An uninspired post

I'm having trouble finding anything particularly inspiring to post about, so I'll mention the following:

* for all of my reader in Osaka, there's a particularly good deal going on in the Hotel Nikko Osaka at their Beer Hall in the sky (well, the 32nd floor):

A dinner set (¥5,500) includes snacks, plates of assorted hot and cold dishes, a main dish, salad bar and bread, and unlimited drinks for 100 minutes. Customers may choose from draft beer, wine, whiskey, sake, shochu, cocktails and soft drinks.

Mind you, caution should be advised for any function which provides unlimited cocktails available for 100 minutes. Could be some spectacular results on the carpet.

* I'm nearly finished Clive James' first volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. I see it was published in 1980, and have been half inclined to read it ever since then. (I often imagine heaven as being a place where you can spend the first thousand years catching up on all the reading you meant to get around to while on earth. The second thousand might be taken up with lessons on musical instruments. Then there may be a few hundred thousand years each of learning about and spectrally observing alien planets. But I digress.)

I had heard that James was very open about his childhood sexual development in this book, but it still made me feel "way too much information" too often. At least such disclosures do something to give a clearer picture of sexual activity of youth in history. I mean, it is easy to get the impression that childhood/early teenage sex only got really going in a big way since the 1960's, but memoirs like James are a strong corrective to that idea.

Anyhow, I found the book does truly become 'laugh out loud" funny when he gets to his university years, and the chapter about his brief stint of National Service was the best in the book.

* Bigfoot is 96% possum? This is probably the most stupidly run hoax in history

Hold on to your kidneys, Ji

Al Jazeera English - BEIJING 08 - Olympic protest zones lie empty

This is all pretty much a PR disaster for the Chinese, these Olympics. From the above report:

So far there have been no reports of any legal protest in the zones, with those applying uniformly rejected or detained.

Ji Sizun, 55, a self-described grassroots legal activist from Fujian province, appears to be the latest casualty of this system.

He told Al Jazeera on Saturday that he had submitted his protest that day to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (PSB).

He said he wanted to demonstrate on behalf of the petitioners who come to Beijing as a last resort to resolve cases of alleged injustice in their home provinces....

He was told to come back Monday, but by Monday afternoon Ji was unreachable.

His family in Fujian believes he has been detained and will be held until after the Olympics, a source said. They spoke with him briefly on Monday but he only managed to say "I have some problems," before the call was cut off.

Let's just hope he keeps his organs intact.

Which brings me to this story from ABC radio last week:

JENNIFER MACEY: Last year David Mr Matas and Canadian former secretary of state David Kilgour released a report investigating allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong members in China. Mr Matas concedes it's difficult to find proof of this practise as China won't release official statistics on executions or organ transplants

But he says he has new audio tapes of Chinese doctors admitting they have Falun Gong organs for sale.

DAVID MATAS: We had callers calling in to China pretending to be relatives of patients who needed organs and asking the hospital that they were calling for organs of Falun Gong practitioners on the basis that Falun Gong's an exercise regime that practitioners are healthy and their organs are healthy. And we got admissions on tape throughout China and we've got the transcripts in our report and we've got phone records and we got the tapes from pick up to hang down.

I think I have heard about these taped calls before, but the story is well worth repeating.

The problem is that Falun Gong is a weird cult-like phenomena, although it's not entirely clear why the China government sees it as such a threat. Still, being a cult, people tend to be sceptical about their claims. So any evidence such as that in the phone calls is important.

As I said before, it is a topic that seems to attract limited attention.

Here comes a bad movie

Hitler to get Pulp Fiction treatment in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards - Times Online

Can't someone tell Tarantino to just grow up?

Surely cheap pulp films were partly about compensating for lack of budget by being sensationalist in their content. But when you have access to large budgets, as does Tarantino, it's just juvenile to keep going on making this style of film.

Own your own dome

International Dome House

Go have a look at this Japanese company's website for (try saying this 3 times quickly) - foam domes for homes.

They make some odd claims - especially under the page "Housing for health". And the introductory video is, well, rather cheesy in a Japanese way.

Yet, when you look at the interiors of some of their examples, they don't look half bad, at least if you admire Japanese ingenuity in fitting a lot of stuff in tiny living spaces.

They look a lot like the sort of igloo dome moon homes I used to draw as a kid. Maybe that's why I want to live in one.

