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What Actually Happened I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody - I'm not saying it was Alexandra; I'm not saying it was on purpose - "bumped" my cage, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water and sinking fast. Hahaha. From here.
Curiouser and Curiouser! The New Republic Online in an article by John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman & Massoud Ansari on July 19 reported the following, This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said. Today is July 29, the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention, John Kerry is giving his acceptance speech for his nomination to the Presidential ticket at this very moment and the following piece of news broke some hours ago, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is among the 22 people on the F.B.I.'s most-wanted-terrorist list, was arrested Sunday, Pakistani officials said Thursday night. The HVT (I'm ready to bet that acronym is not a Pakistani creation ;)) was captured Sunday, and the news was broken eight hours before the Presidential challenger's address to his party's convention, that is far more coincidence than my credulity can take. Meanwhile, there is news from Florida of happenings that would stump Alice surely, like servers with voting records without backup, heck even my spam is backed up. Okay, exaggeration, but again, it is extremely poor system design that does not take into consideration a server crash, especially for such an obviously important set of records. The election officials in the sunshine state have either displayed gross incompetence of they are simply covering up something more sinister, either of which possibilities, are rather disconcerting.
San Francisco  When the say the ice cream's good they do not lie...
Glorious Genocide Nicholas Kristof, in an NYT Op-Ed piece last week talks about Glorious Appearing: The End of Days, the latest in the runaway bestseller Left Behind series by authors Tim LeHaye and Jim B. Jenkins, which has passages like this one, "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again." This unabashed and apocalyptic vision where everyone but those who have accepted Christ will have their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated, is perhaps taken by a worrisome portion of its readers (the books have totalled 60 million in sales worldwide) as the literal, and Biblical, truth, the coming destiny of mankind. Kristof asks, Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell? A serious question, and something that followers of any of the Abrahamic religions should have to grapple with, I wonder what answers or explanations they arrive at. The Return of the Warrior Jesus is an older article on the issue by David Kirkpatrick, it appeared in the NYT in April this year and examines the broader issue of the image of Jesus morphing from an effeminate/marshmallowy/bearded lady one to that of a vengeful warrior intent on delivering a terrible form of justice to those who have refused to believe in him or who have transgressed his laws. Recommended.
The Eagle Has Landed, 35 Years Now I was still eleven years in the future, yet to be conjured up by Mom and Dad, on this night in 1969, when astronaut and fellow USC alumnus (tongue firmly in cheek) Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon and uttered one of the most famous phrases of the past century...   Mission Logo and Earthrise pictures via here
Hold On Time to hold on to your jaws folks! Microsoft has announced a 32 billion dollar payout, yup, you read right, that's 32 of the biggest Bs, as part of a $3 per share one-time special dividend. Of this, Gates' share is $3.3 billion, which has been pledged to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the country's largest foundation of its kind. Microsoft has estimated cash reserves of almost $56 billion, the payout will reduce that figure to a more earthly $20 billion, though the company does continue to add an amazing $1 billion every month in extra cash to its coffers. (source - this article from nyt)
Just Another Day What do you call a day when your wisdom tooth gets pulled in the morning and then your car gets rear-ended in the evening? Today. Darn.
A Century Pablo Neruda, by far the greatest romantic poet of his time, would have been a hundred today. Nobel laureate, communist, exile, diplomat and an incredibly prolific poet, Neruda died in September 1973, within weeks of Pinochet's coup that overthrew the poet's friend and Chilean President Salvador Allende. The Washington Post has a very good tribute by Edward Hirsch and the New York Times takes a look at the pomp and celebration marking the event in Chile. Here's a sampling (from WaPo and Plagiarist), I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
Kerry and Edwards I just saw a news report on CNN of how the the late night talk shows are having a swipe at Kerry's search for a VP and his new found love for Edwards. Particularly funny was the segment from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno where the two are shown hugging, patting each others' backs, and in one particularly hilarious shot where Kerry seems to be petting Edwards' bottom. This brought to mind the warnings we, as fresh imports to USC were given by the crowd that had been around for a year, "Do not walk around with your arms around the shoulders of your friends, no hugging and absolutely no holding hands, they'll take you as gay" we were told, rather ominously. Not many of us are much inclined to hug and kiss other guys but Indians do tend to be more physical when greeting each other without raising any red flags. However, not wanting anyone casting any sort of aspersions on our sexuality the desi crowd maintained a studied distance from each other, all the hugging and petting was done behind closed doors. Nope, I'm just kidding, there was no hugging or petting, that's reserved for candidates on the Presidential ticket, haha.
Lunch and Buffett From the New York Times, On Thursday, the virtual paddles went down on eBay for what, at $202,100, can be billed as a very pricey power lunch. For the fourth consecutive year, Warren E. Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, has donated lunch with himself to a fund-raising auction for the Glide Foundation, a nonprofit social services group in San Francisco.
Plog Amazon gave me today a preview of my PLOG. What's a Plog? here's what, Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog. I've been a huge fan of Amazon for a long time now, they just keep doing things better every time I return to buy something, and this latest idea sounds quite interesting, pretty innovative, a winner? maybe.
Talibanization of the NWFP? One of the problems inherent with democracy is that there is an exceeding likelihood of an agenda of oppression under the guise of traditional, cultural or religious legitimacy being imposed by groups of people who have sufficient finesse or appeal to grab power. The increasing anti-American sentiment in Iraq bodes well for Islamic extremists that intend to impose a rather strict, Talibanistic version of the religion on the people of Iraq, and this concerns me. These ill winds of the state defining virtue, determining what's vice and interpreting the vast body of Sharia to fit their visions of how Islam is meant to be followed, are blowing rather strongly in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, where the ruling alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or MMA, is proposing what it calls the Hisbah Bill, that is intended purportedly to curb corruption and root out social evil. Obviously, the problem with legislation of this kind is that it reflects, merely, one point of view, a filtered interpretation, that ultimately stifles a social structure, it kills the child instead of disciplining it, so to speak. By focussing on trufles like ads showing partially clad women, and thus diverting scant resources, legislators would much better serve their constituents by addressing the broader issues, like education, emancipation of women, better healthcare and infrastructure development. Admittedly, I don't have much knowledge of Pakistan's internal political organization and structure but they have suffered from a rather wobbly democracy in their fifty seven years of independence and it would only serve the Pakistanis better if their governments spent more time on governing and less on infusing the laws of the country with narrow definitions of virtue.
Follow the Google Microsoft has thrown in the gauntlet with a leaner and meaner search page, much in immitation of Google's and is working on its own search technology (techpreview.search.msn.com - may not load properly) while Yahoo's search engine powers them now. Google is the real search company, and has been so for a while now, Yahoo is no pushover either, it will be interesting to watch how this particular battle plays out in the coming months. Via here. Update Looks like the search page has reverted back to its former self. Weird. Update 2 Back to spartan look.
Fuzzy Logic The Oracle of Omaha weighs in with an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post on a bill to be considered by the US House of Representatives which proposes to treat company stock options in a manner that Buffett characterizes as mathematical lunacy. Until now the record for mathematical lunacy by a legislative body has been held by the Indiana House of Representatives, which in 1897 decreed by a vote of 67 to 0 that pi -- the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter -- would no longer be 3.14159 but instead be 3.2. Indiana schoolchildren momentarily rejoiced over this simplification of their lives. But the Indiana Senate, composed of cooler heads, referred the bill to the Committee for Temperance, and it eventually died.
Before Time Homework: Read The Myth of The Beginning of Time on SA, Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense--that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology.
Eeeeyaahooo! I'm happy today :)  Maria Sharapova created history today at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships |
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