In The Headlines Today

Tasmanian devils, marsupials with the most powerful bite in the world, have been suffering from a form of cancer that produces enormous disfiguring growths. It now appears that they infect each other through biting when they engage in mating rituals. Cancer by bite, now there is a scary thought! (link here ….)

Death by lethal injection is coming under legal scrutiny as a painful, cruel and unusual punishment:

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear in April the case of the most recent Florida prisoner facing the needle and take a rare look at whether inmates can challenge lethal injection. That case, coupled with the surprise withdrawal last week of two court- appointed anesthesiologists who were going to assist in the execution of California’s Michael Morales, has unleashed a wave of new questions about the future of lethal injection, the method of preference in 37 of 38 states with the death penalty. Is this seemingly sanitized death really cruel and unusual punishment? Should medical doctors, those do-no-harm healers bound by the Hippocratic oath, refuse to assist in executions, even though their absence might raise the risk that the procedure will be botched?

Cape Town is once again suffering from massive rolling power failures, the latest indication from the news on radio may point to sabotage. Apparently SA has appealed to the French government to help expedite the problem by supplying spare parts to Koeberg (link).

A new Pompeii has been found in Indonesia, scientists have found what they believe to be the lost civilisation of Tambora which was wiped out in 1815 by Mount Tambora’s eruption. The eruption was 4 times more powerful than Mt. Krakatoa and an estimated 88,000 people lost their lives in it.

Fans of Google Earth are bound to go batty over NASA’s latest offering, World Wind allows you to zoom in anywhere on the planet in rich 3D.

And finally:

China has warned that Taiwan’s decision to scrap a council on reunification with the mainland could bring disaster. The move will “create antagonism and conflict within Taiwan and across the strait,” China’s ruling Communist Party and government said in a statement. (link)

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Time, something we can control in our heads?

I was all of 14 years old and adventuring with my peers on a scouting outride. I had a 12 speed racer back then and most of the ride was an amazing adventure, that is until the hill. It was a very bad dirt road and a couple of us, inspired by the previous evenings episode of street hawk, decided to race to the bottom which was an unutterably bad idea in retrospect. Somewhere near the bottom of the road I hit a piece of concrete and my bike and I went airborne. The thing I remember most vividly about the event is the feeling of flying through the air for what seemed like an eternity before meeting terra-firma very very hard. My mother had a similar experience when she was in a car accident in Switzerland and while the car tumbled over and over down the bank she recalls how the luggage moved around the inside of the car in slow motion.

Scientists are looking at this phenomenon now, time being relative to the observer appears to be something we can control in our heads and they are setting out to prove it. It appears that time is not an empirical external constant, but something that is shaped, at least partially, by our minds.

The Second Coming – W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(one of my all time favourites..)

Slough and the office

In 1937, poet John Betjeman wrote a poem entitled ‘Slough‘.  In it he protested against the onslaught of industry (and the 850 factories) in what had once been a rural farming community.  He also raised his pen against the suburban lifestyle and office working conditions.  

I find it a wonderfully real and gritty poem that still finds relevance today.

Slough
- John Betjeman

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town –
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week for half-a-crown
For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

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The wall, part 2

The migration quest continues. I have hit the wall a bit with the current migration agent we are using, I need a second opinion. In this vain I have sent out about 16 requests to different agents detailing our circumstances in the hope that someone will have experience with this extended family arrangement. If it turns out that all say similar things then we will probably stick with Arams as we have gone a certain distance with them already.

There was a time where emotional dependency was considered in cases such as this but now it is down to 100% wholly financially dependent upon the primary applicant and that is what we have to prove if we are going to be successful.

I find this a sad state of affairs, it effectively says that a person, not of working age, can no longer contribute successfully to the society in which they live.

Abu Ghraib pictures don’t get the reaction of cartoons.

As new pictures surface detailing human abuse in Abu Ghraib I have to wonder, where are the hoards of protesting masses? Is everybody having a lie-in after the cartoon explosion? Come on people, where is the sense of righteous outrage at violations of human beings on a most horrific level?

Once again this shows just how silly we all are, are we really that desensitized to media violence, is it really all that blase’ already relegated to yesterday’s news?

Trying out Qumana

I love desktop blog publishing tools, once I moved from Blogger I had to say goodbye to old favourites like w.bloggar and BlogJet. Now there is a new player on the blog…(sorry that was bad!).

Qumana promises all the “ease of blogging” that the other programs gave me and it has done a lot of clever things behind the scenes. When I first opened the program it asked for a URL to my blog and then auto-detected that it is a WordPress blog. It then imported all my categories and placed them next to my main edit area for ease of use. The interface is nice and clean, very easy to use and tabs at the bottom allow me to switch from WYSIWYG mode to HTML mode for those few behind the scenes tweaks I like.

I feel that this is a tool to watch because it caters to both the Windows and the Mac blogger and so far, for day to day blogging, Qumana rocks!

The Wall, Part 1

I have hit the wall, it is official – here it is in print on the internet so you have to believe it.

Accounting, last looked at 15 years ago has reared its warty and slobbering jowls and bit me firmly and very painfully in the gonads.  The rest has been a veritable stroll in the park, but the endless debits and credits and journal postings are causing my studyitis of the most fearful kind.  Time ticks down to our holiday so I need to reach deep and finish the last two chapters – we are talking about reserves of strength that would make Atlas look like Woody Alan in pink spandex.

