Pagani in Paris

This is the cover of the most recent (European edition) Economist:



Ho ho ho. How they must have sniggered when they put that together.

So, to summarise, according to the Economist:

France needs to be more like Britain;

It also needs a decade-long recession;

France's manufacturing sector - the most productive, highest value in the world - needs to be destroyed;

It would be handy to have a small war far away;

France needs to be tossed out of the Euro because its chancellor is incapable of keeping its revenue within shouting distance of its spending;

It needs more riots and hooliganism in its poorest suburbs; and

It needs to double unemployment and poverty as quickly as possible.

Let me see if I can think of reasons why French voters might be wary of the prescription.

(By the way, whatever happened to Mrs Thatcher? Was she the one who was tossed out by her own party, causing a ruption that inflicted fifteen years of division within the Tories? Or would that be another Mrs T?)

A cute New York Times piece about the joys of buying real estate in our corner of Paris, the 17th.

This is nonsense. I'm definitely more right-brained.

C'mon...

You Are 55% Left Brained, 45% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

The French PM calls for television cameras at cabinet. This is a great idea. Secrecy at cabinet is an outdated idea. Yes, many discussions will move elsewhere - but they do anyway. It's only people who have never been near manoeuvring for cabinet decisions who think actual decision are taken there. If it's so important to have closed cabinet meetings, why are city council meetings open?

Meanwhile Mme Royal calls for citizens juries to monitor the work of elected representatives. Another excellent idea. Accountability is the biggest problem of the public sector. Democracy is a pretty good accountability tool, but it is blunt. Citizen juries that representatives had to appear before would another layer of transparency.

Reporters are surprised Mme Royal's support rating is falling. Err - it's falling from 72 percent to 57. Name anyone who can sustain a 72 percent rating once their policies become known. (Though Bob Hawke pulled it off for a while). She is hugely dominant. But the lesson for her is to tack back towards the vague. Specifics never win anyone votes.

"What are those?" I asked Maria, pointing to a set of rosary beads she's been given.

"It's a necklace."

"Do you know what it's for?"

"Yeah you hold this and say something to the guy - the guy, not the girl, the other guy. Ummm, who's that guy?

"The Pope? Il Papa? Jesus? Father Gerry?"

"No. No. No. That guy who you do praying."

"God?"

"Yeah. That guy!"

According to the Independent on Sunday, the item most commonly stolen from shops in Italy is Parmesan cheese.

The letter I just sent the NZ Herald:

In your story about the secrets of French politics you choose to describe the daughter of Francois Mitterand - without quotation marks or irony - as 'illegitimate' and a 'bastard'. Apparently these terms were used in your article because President Mitterand was not married to his daughter's mother. The parents of half the children born in New Zealand today are not married. Most of the children are nevertheless very legitimate to everyone born since the nineteenth century. And unless they edit newspapers, perhaps they don't deserve the other term either.

How completely disgraceful. How utterly and completely disgraceful the Herald can be.

This week is the fifth anniversary of the iPod.

Other than my first Apple laptop, it is without peer as the coolest gadget I've ever owned. It brought music back for me - all the CDs stacked in dark drawers where we never bothered to play them. We hauled them out, loaded them and spent hours that would otherwise have been swamped in the ennui of kids at the park. Every room in the house is ready for whatever mood we feel like.

I remember buying a Walkman in Fiji when I was about 17. I thrashed about six cassettes on it and then made - by taping off the radio! - another half a dozen. You would have one cassette all day: 12 songs. My iPod has over 4000 loaded on it.

When Maria was born, no one had ever heard of an iPod. Now it is the iconic device of the new century. The Internet seems full of theories about its success. It's simple really - it is just an almost perfect toy. It brings exactly the emotional tone you want, wherever you are, in a package so small you can take it anywhere, in a format that is easier than peas to operate. It takes about ten seconds to learn, feels good...and it just works.

The Slate commentary linked to above argues the iPod changed nothing. This from a magazine that has argued salmon is just too declasse and Marlborough sauvignon blanc too bland. The highest acclaim of success is the sneer of the would-be cultural arbiter scambling for a snobbish high ground from where the tastes of the uninformed masses can be mocked and derided. Nothing reveals cultural irrelevance so much as cultural commentary unable to explain the pleasures consumers find without first seeking permission. Cultural snobbery is how modern class pretension conceals its classically fashioned bigotry (see also The Middle Classes Declaiming On Childhood Obesity; Middle Class Derision Towards MacDonalds; and Salman Rushdie).

