Great report here from Reuters:
A monkey urinated on Zambian President Rupiah Banda as he spoke to journalists at a news conference on Wednesday.
Banda softly shouted: “You (monkey) have urinated on my jacket,” and paused as he looked up to see the animal playing in a tree just above his chair.
“Perhaps these are blessings,” he said continuing his address …
Yesterday evening I was watching videos that have leaked out of Iran. I watched a video taken inside some kind of university - students being beaten and shot, gunfire, screams and breaking glass swirling around the microphone. I was totally shaken by the images: left with a physical feeling of fear and nausea. I can’t believe how brave these people are, that they are prepared to protest even in the face of brutality and death.
Afterwards I needed to get some food before theatre rehearsals. I bought felafal from my friend Najar, who I sometimes play football with. I needed to talk about what I’d just seen, so I told him about it. He’d never mentioned this before, but he told me that he is a Kurd from Syria, and said that in 2004 his people were indiscriminately brutalised by the Syrian government in a similar way. Amazingly, he smiled. He said that people are crazy. He praised the use of internet and camera-phones: this violence has happened in the Middle East for years, he said, but before no-one found out about it.
I told him I was amazed that people would still protest, even against police wielding guns and clubs. He said that in England we cannot imagine this sort of protest, because we are comfortable and we have everything. But people in the Middle East are desperate, he says, and sometimes they are so desperate that they are not scared any more.
I felt a bit better after talking with him.
“Short girls”, apparently. I analysed a random selection of a couple of thousand tweets, to find out what is most mentioned in the construction “I love …”
Here are the all the things that were mentioned more than once in my sample:
you 106
it 85
them 13
my job 10
me 10
YOU 9
him 8
her 8
u 6
this song 6
the smell 5
the fact 4
THIS 4
Mondays 4
the sun 3
the rain 3
my wife 3
my life 3
my friends 3
my baby 3
Twitter 3
IT 3
your work 2
your designs 2
watching it with my friend 2
waking 2
the song 2
the name 2
that show 2
that quote 2
starting 2
sleeping 2
short girls 2
reading 2
nice people 2
myself 2
my sofa 2
my dog 2
enthusiasm on the field 2
days 2
Spring 2
Marcia Cross 2
Huff’s fist pumps 2
Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are normally such schmaltz-generators… but finally someone has made something meaningful out of the day. See the collection at PostSecret:
Maryam Beheshti, 23, another student, said: “We will continue this till we get our votes back. I don’t afraid of being killed while many of my friends have been shot to death by this dictator government. My friends have cried today when they saw the pictures of the dead students in front of Tehran University carried by ordinary people. How can I be indifferent and just ignoring what they are doing? This time it’s different from before, we will not get silent by any means, even if they continue to kill us.”
Guardian, Wednesday 17 June 2009
I can’t resist gleefully highlighting this fine book review in the Economist:
The “efficient market hypothesis”, the Nicene Creed of the market rationalists, inspired a wave of innovative financial products, such as derivatives and securitised subprime mortgages, that believers claimed would allow users to exploit the wonders of the market. This gospel was embraced so enthusiastically by the markets that these products soon accounted for trillions of dollars of trades. Then it turned out that the market was not rational after all. Trillions were wiped out and, as one of the cheerleaders for rationality, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, put it, “the whole intellectual edifice collapsed.”
… Oh: so now they’re saying that free markets aren’t actually ideal, rational, transparent ways of making everything work better. What a cruel shock.
I arrived late on Thursday night, walked up Bowery through a quiet Chinatown. I found my hostel, haggled over prices (which they had changed since I booked the bed), ate a delicious slice of pizza, then went to bed by about 1am. I slept briefly, then got up early, excited to see what I could make of 24 hours in New York City.
6am Friday - fresh and wholesome, on the stoop in front of the hostel, 14th Street.
I walked up town, through Union Square where some hobos and coffee vendors were beginning to wake up. Some latinos were setting up a fruit stall, and I bought a couple of apples for breakfast - I tested the water using Spanish instead of English, and the lady with the apples didn’t seem to notice or care. Good. I continued, up Park Avenue, still mostly empty; but gradually people appeared on the streets as I reached midtown, with the Empire State Building rearing up on my left, and Grand Central Station popping up down the block each time a street opened up on my right. Continue Reading »
I’ve noticed that the Guardian published at least one article in Chinese, on May 20th.
This is rather strange - and for the moment, mysterious. There is no surrounding content to tell me why they published in Chinese. And Google yields nothing.
(I only found out about this because it turned up as a huge blip in my English language monitoring programs.)
Was this something to do with the Tiananmen Square anniversary? An attempt to counter-balance the surge in Chinese internet censorship?
I’m actually beginning to “get” twitter (after months of thinking: “that’s just blogging with a character limit”).
I think the best thing about it is the search function - you’ve got to be logged in to use it. This can get you latest info on things in a way that Google can’t touch. I wonder though if spamology will eventually begin to corrupt this utility.
Plus being able to “listen in” on peoples’ conversations is also a great information source.
Asked if he thought the pictures might upset Catholic voters, he replied: “Excuse me. When you take a shower, do you keep your jacket and tie on?”