Justice system of India only too willing to help

Six students of Flytech Aviation held for ragging-The Times of India

It's been a while since I've noted an odd story from India, but here's a strange one:

Six senior students of Flytech Aviation Academy, Nadargul, were arrested by the Vanasthalipuram police on Wednesday in an alleged case of ragging...

According to police, the senior students called the juniors over to their place for an "interaction' on August 12. The students were asked to do frog jumps on the steps, measure the room with match sticks and also measure water in a tumbler using caps of a soft drink bottle. This continued from 2.30 pm to 6.30 pm. The juniors filed a complaint with the police. "Cases were booked under the AP Provision of Prevention of Ragging Act, 1997," Vanasthalipuram inspector Chandra Shekhar said.

They need the court system to deal with this? It must be fun being a parliamentary counsel (the lawyers who draft legislation) in India.

Pointless killings

3 aid workers, driver killed in ambush

Three female foreign aid workers, including two Canadians, were slain in a "senseless, heinous attack" by Taliban insurgents south of Kabul, a senior official of the aid agency said Wednesday....

The women and their Afghan driver died in a hail of bullets around 10:30 a.m. local time in a brazen attack in Logar province, southeast of Kabul. A second Afghan driver was critically wounded and remains in hospital. The province's deputy police chief, Abdul Majid Latifi, told Agence France-Presse that Taliban insurgents ambushed the two clearly marked vehicles that were carrying the workers on a 100-kilometre stretch of road between Gardez and Kabul.

He said the attackers broke the windows of the vehicles and then shot the workers at close range.

"There were signs of about 10 bullets on the vehicle but more bullets on the body of the victims. They were hit by dozens of bullets," he said. "We don't know yet how many men carried out the attack."

A person claiming to be a Taliban spokesman took credit for the attack, saying it was done in retaliation for the ongoing NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.

"We don't value their aid projects and we don't think they are working for the progress of our country," said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in telephone interview.

Quantum stuff

Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer : Nature News

I'm not entirely sure that this experiment shows much that wasn't already believed by most scientists, but it seems to have done mainly to rule out some possible explanations. This paragraph at the end is of note:

The experiment shows that in quantum mechanics at least, some things transcend space-time, says Terence Rudolph, a theorist at Imperial College London. It also shows that humans have attached undue importance to the three dimensions of space and one of time we live in, he argues. “We think space and time are important because that’s the kind of monkeys we are.”

God is clearly a quantum mechanic, then.

Cool

US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability' - New Scientist Tech

From the article:

Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing (powerpoint format) on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June...

Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.

"The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike."

A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night.

By popular demand...sort of

Yes indeed, I warned you not to have high expectations, but here's a House of Pork I spotted in the Meat Pavilion from this year's Ekka. Presumably, Homer Simpson would be very impressed.

This year's expedition was somewhat marred by mild illness, and the kids insisting on buying their stuff too early in the day. Still, my son got to arm himself with enough cheap plastic guns to last a year. (He bought the "Western Ranger" bag, essentially a cowboy set, and was very happy to walk around in the cowboy hat that was far too large for his head. I actually wore it for part of the day. This interest in the Wild West seems to have been caused solely by watching the Martin/Lewis comedy "Pardners" on DVD, which will cost you $8.99 at your nearest Big W or K Mart.)

The evening's arena entertainment continues to be of wildly erratic quality. An exhibition polo match that goes for 30 minutes just isn't interesting. Nor were the German Shepherds that did nothing special at all for 20 minutes. I think whoever thought that these "acts" were going to hold the crowd's interest is regretting it now.

At least the Holden Precision Car Driving Team, which remained unchanged for at least 30 years, has gone. Instead, I fear we are now stuck with a motoX freestyle act that will not change for 20 years.

We need to go back to things being blown up. If I recall correctly from my childhood, there were a few years in which acts based on explosions were all the rage - a clown running into a cardboard outhouse that blew up, for example; or a guy that got in a coffin like box that blew up. But then, outhouses were still known in Brisbane when I was a child - I guess modern kids may not recognise them.

It was only a couple of years ago that we had the human cannonball (video taken by yours truly on a not very good digital camera):



That's more like it. Now if only there was a portable pool of crocodiles between the cannon and the net.

Readers prompted

Some reader had better make a comment here soon, otherwise you may never get to see the House of Pork photo I took at the Royal National Association Show last Saturday.