Breaking up with Google

Recent opposition to Google’s censorship of search results to conform with China’s restrictive laws has the online community up in arms. Swathes of new hate-Google images abound and some go so far as to help you overcome your Google addiction. The website NO LUV 4 Google helps you break up with them this Valentine’s day. (But I love my gmail ……. )

Hints of things to come, part 1

Ahh nothing like grabbing your togs, thongs ‘n a cuppela stubbys with your favourite grog in the tucker-bag. Sitting with your feet up in front of the bush-telly, amber fluid by your side and the shrimps sizzling gently on the barbie. Definite Fair suck of the sav I tell you! [where is my slang dictionary!]

The clock is now ticking down, the plans are in motion and the outcome yet uncertain .. we shall see!

Good advise

Work some more my son
Be a man my boy
When you drollery of work
Kicks you in the groin
Smile lad,
It’s what you were born for

Pay your taxes lad
Work some more my son
Take a break
When the walls of the office
Thunder down on you
But not too long

It’s important son
This cash we sweat for boy
A bastard pimp
That whores our dreams
So worth it in the end,
If you don’t die first

So take your dreams my boy
Not stuff of men my lad
Pack them up now son
And think of them
In the quiet anxiety of night
When dreams can breathe

 © Stuart Forsyth

Double standards at Play with Cartoons.

The world has gone crazy, no let me refrain, it has gone completely bloody bonkers, fruity loop and down the rabbit hole. The latest furore over Danish cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed is unbelievable, I agree the cartoons were in awfully bad taste, but it has sparked an unbelievable mess which is completely out of control.

People are calling for the MURDER (hello…sanity check please) of anyone who disrespects Islam and Iran, in retaliation for said outrage, is cancelling business deals worth millions with Denmark and is calling for cartoons about the holocaust which it would like to publish. How exactly that little choice titbit of anti-Semitism crept in is anyone’s guess.

I wonder though what the effect would be if Westerners started burning down embassies to Muslim countries calling for freedom from oppression for Muslim women, a call to ban the stoning of human beings and a challenge for the rights to have freedom of religion in Muslim countries.

There is an interesting double standard at play here and western countries better watch out. Freedom of expression, again however distasteful, is a fundamental right that has been fought for over many centuries.

Loss of sanity and barbarous behaviour should not, under any circumstances, be tolerated.

The Sad Perversion of Religeon

This is not the first time religion has been misinterpreted nor will it be the last. I very much doubt the sense of outrage we are seeing has much left to do with the publication of the cartoon; it was in my opinion merely a trigger. It has allowed fundamentalists to fan the flames of whatever political agenda’s they are following, to stir up religious fervor and dissent and to focus it for their own ends. Religious war, an abhorrent contradiction in terms, is just too easy — the holy deity / prophet you are fighting for is not around to instill common sense and rational thought, the common man is often not educated too the level of the religious zealot and thus swallows any deliberate misinterpretation without question. No culture or religion is immune, from the bloody rituals and games of the Aztecs to the burning of witches and enemies of the Church, Europe and America have been through this process, albeit many years ago.

Should the cartoonist have published the article, probably not — common sense dictates that level of bad taste in a politically and religiously volatile world arena is just plain stupid. Should the cartoonist have the right to publish the cartoon, I believe so.

If this were handled differently, the swathed militants holding banners to execute critics of Islam would have had a lot more sympathy and a lot more support. Instead they come across as irrational, militant and beyond reason and that loses them any sympathy they may have garnered from a more tempered approach.

Mohammed was a man of immense vision and intellect, he was a gifted statesman and a mediator — on many fronts he smoothed relations between rival cities like Medina and Mecca that were close to war. He tried to bring the Arabs, Christians and Jews together in understanding the worship of the one monotheistic God.

He emphasized the importance of Abraham and his son Ishmael and initially declared that the Ka’aba in Mecca was a shrine built by Abraham in honour of Monotheism, in other words for all faiths of the one God.

He was a superb example of the evolution of the human spirit. He preached tolerance and practiced his faith through his actions and it is in this vain that I firmly believe the gun toting, hysteria that has inflamed the world brings more shame to his name than any stupid cartoon ever could.

Supply of Weapons Undermine Debt Relief in Africa

In an unprecedented show of honesty U.N. advisor Dennis McNamara got to the heart of a lot of the conflict in Africa. The West fuels unrest in African countries by supplying them with weapons, ever wonder where the little kids get the rocket launchers? Guns are a huge problem and allow minority groups to sow terror and unrest in a country while their mineral and oil reserves are being plundered by other Western countries.

Children are drawn into these conflicts fighting, from an inhumanly early age, and are left with no education and no real skills when the conflict ends. Conflict is their job, without it, and having no means for sustainable skills such as farming, they have nothing.Debt relief is only a short term solution; it is the “feeding the man with fish” scenario as opposed to “teaching the man to fish”.

As long as people in African countries are staring down the barrels of their rapists and despots, only so much can be done.

IE7 is amazing

I have been a staunch Firefox supporter for the last little while, mainly because IE6 was so outdated.  Firefox provided extensions, tabbed browsing and a low memory overhead but when you are a company the size of Microsoft and have accss to many gazillions of dollars it shows in your products.

To say IE7 is slick is an understatement, with built in support for rss feeds, spiffy new look, quicktabs and add-ins it really is something.  Still in Beta though, I expect we will see a lot more coming in the next few months. I also can’t wait to see how this uses Vista’s new graphics engine.  For the time being most things I do can be done from one place – kudos!