Dear all, I arrived in Bangkok just under a week ago. The oppressive, stifling heat reminds me somewhat of Dar es Salaam, or Lima - New Orleans even. One vast, dirty, sprawling metropolis home to some ten million souls, nobody is quite sure, which is where the comparison to New Orleans departs abruptly. For it is magnificently dirty and filthy, with barely a patch of green, where the belching fumes of tuk-tuks, lorries and hordes of spuming motorbikes shovel out monoxides into the...
The main cause of death in the US emerged yesterday as not smoking, but obesity. Statistics published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that in the year 2000, 400,000 Americans died from poor diet and physical inactivity. Since 1990, the number of people killed by gross fatness has increased by 33%, whereas tobacco related death has decreased by a disappointing 1% Two thirds or 130 milli...
It is 1978. The cargo ship Munchen set sail to cross the Atlantic. Munchen was a state-of-the-art cargo ship. The December storms predicted when she set out to cross the Atlantic did not concern her German crew. The voyage was perfectly routine until at 3am on 12 December she sent out a garbled mayday message from the mid-Atlantic. Rescue attempts began immediately with over a hundred ships combing the ocean. The ship was never found. She went down with all 27 hands. An exhaustive...
With news out today that the WMD team in Iraq has been instructed to change its focus on finding WMDs to establishing Saddams intent to produce them, some stories are emerging on the hard streets of occupied Iraq: 'The Bush administration yesterday vowed to stay the course in Iraq despite the attacks in Fallujah that ended with jubilant Iraqis dragging the charred bodies of Americans through the streets. Until yesterday, Washington's explanation of the continuing violence in Iraq...
April fools day used to be known as All Fool's day, but where did it come from and why is it celebrated? There are many theories, the preponderant one claiming that the day has its origins in the late sixteenth century, when the Gregorian calendar was reformed. The start of the New Year used to be April 1st, but this was shifted back to January 1st. The reforms were slow to catch on however, and some people still continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st. The mo...
The latest reason for invading Iraq being pushed by the Whitehouse is that it caused Libya to forsake it's nuclear programme. But did it? The Whitehouse has proven itself time and again to be liars, at the worst interpretation, and incompetent at the kindest of interpretations. So let's look at the facts. Five years ago, Britain resumed diplomatic relations with Libya. Libya's economy was a wreck, screaming for relief from Western sanctions and in desperate need for outward inv...
With the protests around the world marking the anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Bush is claiming that things are getting better in Iraq. Most people I'm assuming are familiar with the stated objectives of PNAC. But what is the grand objective of whoever plotted this war? When you get fantasists like Bush claiming that things are 'going well' in Iraq, surely that begs the question, 'measured against what criterion?' In order to claim success or ...
The Water Wars. The world is made up of 70% of water. Curiously enough, so is the human body. But only 3% of the worlds water is fresh, and much of that is caught up in the poles, the glaciers and the ice-sheets in places such as Greenland . Of all the worlds water, only 1% of it is fresh and available to human beings. 20% of people, or 1.1 billion human beings have no access to fresh water. &n...
It sounds like a good excuse for a piss up, 19,000 people downing 16,000 litres of ale. Its the fifteenth annual wild-food festival at Hokitika, a small community perched on the West coast of the South Island of Aotearea. But apart from the copious amounts of ale being consumed, there is something more sinister to the menu than traditional wild fare of boar, rabbit, hare or deer. Wandering around the food stalls, I was unfortunate to have m...
The San At times of the year, the Kalahari desert is a misnomer. Following the seasonal rains it becomes a living carpet of green lushness and blossoming wild flowers. It is a good time for the San, gathering berries, roots, leaves which they will roast or press for an evening meal. The San people that have lived here for at least 40,000 years, but their future is not as certain or clear as the sudden abundance of food that they are foragin...
In 411 BC the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a play known as Lysistrata, a comedy of sexual politics. In the play, the women of Greece band together to form a rebellion. They are fed up at their men continually going away from the marital bed and fighting interminable wars among one another in the Peloponnesian war. Their agenda is a simple one, they withdraw conjugal rights for their husbands until peace is signed. Driven to distract...
The San people are a direct link to the past for all mankind. They have lived as hunter gatherers in the Kalahari for an estimated 30,000 years. They hunt the eland antelope, a large and dangerous beast. A small group of men, five or so, set out on the hunt. First they scare up a herd of eland, and identify the strongest, fittest male with the largest horns. Working silently using only hand signals, they slowly split off the male from the rest of the herd. The large male...
Dear all, Er, hello there. Arch angel Gabriel here. Now listen up old chaps, I'm afraid that God has a little bad news for all of you that believe in him and that when you die you'll go to heaven. The thing is, you see, well Gods asked me to say he's dead chuffed at you lot having faith in him etcetera, but there's a wee bit of a technical problem with all this living in heaven stuff. He can't imagine how you lot overlooked it with all those bible thumpers out there. But he mad...
In a recent posting, I commented on the arrest of a woman in Florida for bearing her breasts in public. To me it seemed ridiculous that while men were allowed to wander around with their torso exposed, women however were not. The replies were interesting, one of the most pertinent being, look, if every woman or man had the figures of Hollywood idols, there'd be little objection to torso nudity. However, most people do not possess these figures, and bare flesh can be quit revoltng, es...
The recent Spanish atrocity had bought home the truth that the war against terrorism is not going well, as some would have us believe.But rather than whine about it, what can be done to avert these attacks? 1. Hit them in the pocket. From the top down, the terrorists can be most effectively combatted by killing their finances.Money laundering is now the worlds third biggest industry, and in that rotten pile are funds that are made available to support the terrorist networks.Remember when the U...