Anyway, five observations on the fifth birthday of my perfect toy:

We're all rocking crooners in our heads.

You never quite get used to a shuffle playlist that jumps from the Dead Kennedys to Mozart's Requiem.

As they say about mobile phones, electronic gadgets are the one thing where men think smaller is better.

There is a good reason we stopped listening to some of those songs.

Motown r-o-c-k-s. Still.

Singing out loud when you're the only one who can hear the tune?

Poor Macca. Divorcing a one-legged prostitute who accuses him of wife-beating and he's still the boring one out of Lennon and McCartney.

Popbitch

Armed kids hijack and burn bus.

Brit tabloid reporters faint in pleasure.

A cafe owner says:

"The French are becoming lazy people who don't want to work. But they shouldn't decide for those who are eager to earn their bread and sweat for it."

It's a bit mystifying that workers can't negotiate to work a longer day in exchange for more holidays. A 39-hour week seems to come up short of brutally oppressive working conditions. You know, just a little short.

Someone in the linked article claims cafes everywhere will be complianing to voters about this law...but it's hard to believe in every cafe les garcons will be telling their customers they want to work longer.

When Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker, Paris To The Moon) wrote about the 35-hour week, he said France decided to fix its economic problems by deciding "everyone needed to work less."

Last year I carefully studied all the figures I could get hold of on the 35-hour week. They showed GDP and employment figures going all over the place - no meaningful linkage was available in any direction. One reason - a shorter working week means places that want to stay open have to employ more staff; and it means people use their leisure time not only to sleep, but to shop and to sit in cafes and bars. It forces an increase in productivity. The idea that we work to live, and not the other way round, is part of French culture; the same culture invests in beautiful public facilities and grand public art, it revels in food and wine. You can't have one without the other.

Funny. Clever.

"Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported."

Noting the single source and the ubiquitous reproduction of the story, does anyone think someone was pulling the reporter's leg?

When I try imagine the world my kids will grow up in, it's tempting to think it will be exactly like the world we know, only a bit more of good things.

But why would it be like that?

Compare 1906. Imagine the global outlook then. Not a single country in the world had experienced a communist government, yet it would be the dominant ideology of the twentieth century. Not a single Labour Party had been formed in the fashion that would see them elected to government in all but one of the world's democracies, and arguably introduce the most important humane reforms of the century. If kids like mine lived in Europe then, in 1906, not a single person they met would have heard of fascism, yet before they were middle aged it would have murderously swept all of Europe, dragging away its opponents and victims to ovens and firing squads. Two world wars would cause unimaginable destruction and reshape their continent impossibly. The monarchies of Europe could not have believed the disasters waiting at their door.

What is different now? In the developed world, everything. But why would analysis stop at the borders of rich countries? Those kids now will deal with a world dominated by the rising triple-spiked threat of Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic militarism and Islamic civil war. Their democracies might face disasters at our door: The world's democracies, with the exception only of India, are being outperformed economically by thugocracies. Economic might produces military might, and military might sooner or later produces military projection. In this century it will be armed with lunatic weapons.

And yet those kids will grow up with more choices, opportunity and wealth than their grandparents could have believed. A middle class person in middle age when Maria is middle aged will live as Kings did when her great grandfather was born. There is nothing like the spread of abundance to buy complicity in the status quo: In fact, that might be the greatest gift of twentieth century ideology. Rising affluence brings peace; hopelessness brings crisis. There is evidence in the past, but it is far from conclusive.

If the Ford Motor Company is the Vatican of mediocrity, then its bishops of bland are imperilling Jaguar. I hope the Germans buy the Jaguar marque. The Germans know how to make a car.

Ford is losing less money on its prestige brands than on its mainstream motors. But anyone can see why it's failing: It makes dull dull dull cars that no one really wants, that don't meet the rising demand for environmentally sensitive, muscular, versatile, performance. Its cars cost too much, and did I mention they're dull? Fords are dull dull dull dullity dull and only bought by people who think they should. Plus taxis and musty fleet buyers.

