BlogMailr Fixes Double Posting Issue.

BlogMailr seems to have sorted out the double posting niggle and I am happy to say that I am able to post to my blogs once more. BlogMailr is by far the easiest method of posting to my two blogs and I haven’t needed any of my off-line editors for a while now. The ability to post from email – mostly gMail in my case – allows me a consistent user experience regardless of the OS I am using (Windows XP / uBuntu). It is undoubtedly one less thing I have to worry about when I relegate Windows to the trashcan for good.

http://www.blogmailr.com/
If you haven’t tried it, I recommend you do.

The Making of a LEGO Brick

Let’s hear it for LEGO! Forty-eight years after they were introduced, LEGO toys are still much beloved by children and parents alike for their bright colors, durability, and the amount of imagination they inspire during play. Compared to the high-tech toys of today, LEGO bricks look exceedingly simple. But their precise production process is nothing to scoff at. Each LEGO brick must have that perfect grasp — strong enough to hold onto another brick but easy enough for a child to pull apart. The production of LEGO bricks is so accurate that only 18 out of 1 million LEGO elements produced is considered defective. It’s an astonishing number, considering that 15 billion LEGO components are made every year. We take a look at how classic LEGO bricks are made.

See the slide show

Undoubtedly both me and my son’s favourite toy.

Peter Jackson Pulled From the Hobbit

What on earth are New Line Cinemas thinking? To pull Peter Jackson off the Hobbit is like …. like … well similes fail here – it is just plain unbelievable. To those of us who grew up reading Tolkien, we were horrified when it was announced that The Lord of The Rings was to be made into a movie. Hollywood is notoriously reliable for taking wonderful stories and books and completely screwing them up. It was thus with a sense of disbelief and awe when Jackson managed to take the essence of the story and render it reliably to those who loved it best.

New Line declined to comment on “The Hobbit,” but said in a statement to The Times that the situation was complicated by the lawsuit of Mr. Jackson’s company, Wingnut Films, against the studio over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings,” which New Line produced. “We are in litigation with Wingnut Films, and have been unsuccessful despite a formal mediation, as well as discussions with Wingnut directly to settle the matter; therefore, we cannot comment at this point,” the studio said this week.

Source …It appears since the announcement New Line has been deluged with emails and phone calls by horrified fans. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though.

It was left to another studio entirely, MGM, which owns the distribution rights to “The Hobbit,” to step in and calm the raging waters — and the Web sites. “We expect to partner with New Line in financing ‘The Hobbit,’ ” a spokesman for MGM said. “We support Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and believe that when the dust settles, he’ll be making the movie. We can’t imagine any other result.”

Peter Jackson is the only person, in my opinion, who should be allowed anywhere near the Hobbit movie. Although he has become wealthy and famous from the trilogy, his accurate portrayal was due to his love for the original story. I for one cannot see myself supporting the attempt by another director, those aren’t Hobbit sized shoes to fill.

The Cruelty of Pseudo-Science

The Cruelty of Pseudo-Science
by Stuart Forsyth

Every so often I am forced to write about products that are touted as cure-alls, panaceas for any number of horrific illnesses and how groups of marketeers are able to get away with advertising these products legitimately. I have a medical background and having once been involved with homoeopathy I am very sensitive to medical pseudo-science of any type because if it can con a reasonably healthy skeptic, then people who are desperate for any glimmer of hope in an otherwise desolate situation are easy game.

The latest farce to come to my attention through a work colleague is the MediZone BubbleSpar (http://www.medi-zone.co.za). Allow me the luxury of quoting their marketing blurb in it’s entirety before I attempt to rip it limb from limb.

For the millions of people afflicted with dread diseases (Cancer, AIDS, Heart attack, Stroke, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes etc) and numerous other so called “ common ailments” (Asthma, Sinusitis, Arthritis, Rheumatism, Hay fever, Skin Disorders etc) the information contained in this website may astound them. It will also bring new hope in a world fraught with expensive medicines, countless therapies and treatments!

