I think thirty five more days to go...
"I speak plainly sometimes, but you've got to be mindful of the consequences of the words. So put that down. I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something." --George W. Bush, speaking to reporters, Washington, D.C.,14,1.2005
Sometimes, life is strange, you can't guess why people do what they do. Sometimes it is the case with ourselves, but we don't laugh about it the way we laugh at others.
For I find that according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, two burglers entered a man’s home early Sunday and demanded his eggbeater. One suspect held a pistol while the other brandished a knife to the resident’s neck.
Police arrested the two and found the eggbeater in one of the the men’s left pocket.
"We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication. The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people's lives,"- Facebook statement
It seems that a court in Australia has approved the use of Facebook, a popular social networking Web site, to notify a couple that they have lost possession of their home after defaulting on a loan.
Australian courts have given permission in the past for people to be served via e-mail and text messages when it was not possible to serve them in person. Now they are moving our to social networking sites.
The documents were sent last Friday after weeks of failed attempts to contact borrowers Gordon Poyser and Carmel Corbo at their Canberra home and by e-mail to notify a couple that they lost their home after defaulting on a loan.
It is not often that you get to hear strange lottery stories the same day, but here we have
A man in Hampton, Virginia win $1.1 million after playing the same numbers on 11 tickets for the same drawing. Each winning ticket gave the man $100,000, making a total of $1.1 million dollars in winning.
and then, there comes the news that
Two winning Hoosier Lottery tickets worth $1 million each were sold within a couple days of each other at the same central Indiana convenience store!
Not all strange stories make for humour, some might be terrible, but in this case it is a prehistoric marine animal that could have shocked the living daylights out of the contemporaries of dinosaurs:
A prehistoric creature called Gerrothorax pulcherrimus, which lived alongside some of the early dinosaurs, opened its mouth not by dropping its lower jaw, as other vertebrate animals do, but, instead, it lifted back the top of its head in a way that looked a lot like lifting the lid of a toilet seat.
It was clad in bony armor and prowled the warm lakes 210 million years ago
"It's weird. It's the ugliest animal in the world," Harvard University's Farish Jenkins
You might remember a post here on Alan Scherr, the 58-year-old Virginia-based meditation teacher who was killed in Mumbai along with his 13-year-old daughter Naomi. This hard-hitting, straight-talking article is by his childhood friend Edward Olshaker
It warns against the tendency to excuse violence on the grounds of poverty and injustice, failed aspirations and frustrations.
and lists cases where violence and its justification are not merely murderous, but brutal and mindless- "...even if the US and Israel were to disappear, there would be no shortage of Islamic extremist rage -- at Buddhist schoolgirls they behead in Thailand; at Christians persecuted for being the wrong religion; at schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia; at blacks they enslave, rape, and kill in genocidal numbers in Sudan; at the Dalai Lama, who is under a death fatwa; at the five fishermen the Mumbai terrorists killed at the start of their mission; at fellow terrorists summarily executed in Palestinian infighting; at their own women who they dispose of in "honor" killings; at their own children who are hanged to death in Iran on suspicion of being gay. It takes no more than a mere cartoon to trigger deadly rage."
( Writing on the recent honors bestowed on Samir Kuntar, a prisoner released by Israel), "Kuntar killed an Israeli father in front of his 4-year-old daughter, then bashed the girl's skull repeatedly with a rifle butt until she was dead. On November 24, Syrian television reported that President Bashar Al-Assad awarded Kuntar "the Syrian decoration of the highest degree" for his achievement. The Al Jazeera "news network" threw a birthday party for Kuntar.
"Kuntar, dressed in fatigues and sporting a Hitlerian mustache and haircut, walked down a red carpet arrayed for him in Beirut. The government closed all offices and declared a national day of celebration. Tens of thousands of Lebanese cheered, waved flags, threw confetti, and set off fireworks as Hezbollah staged a rally to celebrate their "victory" over Israel. Mahmoud Abbas, the "moderate" leader of the Palestinian Authority, sent "blessings to Samir Kuntar's family.""
"Be alert and vigilant. Avoid self-delusion regarding the nature and gravity of the threat. Do not be faint of heart. Fulfill your solemn oath to defend and protect. Do not let them harm one more child."
_Edward Olshaker in American Thinker.
It seems you can justify everything by the force of your grievances, and people who have a strong sense of hurt and are filled with an indignant anger have their moral senses blunted
I am not going out of my way to cite instances of extremist positions in the Arab world, but the times are such that they are everywhere in the news.
Remember the shoes hurled at George Bush? Well, here is a positive spin.
"With the hurling of shoes at Bush, the relationship between the people and their government has moved in the span of five years from a murderous tyranny, through armed resistance to a temporary occupation, to symbolic acts not any more threatening than you’d find in an unhappy marriage.
It ain’t pretty, but it’s progress."
_Mark Hemingway
And here, something that would make your head spin- Sock and Awe!
More about that in Times of India.
At least people can mock and laugh with impunity, that liberty is one of the most valuable prizes of democracy, I think.
I think Bush should intervene and grant mercy to Zaidi (the Iraqi Journo who threw the shoes at him). He can also say something to the effect that he achieved a great transformation that people are now free and courageous to show their displeasure as opposed to Saddam's reign. It can send his stock soaring in the Arab world. ;)
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