Couldn't Have Put It Better...

A Few Facts

It's easy to get confused by Middle East politics, and it's very easy to feel a great deal of sympathy towards the Palestinian people. Their leadership has so comprehensively failed them that they are almost certainly condemned to poverty and misery for generations to come.

It's then sometimes easy to point the finger at the Israelis but before you do, I urge all of my readers to take a little history lesson.

Please go here...

L'opera De Les Desserts

Every now and then, something arrives in my inbox that's bloody brilliant.

What Are The Odds

I was driving Dr J's car today... I had a series of pick-ups and frankly, the little Smart's too small for all but the groceries.

She has a personalised number plate... JAE002. Her initials (with 002 attached).

My round trip took me to the four corners of Sydney.

And on the way home, I pulled up behind a car with the number plate JAE003. There are probably two million cars in Sydney. Calculating the chances of pulling up behind a car with a consecutive personalised number plate will make my brain hurt, though I suspect it's probably a number with eight or nine, or even ten zeros on the end.

It's not important, but I tend to notice these things.

Wow.

Photo courtesy of AP. A missile launches from the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie. It wasn't this missile, but today, one like it did the near impossible.

I hope this story didn't pass you by, because the achievement, even in today's hi tech soup, is impressive indeed.

Today, the US Military shot down a satellite. From a ship... at sea.

Think about this... here's a satellite about the size of a bus, hurtling through space at around 20,000kph. It's 210km up... in space.

Someone on an Aegis Class cruiser pushed a button, and a missile launched from the ship. A few minutes later, it scored a direct hit and blew that satellite out of the sky.

Do you have the faintest concept of how hard that was. Let me put it in perspective for you. Imagine taking a rubber band sling shot and firing a ball bearing at a Mercedes driving along a road 20km away at 16okph, and so precisely aiming it that you hit the key hole on the driver's door, exactly as intended.

Stunning.

Of course, they still can't find Osama but hey... a hit is a hit.

Monkey See, Monkey Do.

I understand it started out as an Arby's commercial. Now it's so much more.

Fidelity

I'd like to ask you some serious, confronting questions.

I read a few statistics today, one of which smacked me over the head.

• The first... 50% of marriages end in divorce. That's sad, but not surprising.
• The second... 60% of men cheat in their marriage. That's disappointing, but also not surprising. My observation is that men just have trouble keeping it zipped. That there is a difference, though, between the male cheat rate and the divorce rate is a little surprising, and I'll ask you a question about that in a moment.
• And the third... 40% of women cheat in their marriage. Now that IS surprising. It's been my observation that women aren't like men. Men will have sex with a total stranger, as long as she has a pulse. Women usually require some emotional connection before they can get physical (though I have met one or two exceptions).

Now I don't want to enter into a debate about the wider issues of morality in this post. No. For me, cheating on your spouse is about trust, or, more precisely, breach of trust. And once that trust is breached, it's broken forever.

Allow me to bare a little of my soul....

Have I ever cheated on my wife or long term partner? No. Absolutely not. To deliberately do something that has the potential to hurt the one you (supposedly) love is unconscionable.

Have I ever had sex with a woman who I knew was married (to someone else)? Hmmm. Now that's a less comfortable question. The short answer is "yes, once". At the time, I thought I was providing "comfort"... hubby had been away on business for about a year and she knew he was cheating on her so she just wanted to be in someone's arms. I was wrong though, and I have vowed I will never do that again.

Has my wife or long term partner ever cheated on me? Sadly, yes.

And finally, could I ever forgive a partner who's cheated on me? No. Like I said, it's the ultimate breach of trust. Nothing they could do or say could ever make good. Nope... you cross that line and it's all over.

The statistics tell me there's a different view out there, so maybe it's me who's out of step. Therefore, I'd like to pose a few questions to you, and you can answer anonymously if you like.

• Does that figure of 40% infidelity among women surprise you? Come to think of it, is the 60% infidelity rate among men surprising? Would you have expected more, or less?
  
• Have you ever cheated on your partner?
• Have you ever had a relationship with a married man or woman (other than your spouse, of course)? Did the partner ever find out? Would you ever do it again?
  
• Has your partner ever cheated on you?
• What would you do if you found out your partner was cheating on you?
  
• And is infidelity something that can (or should) be forgiven?

Again, let me stress, this isn't about sex. If you're single and you feel like a casual bonk, then that's between you and the bonkee (provided he/she understands the intention).

What I'm concerned about are the statistics... 60% of men and 40% of women think being unfaithful in a long term relationship is ok. That, to me, seems just a little wrong and I'm starting to think we've got some conflict between promiscuity and integrity happening here.

Maybe it's because we live in such a sexually free society. If you're single, you're expected to be sleeping with him/her on the third, second, and sometimes even first date. Go beyond the third date and you're considered just a little weird.

Sex has become a recreational activity, as much a part of the weekend as dinner, a few drinks and a movie. By the time you get married, you're expected to have had multiple partners, and you're considered a bit odd if you haven't. That's all fine. I don't have a problem with any of it... except...

