informage

Independent Online Edition > Middle East:
Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year.

Why Do You Stay Up So Late?: beautiful (requires flash, via boingboing)

I recently read a couple of engaging blogs, both of which can (and possibly should) be read as a contiguous whole, something with which to while away those mundane back-to-work January afternoons.

First, Bob Harris went on a mid-life crisis journey around the world and wrote about it. He has some fascinating insights as a progressive American on the move. For obvious reasons I particularly liked the stuff on South Africa - although I don't agree with every word. Bob Harris did some stand-in writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog.

Second is she's a flight risk by Isabella V, international fugitive. I first saw this just after she started somewhere around a year ago, and was reminded of it by Jamie Zawinski. It's a fascinating story of a rich heiress one the run from her powerful family, hacking into wireless nets with her Linux-running laptop, hanging out with smugglers on tropical islands and just generally living a life less ordinary. One can't help but have doubts about the veracity of the whole thing, but apparently an Esquire journalist has met her for what that's worth.

(Jamie Zawinski - or jwz as he's known - is a bit of a geek legend, one of the early Netscape developers who now runs a nightclub in San Francisco. His blog is a fairly continuous stream of links to web exotica).

Crikey - a 6 metre long granny-eating shark is on the hunt here in Cape Town. And who's to say it's just after grannies? Well I think that puts pay to any ideas about taking up surfing again. Or anything else involving any kind of proximity to ocean water for that matter. I can't help but think that the increase in chumping to attract sharks for "cage dive experiences" is making matters worse - shark attacks have increased significantly in the last few years - despite some lame protestations I've heard that it couldn't possible be connected. Yeah, right.

Talking of behemoths, our local brewery - no less than the largest in the world after swallowing those notable Wisconsin brewers whole - seem to have a rather nasty grudge against Justin. I don't know him that well, but he seems like a decent fun guy and certainly doesn't deserve this for having a rather clever light-hearted poke at a completely legitimate target.

It's the picture that makes it.

"In 1995, The Lemonheads' Evan Dando missed his slot at the festival due to rock star excesses. Arriving late at the site, he attempted to force an impromptu acoustic set on a crowd waiting for Portishead. They were vastly unamused: Dando had to be removed from the stage for his own safety. It remains a solitary recorded example of coffee-table trip-hop fans erupting in a livid wave of anger - the musical equivalent of assistant librarians rioting."

Ami found this fine piece of festival writing in The Guardian today. I was one of the aforementioned coffee-table trip-hop fans and remember this event well. "Evan-fucking-who?" were I believe my exact words at the time as I tried to cope with having fought my way through an unexpected sea of Portishead aficionados only to hear a solo unknown (to me) guitarist's drivel.

Kieran Healy gives a droll account of the Eurovision song contest for the uninitiated. The strange thing is I remember getting genuinely excited about this in my youthful years.

"But in terms of kitsch, tackiness, geopolitical tension, and sheer entertainment value the U.S. has nothing, but nothing, to match the Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision is the common cultural bond uniting generations of Europeans, the continent’s one true collective ritual."

Wonderful pictures of Earth and the Moon from Mars.

The Lemon has a hit-and-miss satirical Internet history up. Although the humour is patchy, the timeline is pretty accurate. The obligatory swipe at blogging was uninspired:

"1999: Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets"

but some other entries were funnier:

"1995: Real Audio released, allowing users to listen to halting bursts of static in real time.

1996: Parenting groups become concerned that spending extended time online is depriving children of important time spent watching television.

2000: EPA warns that entire surface of the earth will be completely blanketed with AOL CDs by the end of 2007"

For the more refined taste, Google has a real history of Usenet, which is in many ways funnier. Usenet newsgroups were around long before the Web provided a more immediate source of idle geek trivia and downloadable images of one's favourite album covers.

The front page of the Cape Argus is usually blazoned with either a local or an international tale of woe. Murders, robberies, rape - and then there's all the crime in Cape Town too. Yesterday, however, was an exception. The banner headline was My Gugs liberation move, and this was an upbeat story about a succesful music producer who's moved out of a luxury mansion in the foothills of Table Mountain to a two-bedroom house in Gugulethu, one of the local townships. Gugulethu is the township I know best, Hilda and her family live out there, and through them I've met several other friends like Mphumzi and Msekeli. According to the article his move was inspired by the Landmark Forum.

So this seems an appropriate introduction to a couple of longer pieces, assuming I find the time to sit down and write them. Firstly I plan write about my experiences of integration and non-integration in Cape Town - as an outsider who's tried hard to meet a fair cross-section of Capetonians. I also mean to write something about the Landmark Forum, particularly because Zaid - a fellow Pioneer - has just written an exceptionally sharp critique of Landmark and their technology, to which I've promised that I will respond.

So watch this space...