Oh and why are they losing money even on prestige national brands? Because Ford has clung for too long to a protectionist defence against competition that locked in high cost structures and dismal ideas. Car manufacturing should be the most globalised industry in the world. Instead it's almost the least. The sooner Ford and GM are bankrupted the better if they take with them their malignant manufacturing processes and gargoyle designs.

UPDATE: I've reflected on these exuberantly excessive thoughts over lunch and decided I don;t mean it at all. I don't really want them to go bankrupt. That's silly. I do want Ford to spin off Jaguar and its other prestige brands into a prestige brand managing owner. I want Ford to be a marketing and design company that demands and promotes innovation among a global network of innovators. Why aren't cars any much different to how they were in 1975? Or 1955 for that matter, when you think about it? Because the people who design cars today made their careers starting out in the 70s. There is no way an innovator will take over car production at Ford or GM. The only reason they survive is they have blocked, through tariffs and vertical integration, the innovation that would produce something transformative. (No I don't mean ABS braking and lighter metals; I mean something that transforms how we get from A to B, just as email and the Internet have transformed how we write letters home). They need top radically transform their structures. That's what I really mean.

I can't find where, but I while back I remember writing about how every car these days seems to be grey or silver. (I can talk - my Jaguar is silver).

Anyway, marketing genius Seth Godin noticed the same things - and comes up with a brilliant insight about what this means for advertising stuff.

The hidden connections are how the world works.

Slaphead Jack's personal collection of wine from his excesses as mayor of Paris has been flogged for a million Euros.

There is an old 'cave' - a wine cellar - round the corner from us where I popped in on the weekend. The proprietor had bottles of Armagnac from the fifties, forties and from 1934 on the shelf for sale. All house label. I asked him if the 1934 is still drinkable. He assured me it was a very good drop. Only €400 Euro. It's been in the cellar in this wine shop on the rue de Courcelle since 1934.

Bush has banned Vegemite from the US!

Is there no depth of depravity to which this monster will not stoop?

(Boy that Aussie-US free trade deal is good for the Aussies, eh?)

Update: More on this here. (Check the comments for a couple of gems, too.)

Okay so I've already filled the house with things that make noise. But this looks edible.

Bugger.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has a statistically significant lead if she uses her maiden name, but not if she is just Hillary Clinton.

What could this mean?

The burnt out carcass of a hatchback has been sitting at the end of our street for a few weeks. Not sure what happened to it, but it's not impossible it was the closest example we've had of the car burnings. The headlines have gone, but apparently an average of 112 cars a day have been torched this year. Clichy is only a few miles from where we live, though it might as well be Belgium it for the practical distance. When we've driven through it has felt the same as any other quarter of the banlieu.

An idiot at the fringe lunatic wing of a minor police unit has convinced the Telegraph that the car burnings are an intifada. A competent reporter might have recorded reasons for scepticism, thought here's no evidence that either the Telegraph's sub-sentient cretin nor the foaming police union spokesperson know what an 'intifada' is.

How smug of the English press. We could equally ask how many knifings there are daily in London and conclude there is an undeclared insurgency.

For all that, there isn't anyone in France with much idea how to put out the flames. If you create ghettos, this is what happens. Ghettos take generations to disappear.

I can't too excited about the French ban on smoking in public.

The BBC correspondent here argues France is unusually smokey - "you'll never escape the fragrance of fags," she says. Well the trouble is, as this post from a French blogger living in the US discusses, France isn't a lot more smokey than a lot of places.

there are 12 countries in Europe alone that smoke more than France. 40% of the Greeks, 37% of Austrians and 27% of Europeans overall smoke.The French: between 25% and 20%, depending on the source.

But it does seem smokier than New Zealand, especially in the bars. One of the reasons for the popularity of MacDonalds is it is reliably smoke-free. Especially as a place to take the kids, that concern weighs far more heavily for me than worries about fat in their Happy Meals. For everyone kneejerk critic of MacDonalds, I am yet to hear anyone as vociferous about the health risks of taking kids into an average Paris brasserie, where the air is toxic.

I'm not sure the ban on smoking in public will make a huge a difference. It's been years since they banned dog poo on city streets, but there is no shortage of it on the sidewalk. It's just about possible to imagine Parisians showing the same deference to the smoking law.

