• Guns don't kill people, French bullets kill people.
• Latest benefit of being a Dutch citizen: If you take your child out of school a day or two early for the family summer vacation, "compulsory education officials" just might organize a sting at Schiphol airport to surprise you with a public dressing-down. [thanks, Erik!]
• Man puts his entire life up for auction on eBay.
The single lot included Usher's former marital home outside Perth, car and motorbike as well as all the toys necessary to enjoy the Australian lifestyle: a jetski, kite-surfing equipment, a mountain bike and the obligatory barbecue. It also contained a two-week trial run at Usher's job as a rug shop assistant and an introduction to his friends, offering the successful bidder a ready-made life.
Wow, what a horror capitalism is (if you're Naomi Klein). The guy is a rug shop assistant and he owns his own house and a heap of expensive toys. Yeah, I know, he's sick enough of it all to ditch it on eBay. But that, too, is a choice that really only seems possible in a free society and a free (global) market. People bid from all over the world. Pretty damn cool, if you ask me. The lot went for close to $400,000, by the way.
• Cartooning in the Middle East:
Creativity, wit and strongly-held views do not always sit happily together.
That's because it's pretty tough to make fun of the powers that be in countries where government censors are breathing down your neck 24/7. Still, the artists try, and the Guardian gives them some lovin'. This memorable and spot-on cartoon is from Jordan's Emad Hajjaj.
• Amusingly enough, Muslims fundies are really, really threatened by a woman behind the wheel, especially when she goes faster than they do. So they threaten her right back.
• Yeah, this awful crooner makes my ears hurt, too. But it's much worse for the ear of his captive dance partner.
• Excuse me ma'm, may I see your license to hug?
A woman could not kiss her daughter goodbye on a school trip because she had not been vetted.
And vetting is the thing now, in the U.K.: it looks like a quarter of all adults will have to subject themselves to an anti-pedophile test if they are ever to come near a child again. [via Samizdata]
Some years back I was on a bus in Seattle, WA that goes by Seattle Center. The Ringling Bros. circus was in town and I was seated near a couple and their 3 or 4 year old daughter. The little girl was *jazzed* about going to her first circus and talked to me all the way there about it.
I make it a point to always talk to children as if they were little humans, not some weird second race, and the girl responded to that as one might imagine. Kids *hate* to be condescended to.
When her stop arrived she got up, came over, and gave me a hug.
I can't quite decide which is sadder, the fact that I felt constrained to giving her a half-hearted "one arm man hug" or the fact that her parents actually seemed *embarrassed* and apologized to me.
What kind of society are we setting ourselves up for? I don't think I like it.
Posted by: Howlin' Hobbit | Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at 06:07 PM