On China, etc

LILEKS (James) :: the Bleat

James Lilek's comments on the war in Georgia, and China, are all very apt. He's reading a Mao biography at the moment, which leads to this pithy summation:

It’s not that he was worse than Stalin in character; he just had more people to kill. A larger canvas. As the book pointed out: he worked the nation to exhaustion, took everything they produced, and wasted it. Thirty million dead alone in the Great Leap Forward. Now? He’s a fat old weirdo on postcards who looks funny because the picture’s done in a kitschy style. Ha ha, you were succeeded by crafty pragmatists! But. As the book notes, he wanted to start a nuclear war with the West, and was perfectly content to lose half the population of China. He was even considering where he’d build a new city to head the new World Socialist Government. The Sovs thought he was nuts, but of course that didn't stop them from handing him treats and toys.

I know things have changed, and the Bad Old Days are gone, and they don’t do that anymore – except for Tibet, the fate that launched a thousand bumperstickers, and Falun Gong, which is weird and hence, I don’t know, one of those things – but in a sense the same government is in power, no? Mao's picture still hangs in Tiananmen Square. It’s like going to Berlin for the games in 1976 and seeing giant portraits of Hitler.

Japan and China

War and reconciliation: a tale of two countries | The Japan Times Online

This is an interesting article on how China and Japan deal with the Rape of Nanjing. There's a museum in that city now that deals with it.

I like this description of how, in Japan, the controversial Yusuhukan museum near the Yasukuni Shrine deals with it:

There one can view a video of Japanese troops bellowing a collective "Banzai!" from atop the city wall that abruptly cuts to a scene of a soldier ladling out soup for the elderly and young, while the narrator helpfully explains that the Japanese troops entered the city and restored peace and harmony.

Throughout the exhibit, Japan's invasion of China is portrayed as a campaign to quell Chinese "terrorism" — a post-9/11 narrative that demonstrates just how much the present impinges on the past. At the museum, there is no mention of invasion, aggression, massacres or atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China. Improbably, the suffering of Japanese is the only suffering on display.

On the other hand, the writer says:

As a teacher, I have noticed how much better informed Japanese students are now than they were 20 years ago about this shared past. Only one of the more than 100 research papers submitted in my classes on Nanjing expressed anything but condemnation and contrition.

All interesting.

Why are they still here?

Here's three people who, for some mysterious reasons, still have their jobs:

1. Brendan Nelson
2. Sam Newman
3. Sam de Brito

The first two are self-explanatory. I add Sam de Brito's name because, you know, Fairfax press doesn't really need a blogger who shares with us his stories of casual sex and crab lice. (He's been annoying me for years, with his "pulse of modern manhood" schtick.)

"Traditional custodians of the land" needed eco-management training

Extinctions 'due to humans not climate' | NEWS.com.au

Anti-China round up

With the Olympics underway, it's interesting to note some of the recent anti-China commentary by people who refuse to be taken in by a good opening ceremony. (Well, I assume it was good.)

First, Nick Cohen rips into China as being an environmental disaster zone (my words, not his), and yet his ability to annoy Guardian readers still means that many in the comments section have rushed to criticise him.

Next, a Tory (Edward McMillan-Scott) also writes in The Guardian reminding us of China's human rights abuses, and in particular the unresolved matter of whether Falun Gong members are (or were) the subject of organ harvesting. (I mentioned this allegation, which is believed by some quite credible sounding Canadian investigators, 2 years ago on this blog, noting then that it was a topic which seems to attract little attention in the West. Nothing much has changed, it would seem). Of course, the fact that a Tory should write about human rights is just too much for some Guardian readers, and there is one amusing comment to the effect that because Conservatives supported Pinochet, they have no right complaining about China!

Thirdly, Mark Mardue in The Age complains that business interests are only too willing to support the China government and its abuses. He also believes that it is by no means clear that the current crop of young adults will have reforming zeal:

Brought up in a post-Mao era and a system that blanketed out events like Tiananmen Square, talk of such historical moments is as tiresome and vague to them as Woodstock and Altamont are to Western youth. Indeed, young Chinese regard Tiananmen as the ultimate in sentimental Western fantasies, a cliche we hook ourselves on to slight their country's ascendancy.

It's unclear how much the Government will be able to ride the nationalist fervour of this new generation, and how much it has the potential of creating instability even for it.

I don't know. I think instability is still pretty likely.