Lets pause for a moment here to examine the diseases this bubble mat can help with. HIV (Human immunodeficiency virus) is a retrovirus that is responsible for attacking the immune system. The syndrome of symptoms that follows is known as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficient Syndrome). Eventually the immune system fails to such an extent that life-threatening opportunistic infections like TB or pneumonia kill you. Does it sound like a bubbly bath mat can help with this? I suppose in South Africa, where our health minister touts the African potato and garlic as effective alternatives to anti-retrovirals at the Toronto conference, anything is possible.

Stroke or cerebrovascular accident occurs where blood supply to part of the brain is interrupted – often resulting in that affected area of the brain being damaged leading to crippling neurological and physiological conditions. No doubt bubbly Ozone can re-grow brain matter – excellent! … next.

Alzheimer’s occurs due to neuron loss or damage in the brain and is a progressively degenerative condition that leads ultimately to the most terrible forms of dementia. Perhaps the makers of the BubbleSpar mean for Alzheimer’s patients to enjoy the rejuvenating effects of a tickling bubbles while they smear their faeces on the wall. Multiple sclerosis is a caused by chronic inflammation of the Central nervous system resulting in muscle weakness, impaired speech and movement, fatigue and pain – I grant that warmth may relieve the inflammatory condition but that is as far as I will go, as to being able to cure this condition – I think not.

and to finish up:

Diabetes, in a nutshell, is a metabolic disorder whereby the pancreas stops producing insulin that regulates the uptake of carbohydrates by the cells. Who needs insulin injections to preventing you dying .. bubble bubble.

They go on to use the wonderful method of conning the public called “Blinding by Science”. Blinding by Science is the attempt to con a lay person into believing your false claims by introducing just enough scientific (or scientific sounding) information to make it sound convincing. People by their nature are averse to arguing with others more in the know and thus tend to back down when you throw science-babble or mathematical equations at them. The makers of products such as these prey on either fear or hope and use the method of blinding by science as they know full well that their target audience is not well grounded in scientific principal.

There is a humorous anecdote about the ability of science to blind.

Diderot had been invited to the court by Catherine the Great, but then annoyed her by trying to convert everyone to atheism. Catherine asked Euler for help, and he informed Diderot, who was ignorant of mathematics, that he would present in court an algebraic proof of the existence of God, if Diderot wanted to hear it. Diderot was interested, and, according to De Morgan, Euler advanced toward Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: “Sir, ( a + bn )/n = x , hence God exists; reply! ” Diderot had no reply, and the court broke into laughter. Diderot immediately returned to France.

Back to the “proof” of the Bubbly Bath Mat – Medizone quotes the following as scientific proof for Cancer:

In 1926, two times Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Dr Otto Warburg of the Kaizer Institute in Berlin, announced to the world his findings on his research on oxygen and cancer in the human body. THE CAUSE OF ALL CANCER IS THE LACK OF OXYGEN AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL IN THE BODY!

1926, just in case you missed it – before antibiotics (Flemming and Penicillin, 1928) or a proper understanding of the atom (Schroedinger and Heisenberg, 1926) – I feel sure a 1926 doctor knew a lot more about cancer than the millions of current professionals the world over who dedicate their life to understanding the intricacies of this cellular proliferation gone wrong.

 

The Medizone website provides some very basic and inaccurate information regarding what Ozone is and how it is beneficial for you. They make no attempt to show how a bubble spar could make any difference to reducing or killing the HIV virus, or reversing cells gone mad in their proliferation or fixing a pancreas that can no longer produce insulin. Advertising is especially good at this, any number of fat pill on the market have pictures of people in white coats holding pipettes and looking pensive. “Gee look ma, dem are scientists, surely to goodness dey know what dey doin!”

The medizone “proof” for the rejuvenating effects of Ozone are the following ridiculous anecdotes

In Asia the people of Tibet is reported to live up to an average age of 132-135 years of age while an Indian tribe in the Peruvian mountains in South America reaches 145-150 years of age! Upon investigation it was found that these people at age 80-90 years old look like we do at the age of 40-50 years old. They work 2-3 times harder than we do…

This is completely unjustified and any sane person would surely call for the proof as journal article or quotation from any number of reputable scientific sources, I am sure that should people live to these unbelievable ages, science and the Guinness book would know about it and their lack of supporting evidence shows this to be merely anecdotal and entirely false. Searching back in time in Tibetan literature, most of the highly ranked monastic officials who really did all the right things including meditation and exercise and weren’t subjected to “hard labour” lived to the ripe old age of 70 or in some extreme cases 80. Extreme longevity however abounds in myth, in the stories of Methuselah and other religious icons of all faiths. The Canada-Tibet Committee recently published findings that the average life expectancy in the region has almost doubled: from 35.5 years of age to 67 years of age.

