ztraffer

Shopping for lightsabers? Enjoy.

I've always seen the ability to laugh at one's self as sign of sanity and good nature, so this article from ArabNews.com really made me laugh... LOCAL PRESS: Thefts impossible on Saudia flights By MUHAMMAD SULEIMAN AL-AHIDIB | OKAZ Published: Jul 26, 2010 23:22 Updated: Jul 26, 2010 23:22 NEWS agencies, newspapers and satellite channels have all carried the story of an Air France flight attendant who had been stealing from passengers while they slept, especially on long haul flights such as those between Paris and Tokyo. The reports noted that Japanese passengers usually carry with them large amounts of cash as well as valuable mobile phones, and that the air hostess was caught after it was discovered that most of the thefts happened on flights she was on. This woman would not have been able to steal if she were working for Saudi Arabian Airlines. First, she could easily find a job with Saudia because our people do not thoroughly scrutinize résumés. However, I do not say she w...

Every four years, the world gets together for the biggest party in the planet: the World Cup. What used to be a European and South American club, is now truly global, with North America, Asia, and now Africa having hosted the event. The last World Cup final was watched by 725 million people -and that number grows with every event. Here in Uruguay, every match is televised, and you can pretty much tune-in to a World Cup-related show 24/7. When Uruguay plays, an eerie calm befalls and it suddenly feels like a ghost town -at work, in school, at home or at restaurants, every last soul is in front of a TV. World Cup fever is here.

Montevideo is a city full of trees. They line most streets in abundance. Yet the species chosen don't produce the full spectrum of red and gold leaves come fall, as do most trees in North America; just a few shades of dull brown and yellow. I miss the symphony of color.

The health insurance industry is very powerful and so is their lobby. They have almost limitless resources, and have used them to apply enormous pressure to congress and to conduct a missinformation campaign of legendary proportions in order to maintain the status quo. They don't want to give up the golden egg goose -everything else is inconsequential. This is of course, predictable. Why give up the such an enviable situation? The truly remarkable fact is that the current administration managed to break the status quo. Altruism over self-interest. Truth over deception. History will rememeber this day as a good day for the US.

Some snapshots from the Guns 'n Roses concert I attended last Thursday... No bad, but it started 90 minutes late, at 10:30 PM, and it ended around 4 AM... GNR started playing around 1:30 AM, and people were starting to fall asleep... there were rumors that Axl Rose got there really late, so we had to put up with Sebastian Bach a bit too long. In spite of it all, it was an awesome concert.

In case you haven't heard enough about this film, it's a visually stunning, very well executed epic about a technologically primitive but environmentally advanced people living in harmony with their home, Pandora, a moon orbiting a gas giant in a distant star system. Their only sin was to stand between belicose, technically savy, and environmentally primitive humans, and the object of their greed: a valuable substance with the comically foreshadowing name of "unobtanium". The story has been told before: western/transnational powers steamrolling the innocent natives for King or quarterly reports. Watching this film, I found myself wishing I could live a simple and full life in this beautiful quasi-magical land among these free-spiritited people and their tropical paradise, in perfect synergy with their surroundings, free of materialistic concerns, lacking nothing. Then I realized they lacked a very important something: the keys to the Universe. It is true that the nati...

I often find myself doumfounded by how often policies that are in the best interest of the majority -that are aimed at fixing major problems- are met with strong antagonism by large sectors of the the public. Helth care reform in the US is an obvious example. I have a hard time living with the fact that significant percentages of the population can be so easily manipulated, regardless of how much money special interests throw at maintaining the status quo. I'm not sure what upsets me the most: that politicians will play to the tune of special interests against the people they are supposed to serve, or that people will actually fall for it. The article below goes a long way to explain why this happens, so I decided to copy the whole thing into my posting. Enjoy. The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare ...

No winter for me... :-)