You then choose a life mate and you're expected to have a 180degree change in your behaviour. Probability says it's just not going to work.

I once dated a girl who openly told me that she expected me to be unfaithful. "That's just the way men are", she said. "Just don't ever let me catch you." I actually felt sorry for her. What caused her expectations to be so low?

My ex told me she thought her affairs were ok too, and apparently, 40% of her female colleagues would agree with her.

Has the pendulum swung too far? Am I being an old fashioned relic who, as the statistics suggest, has lost touch with prevailing opinion?

Or is it that we tend to just draw the lines of "normality" in society today in all the wrong places?

A Fresh New Look

Dr J bought a new laptop yesterday, an ultra light Sony VAIO with Windoze Vista and security that scans your fingerprint/iris/bank records/license/dental records/dna/whatever, just to make sure it's really you switching it on.

At first, I was awfully jealous, not so much of the computer but more of the new look and feel of the operating system thingmie. I'm just a sucker for a whole new look... it goes with my "form over substance" mantra... and after gawking at it over lunch, I sulked upstairs to my little office and my extremely boring looking Windoze XP.

In the next ten or so unproductive minutes, I scanned the web for something that might make my XP look cooler. After all, it was supposed to be designed to be re-skinned, though the only skinning I've ever seen from Microsoft involved extracting money from my wallet.

"I'm not that clever", I thought. "Someone who actually knows what they're doing must have had the same thought as me, and then actually done something about it."

The problem, though, is that it seems like the people who really know what they're doing aren't the nerdy geeks they used to be, and now they're not only tech savvy, they're also money savvy. Just about everything I found that would do what I wanted it to do either a) cost money, b) came with scumware, or c) both.

Bastards! What happened to the open, sharing, caring spirit of the internet? I remember a time when you could get just about anything you wanted for free. People, out of the kindness of their hearts and a solid sense of the greater good would blow huge chunks of their time creating a little program that did whatever, and then they'd upload it so everyone could enjoy their cleverness.

No-one even remotely thought of adding in a few lines of code to steal my email addresses and then turn my machine into a zombie to send out a gazillion emails, or relay my private web habits so that I can be "served" ads that might be of relevance. Such underhanded behaviour was a capital offence.

How times have changed in the few short years the web's been other than something spiders make.

Then I struck gold. I found and installed something called "Vista Anthracite Pack" by Nekh Art Studio. This seemed to fix the window borders but the cursors were still the same old boring XP cursors so the job's wasn't done. That required an "Aero-cursor" package.

Ok... now we're getting somewhere, but it still looks like the proverbial mutton dressed as lamb*.

Enter a little package called "Vista Start Menu" which comes with something called "Yahoo Wigets". The widgets give you the nice big clock, the weather report, and all the other goodies Microsoft has built into Vista, while the Start Menu changes the Windoze XP start menu.

Nice. I now have this shiny, new looking interface that works just the same as it did before.

I didn't realise just how important that last bit was until I spent a few hours with Vista on Dr J's new toy this morning. I came away drained, frustrated and with one overwhelming reaction. "Vista is a load of crap."

While it might look very nice, Windoze Vista takes more clicks to do just about anything, and half the things we wanted to run aren't "Vista compliant". It was disappointing, more for the fact that a)Microsoft built an empire on eye candy so I expected better than this, and b)I didn't think "wow" was short for "wow, this is truly awful".

Ah well. Dr J will get used to it.

I should mention that the VAIO also came with Norton pre-installed. You get a "free" 3 month subscription, after which, the Symantec folk put their hand in your pocket. No thanks. Let's uninstall and get something that actually works. Big mistake!

We clicked "Uninstall", went through the process and rebooted the machine. When we tried to install AVG, we got a warning saying Norton was still installed. Bah! A quick check of the registry showed Norton still there, hogging resources after re-installing itself at boot time.

I went to the Symantec website and searched for "uninstall". I found nothing, so I tediously went through the registry deleting, line-by-line, everything with "symantec" or "norton" in it.

We rebooted, but... yes... you guessed it... like the most persistent of viruses, Norton was back! Didn't the US Department of Justice fine Microsoft about $600mil for doing this with Windoze? I'm sure they did... so how come Symantec gets away with it?

Thank your deity for Google. A quick search on uninstalling Norton yeilded a utility buried deep in the Symantec website... really deep, because I'm sure they don't really want anyone to know it's there. It occurred to me that most people would just give up and re-install the thing. It also ocurred to me that Symantec's counting on it!

Doean't it make you yearn for a simpler life?

*For my non-Australian friends...
"mutton dressed as lamb" - coloquialism. origin unknown. usually refers to a woman well past her prime trying to dress and present herself like a 19 year old.

My Failing Brain

While driving home a few minutes ago, I heard a great piece on the radio.

I immediately thought to myself "oh, that's fabulous... must look that story up on the web when I get home, and then blog it.."

And now I'm home... and I have absolutely no idea what the story was about, or what I was supposed to be looking up.

Bugger.

