of creatures, aircraft, space ships, and the environment seemed to me to be flawless.

The sound effects were impressive, very impressive indeed. Our theatre's speakers were really good; when ships were landing, or vehicles moving, I could feel the vibration right through my body; it felt really convincing.

The scenery was fabulous; much was filmed in New Zealand (what a surprise), but it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't. The night-time ultraviolet was done beautifully, and I loved that; the night-time animal and plant life was lovely.

However, I thought the story was rather predictable and dull - essentially, Dances with Wolves on an alien planet, which was rather a pity given the interesting concept of the avatar. The characters were rather distant, and I found it hard to empathise with them in any way; sadly, they also seemed to largely be stereotyped caricatures, where you could predict exactly which role each would play. Acting was good, within the limited ambit of the characters, though I did think Zoe Saldana was especially good.

James Horner's score was a veritable pastiche of copy & paste from his other scores - Titanic, Enemy at the Gates, Star Trek, and others. Very derivative, and not particularly interesting.

( More, but with spoilers )

The film could have been so much better, but between hiring Weta and ILM, I guess there wasn't enough money left over for an innovative script.

Edit for score.

Can anyone point me to decent 4th Ed. D&D resources? I'm thinking particularly of things like adventures and modules, but anything else useful for 4th Ed. newbies would be handy too.

The new LJ Statistics and My Guests pages are awfully interesting. They've just been released in the newest LJ code release.

So, what were you doing when Y2K rolled around?

Like many of my colleagues, I spent Y2K at my company's data centre, alert for any issues. We didn't have any; everything had been patched and resolved long before, and a goodly number of forests used up in creating paperwork.

10 Years After Y2K -- Stories From the IT Battlegrounds

Sometimes The Onion comes up with amusing stuff...

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God Creates World

December 15, 2009 | Issue 45•51

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

"Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars."

Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

"The Sumerian people must have found God's making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else," said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. "If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week."

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

"These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant," one Sumerian philosopher wrote. "They must be the creation of a complete idiot."

Source: The Onion

Back in the days of bulletin boards, dial-up modems, SLIP/PPP, Winsock, and those things, just about anyone you chatted to online had some IT connection or involvement, and I think it became a natural thing to assume that people who were interested in IT were interested in online communications.

As connecting to the Internet became more prevalent and easier, I started noticing that the people who communicated a lot were the same people who communicated a lot in the real world: the social people. They're they ones who simply took a new medium of communication into their stride. By contrast, I'd have to say that the vast majority of those people I know (socially) who are in IT tend to be among the worst communicators around; they tend not to answer emails, don't get involved in blogging/Twitter/LJ, don't use messaging clients socially, and don't participate in web forums for non-technical reasons. All very interesting, but sad, in some ways.

What do you think?

Blackberry App World was (finally!) made available to Blackberry users in South Africa a few weeks ago. Nice to finally browse all the apps available; because I'm a cheapskate though, that means the free apps. :)

Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 was released yesterday, and I gave it a try. It's far better than the previous beta, and seems slick and quick. It now supports Opera Sync, so all my settings and bookmarks were just downloaded off the net, and it seems better integrated with the Blackberry. On the downside, the tabs are somewhat fiddly, and Opera doesn't have much in the way of useful keyboard shortcuts - stuff like T for top, B for bottom, keys for switching tabs, etc. Also, on mobile pages, having a mouse-cursor is just irritating; I preferred it when scrolling up or down simply ran through the available links on the page. Still, it['s a nice improvement.

Eric Woolfson, my favourite musical artist, died on 1 December of cancer.

Eric was the prime force behind the Alan Parsons Project, and I've been listening to his music for more than two decades - his albums as part of the Project, but also his individual work, like Freudiana, Gambler, Gaudi, Poe and The Alan Parsons Project That Never Was. I love virtually everything he's done, but especially his individual work. A few months ago I bought The Alan Parsons Project That Never Was from his website, and it was the most pleasant music-buying experience I've ever had - I bought the CD, and immediately got the link to download the MP3s as well.