After quoting all this spurious crap, their disclaimer goes on to say – and this sums it all up for me – “There are no health claims being made in the areas of Therapy and Scientific validity”. Whatever happened to standing by the courage of your convictions. They are quoting “science” as a means of justifying their bubbly bath mat as a cure all and then in the disclaimer go on to say we are not making any claims that this product has any therapeutic or scientific validity. They have to put this in I suppose, God forbid someone actually dies from throwing out the insulin or chemotherapy and lazing about all day on the bubbly bath mat.

The sad thing about this is that there is very little recourse for people who are conned to this level. Unlike victims of traditional monetary fraud, the cancer patient who has a relapse through discontinuing her treatment has absolutely nobody to turn to. It would not stand up in court – it very clearly states in the disclaimer that they cannot be held liable for anything because they didn’t say it was scientific or had a therapeutic effect. So people can go on, becoming very rich in the process, selling misinformation, preying on the misery and suffering of others and offering them false hope and not lose a penny or a sleepless night in the process.

This almost makes me wish I was a religious man, then I could claim some comfort in the concepts of eternal damnation, hell-fire and brimstone.

KeepVid

If you’ve ever come across something funny on metcafe or youtube you may have wanted to download a local copy to share with Yuletide abandon with friends and colleagues. The short answer is “you can’t! or at least not very easily” – you see video sites reckon each pc having to download 200 meg to protect their content is a reasonable idea – I say what a crok of @#%$$.

Welcome then to KeepVid, a wonderful new web offering (note how I deliberately avoided the words web 2) whereby you drag a “keep this” button to your browser and then in future, when you find or see a video you’d like to keep you click it – and you get a download link.

Easy as pie and works like a charm.

Excellent Debate on Atheism

A politician who seriously invokes Poseidon in a campaign speech will have thereby announced the end of his political career. Why is this so? Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job.

So many gods have passed into oblivion, and yet the sky-god of Abraham demands fresh sacrifices. Wars are still waged, crimes committed, and science undone out of deference to an invisible being who is believed to have created the entire cosmos, fine-tuned the constants of nature, blanketed the earth with 20,000 distinct species of grasshopper, and yet still remains so provincial a creature as to concern himself with what consenting adults do for pleasure in the privacy of their bedrooms. Incompatible beliefs about this God long ago shattered our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.—and these divisions remain a continuous source of human violence.

And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise.

How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise.

Entire article @
http://richarddawkins.net/article,372,n,n

SA Ministers ‘hold stake in Gautrain consortium’

Cosatu was outraged by reports that two Cabinet ministers and National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete have shares in the consortium that is building the high-speed Gautrain , a spokesperson said on Sunday. “The reports reinforced the belief expressed in Cosatu’s recent congress that a worryingly growing number of ANC and government leaders had a personal self-enrichment culture,” said the Congress of SA Trade Unions’ spokesperson Patrick Craven. He was responding to a report in the Sunday Times that Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula and Education Minister Naledi Pandor were part of the shareholding structure of the Bombela Consortium which won the R23-billion bid.

Link

surprise….surprise….

BlogMailr … So Close

The behind BlogMailr is an excellent one. We all spend so much of our time with our respective email offerings that it is a natural way to compose and post to your blog. The folks over at BlogMailr offer a solution whereby you should be able to post to a number of platforms with just a simple email. They propose that it is easy to add tags and graphics to your postings – my experience started off well but then went off the rails.

The one overwhelming problem plaguing this new offering is that of multi-postings, this is irritating to say the very least. One email becomes 2 or 3 posts and then you have to go into the clunky wordpress (in my case) admin area and start deleting. Blogger beta I later found out has a very mature email to blog ability as well as the ability to post directly from Google Docs. Another issue I found was that graphics would be posted very inconsistently, sometimes I got the image in my post, most times all I got was the filename.

It seems that until BlogMailr sort out their technical issues I will have to make another plan. I really hope for their sake that it is soon. it would be a pity for an excellent idea to be so quickly sullied.

