Following certain rather snarky remarks by a blogger that shall not be named, I want to clarify that in the preceding post I’m not actually expressing excitement; I feign excitement. Or rather, I am of course excited and my faux excitement is a way of mocking myself and commenting on my excitement, and at the same time expressing my genuine excitement in an ironical fashion. Now, admittedly my excitement is caused in part by my appreciation for the silliness of these sort of things, and by my enjoyment of being ridiculous, and in that sense it’s not really seriously meant. So there are layers upon layers of earnestness and pretense in the post.
Category Archives: Websites
Happy belated
Jonathan Edelstein celebrated his first blog anniversary two days ago. His weblog, the Head Heeb, is one of the best blogs I’ve had the fortune to read. He writes eloquently and authoritatively about Isreael/Palestine, Africa, Polynesia(!), Jewish communities around the world, Jewish history, and plenty of other topics. Most of his post are on topics that wouldn’t be covered in the Blogosphere if it weeren’t for him. I can’t really put in words just how great he is.
Congratulations Johnathan, and thank you for making me a less ignorant person.
Moore’s Law As Applied To Humans
Sorry, I’m back. I’ve been keeping myself kinda busy over the last two weeks. On my travels I met what you could consider to be a pretty bright programmer: he writes spider programmes. Now if you were silly enough to want to sit in the first few rows of a concert from some mediocre but popular pop star, you would probably want to be cursing him: for his boss and his spider programme would already have the tickets. He works for an entrepreneur in a nameless but extremely large country, who buys up all the tickets for 250 dollars and re-sells them at around a thousand a go. He told me that at first this work was easy, but recently things have gotten more difficult. The concert organisers have tried to overcome the practice by having an image inserted to which you have to manually type some given response. Problem solved you might think. Well no: this is where ingenuity and globalisation come in to guarantee that ‘real’ entrepreneurship will not be thwarted.
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Blogging the news II
Today’s election day in Northern Ireland, which gives me an opportunity to plug the invaluble Slugger O’Toole.
For Long, Cold Winter Nights,
there’s probably nothing more stimulating than brushing up one’s legal knowledge about the EU by reading a fistful of accession treaties including all appendices to the annexes IV, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV in their entirety (pdf) – via Handakte.de (German).
Blogging the news
There are a couple of English-language blogs that people might find interesting, given some of the events of the weekend.
First, Mary Neal’s Living With Caucasians - ‘A journal from Tbilisi, Georgia’ – has reports from the streets on what happened during Georgia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ over the weekend (link via Jon and Ryan)
Cinderella Bloggerfeller also has some good coverage of events in Georgia.
Also, there were elections in Croatia over the weekend. Dragan Antulov’s Draxblog has lots of detail on the results and what they mean for Croatia.
“An officially licensed Euro-nut”
Today’s Guardian has a brief interview with Denis MacShane MP, the UK’s Minister for Europe. There are no stunning revelations in there, but it’s an insight into the path the British Government is walking on when it comes to European matters. He also has an interesting description of the Anglo-French relationship:
MacShane says: “I would liken it to a marriage in which two partners often think of killing each other, aren’t quite sure of the meaning of the word ‘fidelity’, but never contemplate divorce.”
The Country That Has it All
Posting under the header: ‘More Signs That We Are In the Twentieth Century After All’ my young Argentinian co-blogger notes crypically “I don’t know what a XIXth (or XXth) century englishman would say, if we told him that English unions would one day protest against losing skilled jobs to India”……… adding…………”and, in the heels of our previous post about Sekhar Kapur interview, today the blogsphere is buzzing with news of the P2P network Kazaa’s agreement to distribute (in a pay-per-view fashion) the indian film Supari. If this works out economically, the sidelining of traditional distribution channels might very well enhance the global reach of Bollywood productions, specially among the growing Asian diaspora in the developed world. We are truly living in interesting times”. (BTW: I owe the post on Kapur to Marcelo: completely. If it wasn’t for Argentina, what would I know about India!).
In the comments I respond “Absolutely, there is another big push going on, Google’s innovative share offer is another example, maybe blog portals will be another. Something is really happening out there”. So it’s wakey wakey time. For the first time since the mid-ninetees the thing is really humming. First-movers, creative destruction, defining moments: get tighly back in your seats. Hold on for the bumpy ride.
And meantime, exceptionally, and on a boring grey Saturday morning: news from the country that has it all: problems, problems, problems.
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Mark Steyn is on crack
Well, unless someone else can come up with an explanation for this article, that’s about the only explanation I can think of. I’m not sure, though, whether it’s the argument that Europeans should breed more to stop a situation where ‘Europe will either be very old or very Muslim’ or his suggestion that ‘France and perhaps other Continental countries now exist in a quasi-Cold War with America’ that’s the most insane. Probably the second one, though.
(thanks to Harry for the link – as he puts it ‘I don’t see much difference between this sort of analysis and the kind of garbage we hear from the likes of Le Pen, Haider, Bossi and their counterparts in the UK‘)
Close Encounters of the Virtual Kind
You can tell Saturday has come round again. I’m here with another of those ‘mindless’ posts. Still, anyone not suffering from too much of a post-halloween hangover, and looking for a cool bit of culturally-correct entertainment should try this (especially mousing over top-right exhibit two). If however you are in the mood for a culturally less-correct but nonetheless fairly enjoyable quick read try this. And the point of all this, the place I found the links: Henry Schroy’s Blog. Now Henry is a musician (more culture: check out the music for Orixas), born in Rio and now living in Brooklyn New York: so what the hell has this got to do with Europe? Good question. The answer is probably very little. However…….
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