His music was perfectly melancholic when I was feeling depressed, and uplifting when I needed it, and always complex and multifaceted. I loved the themes to his albums.

He may be gone, but his music lives on.

( The Telegraph Obituary )

I helped someone with an iPhone the other day, and it was interesting seeing how it worked. There were some things about it I really liked, and others I wasn't so keen on - at least, based on my shortish experience with the device. (So if I'm wrong about anything, let me know).

I liked the screen; though it's the same resolution as my Blackberry Bold, it's physically large, which helps a bit. The touch interface is really good; I didn't find myself mistyping things much, or having problems touching parts of the interface accurately. Best thing about it, I think, is the whole interface to the App Store and iTunes. It's so easy to download/buy apps either on PC or from the iPhone, and sync to the PC completely seamlessly. In this case, one app had been purchased on the PC, and the others on the iPhone; once I set up iTunes and synced them, all apps were available. I absolutely loved that; it's no wonder the iPhone is market leader in that arena. Obviously the iTunes music sync was good too, and the chap I was helping was delighted by the whole concept - he was happily ripping CDs when I left; not too many options for those who don't like iTunes though.

On the downside: most irksome thing for me was constantly wanting additional options, and looking for an options button. No such thing; if it's not on screen, you don't seem to have any additional choices. Despite the reputation, I found parts of the interface somewhat unintuitive; I suppose that gets better with practice. The touch-keyboard, though good, is no replacement for a real qwerty keyboard, and obviously there's no capability for one-key shortcuts to apps. No automatic correction of apostrophes/capitals that I saw - maybe it's a setting somewhere? The inability to multitask is a bit of a killer, but it does seem that the apps at least suspend and resume again at the same place. Though I've heard how fast the iPhone is, on this one (iPhone 3GS 32GB) there were some significant delays (several seconds, in some cases) when doing things. Maybe just the particular apps? This one (I don't know if it's the case with other service providers) had no built-in free turn-by-turn GPS software, and the owner was going to buy something for $70.

Apple have done a really decent job (especially when it comes to booting the whole smartphone and smartphone apps market).

So it seems that the reports on child molestation in the Irish Catholic Church came to light.

( Bishops hid child abuse )

It's bad enough that the molesting happened in the first place, but such things can - and do - take place in other churches, at schools, and in other organisations or places where children are in the care of sickos. What makes it so awful was that the Church covered everything up, the police cooperated with them, and the Church moved the perpetrators to other parishes or areas where they could carry on their foul deeds. A betrayal of children on a massive, decades-long scale.

In related news, I discovered that the priest who was school chaplain when I was at school, and who was (if I'm not mistaken) convicted on some child porn charges a few years ago, is now a canon in the Anglican church, and is Diocesan Education Officer for the city.

Apparently our esteemed former Minister of Health may be getting a second liver transplant. For those who don't know, Manto had a reputation for heavy drinking, and during her tenure as Health Minister, she and former President Mbeki were instrumental in denying government-supplied antiretroviral drugs to HIV/AIDS patients. Hayibo has this to say:

Dr Johnnie Walker, Dr Jack Daniels on standby for Manto transplant

PRETORIA. South Africa's top surgeons are standing by as speculation mounts that former Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang will require a second liver transplant. According to insiders, liver experts Dr Johnnie Walker and Dr Jack Daniels are ready to lead an all-star team featuring Dr Jameson, Dr Gilbey, and French consultant Dr Vermouth.

Weekend newspapers reported on speculation that Tshabalala-Msimang could need a second transplant because her first liver has been rejected by her body in much the same way as her policies were rejected by modern science.

This morning her aides said they did not want to speculate on her condition, although they did confirm that Tshabalala-Msimang had asked the media to call them "advisors" rather than "aides" because "'aides' sounds too much like 'Aids', and 'Aids' sounds like something that might get someone accused of genocide through negligence".