SA: Main Barrier For Rape Survivors is the Criminal Justice System itself.

Penny Dladla (not her real name), a rape survivor from Mandeni, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, spoke about her problems with the police.

“When you go to the police, they don’t want to help you and act irritated. It makes you feel uncomfortable. Even the female investigators are rude to you – they question you like you are lying.” The woman spoke of how difficult it was getting information contained in case files from investigators. “To add stress to rape survivors who go through the courts, prosecutors also discourage them from pursuing their cases by telling them that their cases are weak.”

The activists and community members marched in solidarity with “the 51 500 women whose rape cases each year – although reported to the police – are ignored and forgotten,” said Mthathi. The group marched to the regional court in Eshowe, where a long list of their demands was handed over to a magistrate. Top of the list was a demand for justice for survivors of rape, and zero tolerance for all forms of violence against women.

Women demanded that the police and justice system increase the number of rapists arrested and charged.

An immediate end to police intimidation and incompetence, including the “losing” of dockets, was listed. Access to post-exposure prophylactics at health-care facilities, especially rural ones, and better psycho-social support for rape survivors was also emphasised. According to TAC statistics from 2005, more than 55 000 rapes were reported to the police. “We know that rape and sexual violence in general is a much bigger problem than SAPS statistics suggest. We know that most incidents of rape go unreported,” said Mthathi.

Of the more than 55 000 rape cases reported in 2005, only 7 percent of cases were successfully prosecuted. “This is an injustice. It sends a message to communities that rape is not a serious crime and that the survivors of rape, who are usually women, do not matter. “Why does this happen? Because families, communities, social and governance institutions believe that sexual violence is not an issue of pressing concern, and do not speak out against it.” Mthathi said that one of the main barriers for rape survivors’ access to justice was the criminal justice system itself.

more …

Some Rape Stats for SA (2005)

Based on my previous article, here are a few stats for you. They are based in part on approximations however the numbers still tell a very grim story.

Number of Rapes reported : 55,000
Estimated 1 in 14 rapes reported

Therefor approximately 770,000 rapes in 2005

7% prosecution rate means 3,850 rape victims got justice.

That is a whopping 0.5%,

99.5% of rapists got away with their crime.
Our police force tell us they are winning the war on crime.

The Trolls on Blogger

I recently re-activated my Blogger Blog and am in the process of trying out the new Beta platform. There are definitely pros to Blogger, things like speed, customisability and seemless must-haves like email to blog postings. There are however cons and it seems so far to be mostly to do with the community and not the technical platform.

For some of us, blogging is about more than etching up the trivialities of our day in the vain hope that someone even more pathetic would find it interesting. It is about sharing a point of view and perhaps opening it up for debate. For some it’s not and these mindless sociopaths troll around other peoples hard work spreading their stupidity around like so much intellectual faeces. These semi-literate morons are somehow able to wield a keyboard like a blunt instrument leaving bread crumbs of their social ineptitude littering the blogosphere.

The urban dictionary defines a blog troll:

1.(n) -A pathetic and moronic person who maintains a blog with an unhealthy obsessive-compulsive drive, especially angsty goths (sorry to all the likeable goths out there). The content of their blogs usually includes events that no sane person would care about. Here’s sample of what a blog troll might write on their blog:
“today, I ate a sanwich. It bad – it was just ok, mediocre, I guess you could call it. After that I read a few chapters out of an Anne Rice book and was deeply moved by her erotic descriptions of gay vampires fornicating. . Then I took a nap.

2.(n) -A depraved individual who sits in front of a computer all day and posts flames of an idiotic or pseudo-intellectual nature on public forums and private websites. Many of these people actually become emotional about what is said on the afore-said mediums and feel it is their duty to punish those who disagree with them. They too may pursue this object in an obsessive-compulsive manner.

I had it today by a real moron, his blog lists a seemingly endless lust for sex and stupidity. There is no point, seemingly to anything he says yet he left a comment on one of my posts that was, well plain pointless, aggressive and … I did mention stupid already didn’t I? He completely missed the point of the article, in fact his response is so off point that I wonder if he read the article at all. It seems that trolls like these are there merely to illicit a reaction from their victims.

