'Well-made and sturdy, the
supermarket trolley comes with a variety of plastic food items --
bananas, packets of cereal -- that can be scanned with a handheld
scanner attached to the cart. Pass an item in front of the scanner, and
the cart speaks its name and the number of items. Scan the item again,
and the cart speaks its color, the food group and its nutritional
benefit.
'Aimed at preschoolers, the cart is billed as teaching numbers, counting, quantities and simple food facts. . .
'Lyle preferred the exploratory mode and its free-form play. The game
mode, when asked to find certain items, was not altogether successful.
Lyle had no trouble finding the first item asked for but lost interest
before finding the second one, preferring to scan items at random.' [Wired News].
Ho ho hum: According to a survey
published last week, nearly 40% of German children have no idea why
Christmas is celebrated.
Reasons given by the children, aged between six and 12, included: 'because it's winter', 'so that the shops can sell more stuff'
and 'because that's when Santa Claus
died'.
Some 25%, and over a third of those aged between 10 and 12, found it 'utterly tedious that months before
Christmas it looks like it's Christmas already.' [n-tv.de];
[via The
Aardvark Speaks].
Bye Buy: And they're off. In the
US, the day after Thanksgiving traditionally marks the start of the
Christmas shopping season. This year, to avoid a double-dip recession,
consumers have been told to spend, spend, spend. It's nothing less than
their patriotic duty.
Like lemmings with credit cards, let's say a quick prayer before
throwing ourselves down those aisles.
Bah humbug? Only in the minds of the most brainwashed. You don't need
to be the Pope to realise that the advertisers and the corporations
turn Christmas into a deeply profane celebration.
The original Christmas message had nothing to do with consumerism.
There's nothing in the New Testament about colluding in the
exploitation of people around the world so your child can have whatever
the ad companies are promoting most heavily this year. It says nothing
about working overtime to buy more food than your family can possibly
eat while millions around the world suffer from malnutrition.
If retailers depend so heavily on Christmas that governments encourage consumption at any cost, there's something deeply wrong with the way the economy is being run.
What the world thinks: US journalist Mark Hertsgaard asked people around
the world what they thought of America:
'I was surprised that people were really able -- and I heard this repeatedly
-- to distinguish between America and Americans. There's America in the sense
of the official government and the military. That official face of America in
the world is not very well liked. And then there's Americans -- the people of
the country, the ideals of the country, our popular culture. . .
'They were able to still say, but you know, we love Americans and we love
what you stand for. I heard that over and over again from all different walks
of life and all different parts of the world.' [Salon].
Heart felt: Kevin Barbieux is a weblogger who happens to be a homeless guy. He sleeps
in Nashville's shelters and parks and updates his weblog at the public library.
[Salon].
'I've always had a little problem with the cliche, "Bleeding Hearts."
I first heard the phrase when I was a kid, and like most kids, I took the
phrase literally - and I agreed. Yes, hearts do bleed. They bleed constantly
- that's what they're made for. As a matter of fact, hearts bleed so much
that blood has to be constantly pumped back into them. And even more importantly,
when hearts stop bleeding, they die.' [Homeless
Guy].
Waiting in vain: HRH The Queen kicks off her 12-day visit to Canada
by telling her loyal Canadian subjects exactly where to go.
Together with 200 journalists, the residents of Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic
(pop. 6,000) will watch her unveil the town's first street sign. [Globe
and Mail].
Writing in the new issue of Granta, Finton O'Toole compares the Silver Jubilee
of 1977 - 'There is
no future in England's dreaming'- with the modern jubilee experience:
'HI. WE ARE STANDING AT THE MALL. V. TIRED. NOTHING HAPPENING. IF ANY NEWS
TEXT BACK. C U.'
Watching the Golden Jubilee crowds watch themselves on the screens outside
Buckingham Palace, he realises that the Queen has become just another living
legend, an example of retro chic, a bit player in the pop panoply.
It's the experience of waiting for HRH that's the main event. It lets people
catch sight of 'their own forbearance and tolerance, their own cheerful
stoicism'. [Granta].
Sweet taste of success: Thanks to campaigning by local people, Hershey
Foods won't be sold.
Shirley Reale, a Hershey resident, said: 'All I can say is hooray. The
only thing I could see was the deterioration of the town if the company was
sold.' [Boston.com];
[iMakeContent].
Off the scale: Increasing levels of childhood obesity may lead to parents
outliving their children, said Professor Andrew Prentice at the British Association's
Science Festival yesterday. [Independent].
A recent Vatican conference found that about 800 million people around the
world are underfed. At the same time, according to the International Obesity Taskforce, about
300 million are fed too much. [CBS].
The sweetest thing: For anyone who thinks that the main effect of neoliberal
globalisation occurs far away, in Asia and Africa, and in blue-collar industrial
cul-de-sacs, and, whatever, it's just an inevitable part of the development
process, here's a salutary lesson.
You might think that democracy means that those with power are compelled
by those in power, our political representatives, after due discussion and debate, after hearing all the points of view available, to bow to the people's will.
Isn't that the whole point of democracy? With adequate safeguards for minorities,
what's good for the majority prevails.
Not in Chocolate Town, USA. The good citizens of Hershey, Philadelphia are
firmly against the sale of Hershey's Foods. The US chocolate giant employs about
a quarter of them. It created the town. It's been good to them.