Clever

A friend of mine was given this book yesterday. It comes complete with magnifying glass. Like Wally, Osama is hidden in about a dozen locations. Particularly challenging is Egypt.

I love creative people (the authors, not the terrorist).

Green & Clean

I had a call yesterday from a business buddy of mine in New York. Let's call him "Ed". That's not his real name, but you know how it goes... "everything you are about to read is true... only the names have been changed to protect the innocent".

Ed wants to involve me in his latest venture and while my first reaction was "no, sorry, too busy", I did give him the courtesy of listening to the proposition. After all, there's nothing like a "Plan B".

Like many others who know what's good for them, Ed's jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon, and like those others, he's not there because he shares some deep communal concern about the future of our planet... no... he's there because there's a buck in it.

Let me explain...

You've heard about Global Warming, right? About how "greenhouse gasses" are allegedly making the climate heat up, and about how those evil fossil fuels upon which we all rely are eventually going to kill us, and about how coal is the evilest of all. (Those of you who are regular readers will already know my views on this... and if this is your first time here, then take a little time reading my archives.)

You've probably heard about "carbon credits", and "green energy too", and you might even have checked the little box on your power bill opting for "Green Energy", even though it costs a few dollars more.

So here's the deal...

Ed recently bought a piece of land somewhere in the Excited States. It's "contaminated" land, in that it used to be a coal mine, so it's covered with mine tailings. They're the bits left over after you pull out whatever it is you're pulling out of the ground. When you mine coal, you end up with a great deal of what used to be called "sub-optimal" ore... that is, coal that's in bits too small to be useful. Miners have been in the habit of piling that coal up in big piles, perhaps thinking that one day, the technology would be developed to make it valuable.

So Ed now owns this huge mound of coal dust, and the technology DOES now exist to make it useful. In simple terms, you crush it up and make it into little briquettes.

On January 1, a new law came into effect in the United States. Now before I explain that law, let me say I'm not beating up the 'Americans' per se, because their new law is no better or worse than anyone elses.

Under that law, the US Government gives Ed a subsidy for making the coal dust into briquettes. The power stations love the briquettes because they're about a third of the price of regular coal and their uniform size means they're about 20% more efficient.

So far this is pretty boring right? Yeah, I thought so too, but here's where it get's cleaner and greener...

...because the bureaucrats decided that if Ed adds 20% biowaste to the briquette, it stops being "coal", and turns magically into a "green, zero emission bio fuel". In this case, Ed's "biowaste" will be a type of flour, though he could use wood chips or even human poo if he wanted to. It's still coal, of course, with all of the same emmission profile that it had before, except that now, by the stroke of a pen, it isn't, and is deemed to have zero emissions that won't count towards America's carbon emissions score.

And "green" fuel attracts an additional subsidy from the US Government. Governments and entrepreneurs all over the world are rushing into this loophole. Ed will make a fortune.

I love the simplicity. Everyone makes or saves money. The company that owns the land can now clean it up for profit, the energy producer pays about 70% less to generate the same amount of electricity, the flour producer gets to save money on disposing of its inedible flour, and the US Government gets to save on carbon emission fines by turning coal into something it isn't.

I know what you're thinking. "Surrely our governments wouldn't try a stunt like this. Aren't they there to actually fix the problem?" No. They're not. They're there to come up with processes by which things can go on much as before. They just have new names.

I did warn you about bureaucrats and global warming, didn't I?

Ew!

When they talk about naked flights, I thought they were talking about 'planes with no markings.

I'm no prude. In fact, I suspect my ideas on sexuality, nudity, and other such issues would probably condemn me to a flaming eternity if my faith believed in that sort of thing.

But this is just plain icky...

The Guardian reports that a German travel agent has come up with "the ultimate in no-frills flying"... a charter flight for passengers who want to fly naked.

Apparently holidays to places where one gets down and naked are particularly popular among east Germans, who like nothing better than to stretch out on a beach in their birthday suits.

Spokesman for the travel agent, OssiUrlaub gets my award for quote of the week. "The flight can be enjoyed as God intended." Really? I would actually have thought nothing about the whole flying thing would fall into the category of "as God Intended".

"For the first time, passengers in Germany can fly completely in the nude," he said.

Whoa. Slow down... put down that phone... you're not quite ready to make a reservation yet. First, you'll need to get yourself to somewhere called Erfurt. The flight will take you to the Baltic island of Usedom, but you'll be returning the same day so a bit of naked sightseeing probably isn't on the agenda. Tickets cost 499 euros ($831).

All passengers will travel naked but will only be allowed to get undressed once on board, the company said.

They don't say whether you get can get naked before the pilot switches off the seatbelt sign. (Hey... maybe they could replace the smoking light with a nakedness light.)

They also don't say whether nakedness is compulsory, but I guess you wouldn't take the flight unless you were that way inclined.

Pilots and cabin crew will remain clothed "for security reasons". Thank God. The time I flew in Germany, I had to resist the desire to say "thanks Nana" each time one of the flight crew served me a drink.

There has to be a sit-com in this somewhere... and no... I didn't make this up. How could you make something like this up.

For the original story, go HERE.