Stuff on his blog includes such gems as (and I quote):

Was planning to watch Borat today with a couple of work colleagues but dunno if I’ll be able to make it because I might be fucking the living daylights out of my fuckbuddy who should be here this afternoon.

or this

Seriously though although I haven’t had sex in a while( three weeks at last count) I can’t exactly blame it on my lack of game…I’ve just not been going out enough to get any punani. The last time I had sex it was friggin awesome…pounded my ex girlfriend the whole night and into the early hours of the morning…she orgasmed so loudly i thought the neighbours were going to bang on her door. That was fun, fucking her so hard. Afterwards though I felt like a dirty dick because she’s got a boyfriend and I thought I was getting back with my ex gf…the one I broke up with in January (shit, that’s almost a year ago).

I begin to see why so many good bloggers the world over all come to the same conclusion: “Don’t feed the trolls” – and so in future, taking a leaf out of their books I will merely delete troll shit. If you have a difference of opinion then excellent but please don’t troll.

To Q.N.I.T.Y I say, please do the world a favour and stop breathing and for God’s sake, never never procreate.

Richard Dawkins Has A Posse

Share the Courage of Your Convictions

More along the same lines:

• The eBay Athiest
• Misha
• A revealing Google search

Eat less, live longer …

How depressing, how utterly unjust, to be the one in your social circle who is aging least gracefully.  In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time’s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles. 

Yet in the cage next to his, gleefully hooting at strangers, one of Matthias’s lab mates, Rudy, is the picture of monkey vitality, although he is slightly older. Thin and feisty, Rudy stops grooming his smooth coat just long enough to pirouette toward a proffered piece of fruit.

Tempted with the same treat, Matthias rises wearily and extends a frail hand. “You can really see the difference,” said Dr. Ricki Colman, an associate scientist at the center who cares for the animals.

…snip…

calorie restriction, involves eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal while still getting adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species.

New York Times, more…

The Creationist Museum, So what’s with all the dinosaurs?

The world’s first Creationist museum – dedicated to the idea that the creation of the world, as told in Genesis, is factually correct – will soon open. Stephen Bates is given a sneak preview and asks: was there really a tyrannosaurus in the Bible?

Just off the interstate, a couple of junctions down from Cincinnati’s international airport, over the state line in rural Kentucky, the finishing touches are being put to an impressive-looking building. When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.

The Creation Museum – motto: “Prepare to Believe!” – will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.

Its designer, Patrick Marsh, used to work at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and then in Japan before he saw the light, opened his soul to Jesus, and was born anew. “The Bible is the only thing that gives you the full picture,” he says. “Other religions don’t have that, and, as for scientists, so much of what they believe is pretty fuzzy about life and its origins … oh, this is a great place to work, I will tell you that.”

more…

I hope Richard Dawkins has a poke at this, by the way I think I will join his posse officially to stand against human lunacy … There done. Count me in.

Blogger Returns To Grace

I am keeping my options open, I have been very happy with WordPress barring a few niggly complaints that have to do mostly with speed and lack of flexibility.  I find the WordPress back-end clunky and unwieldy when compared to the Blogger online posting area.  This poor posting area of WordPress left me having to rely on external tools initially (painful) and then the wonders of BlogMailr (enlightening) allowed me to post to my blog from my email.  I found out today that Blogger has this email to posting ability in their new offering but it is a little limited at the moment and must have something to do with the ‘beta’ status.  That being said, only the ability to post images and labels are missing and these can be rectified very quickly in the very intuitive and nifty admin area.

So what to do, this is a bit of a dilemma!  It seems that Blogger has had a lot of bad press especially by the blog refugees of the early days.  Incredulity often follows any posting that hints you may be moving back to the Blogger fold, incredulity by the same people that wax lyrical about GMail and Google’s other offerings.  That being said, I am probably more liable to trust Google to advance the cause of blogging over WordPress and believe in time Blogger may just be the cool place to be once more.

Until I have fully made up my mind on one platform or the other,  the ability to email both my respective blogs means I needn’t have to hedge my bets and jump to any hasty conclusions too quickly.