French fears over globalisation are pronounced. It was one of the strongest themes in the vote to reject the European constitution. It underlies much of the fear about immigration too. Ironically, it's mostly misplaced. France owns so much of the world's intellectual property, and has such a strong brand, that it is potentially one of the major beneficiaries. But there are also a huge number of people whose jobs will be sent overseas. They're staring at ten percent unemployment and thinking 'this isn't for me.'

Enter Ségolène Royal, who has come out promising to tax French businesses for moving jobs outside France and to tax their products again when they are imported back in.

"We have to prevent this wildcat outsourcing...The capitalists have to be frightened."

How could this not stop you in your tracks: The Lancet says 600,000 people have died in Iraq since the invasion - mostly from gunfire.

Even by the solemn standards of the region this is an unusual catastrophe.

Lancet has been criticised over the integrity of the data and I'm a little suspicious of the number. The figure is an extrapolation from 547 confirmed deaths. Researchers say they have death certificates for ninety percent of them. If that was good methodology, wouldn't it be simple just to collect up all the death certificates and confirm the figure? It's an outrageous carnage there but I personally won't be using the Lancet figure.

Meanwhile, from Slate:

By failing to distinguish clearly among the overlapping security threats presented by rogue states, nuclear proliferators, and supporters of terrorism, Bush helped bring his own nightmare to life.

Exactly.

And add to that, with his eye off the ball Afghanistan is falling apart.

This analysis is interesting. The intellectual thrust behind Bush foreign policy is the projection of American power to secure democracy and markets. The analysis in the link assesses the strategic implication - that American post-Cold War strategy has been to prevent the emergence of China, Russia Japan and Germany as global rivals. (Notice which two Security Council members are not rated as even potential emerging powers.)

So the evidence is (a) the projection of power is not such a good idea when your power turns out not to be quite as omnipotent as you thought; (b) they need the merging powers to tame the actual, existing hurting-now threat, but they've piqued them all so badly they can't get the help they need; and (c) apart from anything else - the US is not willing to pay the bill to look after the strategic interests of China and Russia (see Bosnia, Conservative-cut-and-run). So the strategy has locked in its own failure.

Carlo has always struggled with the personal pronoun. He started off by saying 'you carry you?' when he wanted to be picked up.

Now he has adopted a pseudo French construction for everything.

"I've had enough me."

"Me I want one."

"You me give this to me."

At least he's stopped muttering in Arabic.

Meanwhile, Maria rushed past us this week calling out, "Mum! I'm just gonna take a piss!"

We're going to the final...


I've seen on TV one NPC game this year - a completely dreary match between Wellington and Bay of Plenty. Possibly the worst I've ever watched, after which I concluded we would be knocked out early. What on earth happened to them?

They play like France and Italy play football in the prelim rounds of the World Cup!

A special Sports category has had to be created in the sidebar to accommodate my excitement at this development. (Notice the passive construction, effecting an air of inevitability).

Actually they play like France in the prelim rounds, but we're not admitting that because we all know how that ended up. Tana sent off for a disgraceful end to his career in extra time? Nah, couldn't happen.

How existential.

Some days i feel like a pinball.

I think we can all identify. The flipper gives you a kick up the jacksie, you get dinged backwards and forwards far too fast for the whole day until eventually you disappear down the plughole.

Anyway, someone has taken pictures of a pinball's point of view.

The Devil Wears Prada? It's crap. The novel is crap. The movie is crap.

The novel is leaden reading like grinding uphill on a three-speed bike. The movie just leaves you asking, 'why bother?' Meryl Streep is brilliant but they do nothing with her. The other one is a ditz.

It's all crap. Even if they do have Paris in it. Though fashion week is not the week before Christmas, which is when they shot it.

Google keeps doing amazing stuff. The latest is Google docs.

Check that out. Create documents online. Save and email them as Word docs. All for free. Why buy Microsoft Office ever again? I can collaborate on a document with several people in NZ - everyone writing and editing the same document, and it's as simple as working on a Word doc. A month or two ago I tried all sorts of spreadhseet options that would allow us to host a database on line and have access by up to four or five staff. They cost thousands and thousands of dollars and were extremely complicated to learn. Hosting was dodgy. This is free and I learned it in two minutes. Plus, I wrote a document and then saved it as a word document and it opened up in microsoft word right there on my hard drive. amazing. Did I mention it's free?