However, independent sources confirmed this morning that a crack team of surgeons and liver experts had been assembled to perform a second transplant if it was required.

According to Glen Fiddich, spokesman for the Thabo Mbeki African Renaissance Ubuntu Clinic and Sanatorium in Sandton, Tshabalala-Msimang would be operated on by a "dream team" including Dr Johnnie Walker and Dr Jack Daniels leading the likes of Dr Jameson, Dr Gilbey and Dr Vermouth.

"At this point the patient is really on the rocks," explained Fiddich. "But she's more shaken than stirred."

He said that rumours of alcohol abuse should be "taken with a pinch of salt and a dash of lime".

"I don't have Absolut 100 percent proof," he said.

He added that Tshabalala-Msimang had plenty to be grateful for.

"For one thing she can thank her lucky stars that she is not an HIV-positive patient during her own tenure as Health Minister," he said.

"She would have died five years ago and been recorded as another victim of cerebral malaria, poverty, racism, or all three."

He said that Tshabalala-Msimang had been offered an African potato instead of a replacement liver before her first transplant but he confirmed that she had opted for the liver and would probably go the same route this time if a transplant was needed.

Source: Hayibo

I installed Windows 7 (the release version) on my work PC, my work laptop, and my home PC a couple of weeks ago. So far, I've been impressed; it's working as I expected, and seems to have fixed the awful Office 2007 bug I had experienced on my work PC. Driver support is excellent; the only thing I've had an issue with is my Canon LiDE scanner, of all things; I did get it working, but it's a workaround.

For my assignments, I've been doing quite a bit of work in Word 2007, but also in Visio and Powerpoint 2007. Frankly, I'm not impressed. Word is more than capable for handling day to day documents, but its style support is still flaky and unpredictable, bullets and numbering is still broken (those issues have existed in every version of Word for Windows), and document layout is still quite crude and somewhat unpredictable (for example, I could lay a document out, with page breaks, images, etc., and not be 100% sure that when I reopened the document that everything would be where it was supposed to).

As for Visio and Powerpoint: both are easy enough to use, but I found myself using a mixture of both because neither on its own had the features to do everything I needed. Back in the early 1990s I used to support the Micrografx products, including the Micrografx presentation package, Charisma, and the flowcharter, ABC Flowcharter (at the time, the market leader). I fail to understand why products from 15 years ago were more full-featured in many ways, and easier too, than Microsoft's latest. Has "office" software really reached a features dead-end? Microsoft's stellar office packages are Excel and Outlook; the rest are really not best of breed.

I've been reading a lot about the proposed US healthcare bill, and the opposition to it. Now, to my mind, general public healthcare is a good thing; can anyone explain reasonably clearly why this proposal has problems? I'd like to know why there is opposition to it.

One of the four remaining flying English Electric Lightnings (one of the two-seater ones, from the looks of it) went down at an air show today, killing the pilot, Dave Stock, who had problems ejecting.

A terrible loss, of both an experienced pilot, and a fantastic fighter aircraft.

Thanks for all the responses to my question about the American white T-shirt thing.

I'm a little confused though: what's with the abhorrence of men's nipples and/or chest hair? Are they really that disturbing? If you're not in the US, do men wear white undershirts where you live?

Just speaking from personal experience, it's not been an issue in South Africa, that I'm aware of. I know white perforated vests were were popular with my grandfather's generation, but not recently. I spent yesterday looking at shirts etc. at work, and I noticed that almost no-one wears smart white shirts any more - they're all striped, lightly checked, or coloured - and also that nipples did not appear to be visible under smart shirts (golf shirts are another story).

All rather interesting...

I have a question for the Americans: what's the deal with the white T-shirts that, judging from movies and TV, American men often wear under their shirts? What are they for? Is it for warmth, or what?