Get me here or here

Subtle Currents

Sometimes I swear I feel the briefest touch of the forces that shape my life, like subtle tidal currents that beckon the swimmer to explore further and further, they go almost unnoticed for the most part.  Perhaps it is this feeling that may comfort us in the belief that there is a some higher intervention in the board-game of our lives.  The swirling mists seem to hold you set in stone until at some seemingly random appointed time they part to reveal to you a way forward.  There often seems no choice but to wait, for the waiting in hindsight is the point all along.

And free choice perchance just a drop in a sea of infinite probability?

More Windows Happiness

It looks as if I have a fun day ahead of me. I got to work this morning to discover a failed Windows Update which leaves me unable to log in and work. So it appears that another day is to be lost to the botched and terrible operating system that is XP. A colleague of mine had this same problem 2 weeks ago – it appears to be a problem with a certain type of Intel processor and a partial windows update that fails and leaves your system badly broken. See the happiness I have below.

Thank God I have this machine dual booted with uBuntu – at least I can get on and back up my work.

A Day to be Outside

The shapeless greyness of today’s sky throw out all other colours in sharp contrast.  The green of the foliage outside my window is brilliant in it’s natural luminosity, broken only by the riotous purple of the Jacaranda and Solanum.  There is a gentle breeze, denied to me in the bowels of a badly air conditioned office.  It is the most perfect cool and slightly overcast day setting mood for tramping across heath or field or under the dappled coolness of forest.  It is not a day for work or computers or offices.

The Ugly Side of Christmas

I feel a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge at the moment, when the topic of Christmas comes up I feel like retorting with a resounding “Bah Humbug!” It’s not that I inherently dislike Christmas; I just dislike all the artificiality and busyness that comes with it. I had the distinct misfortune of having to trawl around one of our local shopping malls this last weekend, a task I dislike at the best of times. Not born with an extra X chromosome I am at an evolutionary disadvantage when it comes to the subtler points of retail therapy. The artificial lighting, the garish colours and the bling artificial decorations (up since late September) leave it akin in enjoyment to having a frontal lobotomy with an ice-cream scoop. I made the mistake of mentioning to my wife at the time that should I die and have to account for my sins then surely hell would be like this – she did not seem amused or able fully comprehend my point of view. The hoards of Christmas shoppers amble along the narrow corridors with slaughter house resignation and blank vacant stares -they know they have to find suitable offerings for Christmas but just aren’t sure where to start or whether the personal loan they took at the beginning November will cover their ability to express their love.

I had some fun in the expensive camera and electronic shop toying with the bored sales clerks – stand anywhere but near the expensive commission based gadgets and you could die of old age before being offered any help but amble up to the R15,000.00 camera and look interested and suddenly you are accosted from all directions, it feels a bit like a Bombay train station.

Christmas used to be a magical time as a child, before it became a big commercial farce, advertisements daring you to “prove your love” through expensive gifts or TV ad break selling Christmas discounted tampons to badly animated Santa’s and cheesy Christmas jingles. We are slowly killing Christmas for our children, by the time Christmas comes round they have had three months of said sales advertising and every shopping mall has their garish plastic caves replete with crusty pedo-Santa in Freddy Kruger like rubber masks. You very rarely hear Christmas carols anymore – there is more than enough gangsta-hip hop on every sale TV with sweaty groin clasping boyz and teams of scantily clad pelvic thrusting harlots.

My advise, avoid the malls, turn off the TV and try and recapture some of the magic of what makes Christmas special. Read some stories about the birth of Jesus, remember him? My little boy recently wrote a beautiful letter to Santa – we have a tradition in our family that Santa sends his elves to collect all the letters and we had to leave a little snack out for the elf who must be doing some mighty thirsty work. Then five days before Christmas a little Christmas fairy comes and sits on his bedroom door, a sure sign that Santa is coming. To see the joy and excitement of real Christmas anticipation and happiness is enough to renew the faith, even in a cynic like me.

It’s the little things we can do to recapture the magic and joy of a time that the commercial Grinch would so readily strip from us.

President Bush Pardens himself from any wrong-doing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyzmeYfNp2g

Interview on CNN – new legislation being passed containing a provision that will pardon President Bush and all members of his administration of any possible crimes connected to the torture and mistreatment of detainees dated back to Sept 11 2001.

Bush and the boys cannot be charged with war crimes if they manage to slip this through before the democrats take over – nice to be the President and be able to make up the rules as you go.