In the future most home computers might just be internet browsers and we'll do everything on line.

The only problem was it doesn't work with Safari. I use Camino to access it, which is a very cool browser.

The Telegraph claims 2500 cops have been injured this year in the Paris banlieu.

Can't see that figure verified elsewhere. But it does highlight the steady level of background violence going on out there. The car burning riots of last year are by no means over.

"Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage." Damn, this had to happen in New Zealand. (link via Boing Boing).

You know that old joke about why Jesus wasn't born in Australia? (Couldn't find three wise men - or a virgin). It looks like Australia has set out to find three wise men itself. They've being asked to vote on whether there are any Australian intellectuals. The lost of nominations is satisfyingly brief.

"Australian intellectual." And the word oxymoron appears nowhere?

Intellectual is not a description many would chose for Ian Chappell, but he is one of the most engaging Aussies. Read this wonderful interview. (Andrew Denton's a pretty good interviewer, no?) There is a particular Aussie character like Chapelli you have to love: Hard, funny and with a deep commonsense streak of a fair go. (Sorry, can't remember how I found this).

And...Har de har har from the Yellow Pages.



Wish I'd thought of that. From here.

Worried that voters all over Europe are telling it to naff off, the European Union has come up with the sensational idea of

a "major communication effort" on enlargement

Whenever someone's daffy ideas are taking a pounding their first resort is to blame the way they are communicating their ideas. It saves the ego from dealing with the reality that there is a problem with the substance.

This 'major' effort will fail. In fact it will backfire.

It is another example of top-down, 'tell the punters what's good for them' arrogance.

To the extent that it manages to connect with anyone at all - and a top-down campaign will usually struggle to do that well - it will only intensify the anxiety Europeans are feeling about enlargement.

It will be undermined by a muddy message because they don't really know what they are trying to say anyway (gee, could that be why it's so hard to convince the punters?) .

And it will be white-anted by member states as politicians read the writing on the wall.

This is third rate professional communications expertise at its worst, funded on the taxpayers' coin of course. But watch the noses go in the trough for it.

I just worked out why I'm always wary of investment advice.

The way to make money is to invest in stuff that makes you money and doesn't cost you money. Invest for cash flow, not capital gain.

How true that is. How very true.

People make a bit of money from capital gains. A little bit. Sometimes we lose a bit too. But not real money. Cash baby. It's all about cash.

Global politics, celebrity news, family trivia and sound financial advice. Is there nothing, nothing, this blog won't bring you?

South Korea's foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon will be the next UN Secretary General.

He is getting the job because he is a vanilla nobody who has never upset anyone and never will. Which is exactly - exactly - what the UN doesn't need right now.

But there was no other possible outcome. Anyone who proposed meaningful reform would not be electable. Still, they could have considered someone with a track record of strong management. Diplomacy is not really the problem at the UN.

The inability of international organisations to reform themselves may be the seed of their destruction.

Important scientific discovery in the New Scientist.

Women may have a reputation for demanding lengthy foreplay, but they become sexually aroused as quickly as men, according to a new study

Harry Hutton notes:

Not when I'm around they don't.

I don't understand why this is, but in the autumn everyone goes on strike. I mean to say, they're all on strike all the time anyway, but in autumn they are seriously on strike. It's something to do with coming back from holidays and being grumpy.

Anyway, Rue Rude has a brilliant list of everyone who is on strike at the moment:

Buses and metros, on strike Wed 4th October in Paris, Nancy, and eight other cities
Customs agents
Employees of the cable company Noos
Starting tomorrow, union demonstrations, including employees of the SNCF/national trains, nationwide against the privatization of Gaz de France
Taxi drivers at CDG/Roissy airport, who meet tomorrow to decide what actions to take. "We are preparing a new strike," said a union representative.
Employees of Sudrail
Employees of Total in Moselle
The CGT union, announcing a metro and bus strike in Paris, Dijon, Nancy, Angoulême and Lorient on Wednesday.

Ouch.

On Saturday for Maria's birthday we went out to Parc Asterix. It's like an Asterix themed, slightly dowdy version of Disneyland. It took us two and a half hours of travelling to get there, so unless you were driving out in your own car I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. But it was fun.

