A Different Drummer

It has always felt self evident to me that the venn diagram of people who can read and write and people who use MySpace is basically a horizontal figure 8. MySpace is for children and idiots, Facebook is for all the rest. But it's good to see someone smarter than me - Rupert Murdoch's new biographer, in this case, saying the same thing:

"...if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people..."

Read the whole interview for more telling it like it is....

Zimbabwe joins Israel in deciding not to allow outsiders to witness its disgraceful shagging of a population:

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that he and others planning a humanitarian mission in Zimbabwe had been refused entry to the impoverished African country.

Carter and two other members of The Elders group — former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and rights advocate Graca Machel, who is married to Nelson Mandela — had planned to assess the country's humanitarian needs as Zimbabweans are stalked by disease and hunger while political crisis occupies its politicians.

But they were told Friday night by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is mediating the political crisis, that efforts to secure travel visas for the group had failed, Carter told reporters at a news conference in Johannesburg.

I assume that Kofi failed to correctly fill in the application form.

Jonathan Cook is getting righteous in The National on Israel's slow-motion strangulation of 1.5 million people:

There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also turned back.

Journalists aren't allowed witness Israel's Apartheid 2.0 for security reasons, I presume.

- Eric Anderson, the founder of the space tourism company Space Adventures, on the need to establish a stronger international order surrounding the exploration / exploitation of space. A short story based on my interview with him is here, something longer to come...

He's spot on with the time thing. In 1998, would you have guessed that you could book a ticket to outer space on a commercial flight in less than ten years? For the right amount of cash, you can now book a ten-day holiday to the international space station. Would be have guessed that the world's largest music retailer would be Apple?

On the other side, we always think that short-term trends will take off much faster than they actually do. The internet is only now starting to approach what a lot of the late 90s dotcom businesses thought it would look like in just a couple of years; it has taken a decade to get serious amounts of people buying things online, watching web television, browsing the internet from their phone etc...

Doesn't this kind of short-term optimism and long-term skepticism apply in a lot of different areas?

There are certain happenings that are burned into our conciousness over thousands of years. Sometimes men get savaged by lions. Sometimes the volcano erupts and swallows its surroundings. Sometimes the rain becomes a flood and washes it all away.

The more advanced we become, the more we pretend these things can no longer happen, that we live in a new age. But then the Earth opens up and swallows a city, or an elephant escapes from the zoo and rampages through a city, and we are all reminded of the primal earthy realities that drive us and occasionally savage us.

These events put us back in touch with that early reasoning that made us what we are: shoot the wild animal. Run away from the vast cracks in the Earth's surface. Fear the lightning.

Anyhow, in this tradition, its good to see that the British Royal Navy is battling pirates off the coast of Africa again. Fearsome men from unfriendly places have been fucking with sailors for thousands of years, navies have been paid to kick their asses for almost as long.

Its a little bit sobering, in the midst of all this craze for Pirates etc, to actually see the "pirate ships" these guys are crusing around in:


And the Navy boat that we kick their asses from.


It's not exactly a fair fight. But pirates don't fight fair, my friends. That's why God invented the airplane.

Let's say you're inside a coffin. After trying to sit up and bumping your head (don't feel embarrassed; everyone does it), you should lie still a few minutes and get your bearings. Keep your breathing slow, and let your heart rate come down to a normal pace. Remind yourself that people have been buried alive for thousands of years and that you are now connected to each and every one of them.

- So You've Been Buried Alive, McSweeney,s

The fact that Sigmund Freud's early days were spent on a frustrating search for hidden genitalia is not exactly surprising, but the nature of the search is pretty incredible. According to Wikipedia:

"After planning to study law, Freud joined the medical faculty at University of Vienna to study under Darwinist Prof, Karl Claus. At that time, eel life history was still unknown, and due to their mysterious origins and migrations, a racist association was often made between eels and Jews and Gypsies. In search for their male sex organs, Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels without finding more than his predecessors such as Simon von Syrski. In 1876, he published his first paper about "the testicles of eels" in the "Mitteilungen der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften", conceding that he could not solve the matter either. Frustrated by the lack of success that would have gained him fame, Freud chose to change his course of study. Biographers like Siegfried Bernfeld wonder if and how this early episode was significant for his later work regarding hidden sexuality and frustrations. "

Gee, I wonder.

Why do I live away from my home town? Among other reasons, this is about the biggest news story to hit my city this year:

Outrage in Australia After Teens Beat Blind Flamingo

The beating of a blind flamingo at a zoo in Australia has sparked outrage and prompted calls to review laws preventing underage offenders from being named.

Readers of the AdelaideNow newspaper have vented their fury over Wednesday's attack on the Adelaide Zoo's 78-year-old flamingo — one of the zoo's main attractions since the 1930s. (Fox News)

Good to see everthing back home is ticking over just nicely...