Josie went on the most insane roller coaster I've ever seen. Upside down through the loop-de-loops and corkscrews seven times.

Best ride was the last one: the log flume. I got soaked. Maria thinks those things are what boats are really like.

On Sunday I took the kids to Canal St Martin and we walked alongside the pleasant canal for a kilometre or so until we found a huge expanse of green grass with no 'pelouse interdict' sign banning us from running on it. The kids took off their shoes and wrestled and jumped over each other on the unfamiliar lawn.

I know you're relying on me to keep you up to date with global developments. If you want to skip over the geo-politics, the funny stuff is towards the end. So here we go:

I'm amazed the confrontation between Georgia and Russia isn't getting more attention. This is very serious. The Russians were sullen enough about their former satellite states not being dependent on them any more. They are going off the deep end at the prospect of buffer states joining Nato. Putin's ominous warning that Georgia shouldn't rely on outside help is realistic. What could anyone else do? No one is going to confront Russia, least of all in Georgia. Poor little Georgia. Not that Russia will invade. They're much more sophisticated. They have simply cancelled their grudging and slow plans to leave their Georgian military bases. So Georgia is effectively occupied by Russia right now.This will prevent Georgia joining Nato. You can't be a member of Warsaw while Russians are all over your military facilities. (although if we think of Philby, Burgess Blunt et al, it never stopped the Brits). This will increase pressure on the Georgian leadership. Splits will deepen between the old guard who say it is strategically better to cozy up to Russia and those who want to confront Georgia more. Russia's next move will be to wind up the pressure on Georgia further. There will be subtle acts of provocation and outrageous acts of terrorism. Georgia will be back in the Russian fold in two years.

In Austria, Social Democrats have won more votes than Bolger-esque chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel. But as far as I can see it's a mistake to call this a swerve left,a s most media commentary has to date: The cards are mainly held by two racist far right parties, parties Herr Schüssel is happy to cozy up with. First rule of politics - learn to count. The Social Democrats won 35%, the Greens 10%. It doesn't make 50.

Donald Rumsfeld is refusing to resign. This, apparently is news. How surprising it is that when his opponents demand his resignation, he says 'no'. Kinda interesting that a congressman gets politically destroyed for sending a sleazy email to a 16 year old boy, but you kill more people than Saddam Hussein and the consequences are zero. Ideology aside, Rumsfeld went out on a limb with the Iraqi invasion in embracing a theory of military transformation - that the days of huge mechanised military action is over and have has been replaced by small, light, very fast and very sophisticated military action. So they invaded Iraq with a minimum of numbers. The theory was right in terms o the success of the invasion and horribly wrong for occupation (although, ironically, there is an unholy alliance between those calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and those who say not enough troops were sent in the first place). Anyway, Rumsfeld embraced transformation not just for military reasons but because a lighter, swifter invasion force means you can do it more often; if Iraq had been dealt with in 2003 (as the White House hoped), it could have threatened to go on to Iran, maybe Syria and so on, with little political cost. This is the heart of the neo-con world order - the projection of American force to secure democracy and free markets. It relies on the successful projection of force. Iraq has proved it doesn't work like that. So Rumsfeld should be fired because he let the neo-cons down. Anyway they won't do it now, just before the elections but the best tactical option for Bush now would be to say that the next phase in Iraq requires a new approach and remove Rummy. That would give him the chance to recover a lot of political capital.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with this, but the logic is compelling: the logic of carbon-based climate change is that opposition to nuclear energy is endangers the planet. Nuclear energy is nutty in NZ, on both cost options and because of the seismic activity. But in many parts of the world it makes sense.

Of course not everyone is preoccupied with the great issues of statecraft, war and the decline of the planet. In Norway - funny old Norway, eh? - they are much more concerned with the habit of boys peeing while standing up. Ah yes. Don't laugh, it's a matter of time before this is banned everywhere. The principal behind the ban says:

young boys are simply not good enough at aiming, and the point was to have a pleasant toilet that could be used by both boys and girls.

So yeah. How they gonna enforce this?

And finally in technology news, who on earth would buy Microsoft's clunky, large, ugly, uncool ipod-killer rather than the sleek, sexy gorgeous ipod? Huh?


PS: Don't you miss the good old days when I did this every week?