But a trust set up by Hershey's founder to benefit the local community, the
town's disadvantaged children, couldn't care less what they think. Keen to maximise
the value of its portfolio, to do the neolibralism thing, it plans to sell up
its majority stock in Hershey's by selling out to the likes of Cadbury Schweppes
or Nestle. [Guardian].
Following petitions and demonstrations organised through the Friends
of Hershey Foods website, the local community and politicians have succeeded
in halting the sale until a court has examined its economic and social impact.
Marge Panettieri, a member of the Friends of Hershey Foods, says that the campaign
has been a 'great experience in grassroots democracy'. [Hershey
Chronicle].
However, the trust, which says that it needs to diversify its stock, is appealing
against the injunction. It's likely to win the appeal this Wednesday on the
grounds that it's an unfair violation of its right to do business.
[Financial
Times].
Matthew G Solovey, editor of the Hershey Chronicle, says that promises that
Hershey's new owners will continue to put the town first amount to zero.
'Corporate America can't make assurances. They can't promise anything. Executives
at corporations want to do one thing: make money. They don't care about the
impact on a community - they care about the bottom line. Hey, that's America,
and they have the right.
'But the Hershey Trust is not a corporation. It's a trust. It's here to
provide. Its members certainly should not be looking at the bottom line, but
should be looking at the moral thing to do.' [Hershey
Chronicle].
Left-wing rally: You can chuck out the polenta. And Gordon Brown should
think about another tax rise. Nearly 70% of the UK public claims to feel
'working class and proud of it', according to a new Mori poll.
It's a huge change from 1994 when only about 50% of people said the same. The
other half echoed Mrs Thatcher's mantra, that they had an inalienable right
to 'little
cheesy-pineapple ones'.
This change is nowt to do with Tony Blair's ostensible political agenda. It's
not that he's proved that there is such a thing as society, succeeded in converting
Mrs Thatcher's Essex men and women into social democrats. Quite the opposite.
It's more likely to be a reaction against five years of Blair's more extreme free
market ideas, his mania for public-private partnerships, his closeness to big
business.
Shocking though hardly surprising: Labour can't now take the traditional working
class vote for granted. As Mori reports, manual workers and others on low pay
no longer seem to have a class identity that binds them to the Labour Party.
'Those who admit they are working class and proud of it are no more likely
to vote Labour than those who do not - instead, they are more likely to say
they will not vote or to be undecided.' [Mori].
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Richard
Skase, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Canterbury Business School,
said that Labour shouldn't take the 'new working class' for granted either.
Without secure jobs and under increasing pressure at work, people who used
to be described as middle class, technologists, engineers, doctors, teachers,
social workers, are now more likely to describe themselves as working class.
'They don't have safe, secure jobs; they don't have safe, secure futures.
As a result they're under increasing anxieties, increasing insecurities, pressures
to perform and in that sense they feel they're working class. . . And this is
the new working class that Labour is at great risk of losing at the next election.'
[Today
- RealPlayer needed].
Never mind, Tony. You can still count on your business friends. How many votes
is that?
Money talks: The 1.5 million people earning £60,000-plus are 'affluentials', according to Barclays. Their spending power 'gives them enormous power over setting trends and influencing the way we all live'. [Guardian].
Life in America: New analysis of 2000 US census data shows that the
gap between rich and poor is accelerating in some areas.
In Rhode Island, 12.9 percent of Newport's families live below the poverty
line. The city's income disparity gap has grown by 10 percent since 1990. [AP].
Foot in mouth: Newsnight's Jeremy Vine has an agent who presented himself to the Japanese media in Tokyo with the words: 'I am Alex Armitage, director of the Noel Gay organisation.' He couldn't understand why the room went quiet. A local journalist later told him that it was a mistake in Japan to shout loudly about any organisation called the 'Enola Gay'. [New Statesman].
Daydream nation: Just like Catherine Bennett, I've up to here with bread
and circuses. Is that all folks? No, the curtain's just gone up on a summer
of fun, fun, fun:
'Although it is not in Blair's power, even as saviour of the world, to increase
the frequency of international football tournaments, golden jubilees, or deaths
of well-loved monarchs in their 102nd year, that is not to say he cannot find
other ways of endearing himself to the populace, as the Caesars once did to
the plebs with chariot races and gladiatorial combat, comedies and boxing matches.'
How else to distract us from the lunacies of the state? Bennett quotes from
Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome: 'By the time of Claudius...
"the Roman calendar contained 159 days expressly marked as holidays, of
which 93 were devoted to games given at public expense". Romans enjoyed at
least one day of holiday for every working day. In return for these favours,
the Caesars obtained both the adulation and quiescence of the mob.'
She quotes Sebastian Haffner on Nazi Germany: 'one was permanently occupied
and distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies, and national
festivities... The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending
events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering
and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it... Was it not wonderful
to celebrate in the spring sunshine, in squares decked with flags'. [Guardian].
In Brave New World, Huxley projects this never-ending sunshine onto an England
of the future. And, blinded by the light, here we are: thank Ford, everybody's
happy nowadays. Bah humbug!
Last among equals: Profiled in the Guardian as part of a week-long investigation
into the state of Muslim Britain, Imran Khan, solicitor, argues: 'In the
end racism is just another brand of unequal treatment. Inequality in our society
is increasing and for those at the bottom things are getting worse. Racism is
bred by inequality.
'Look at Oldham for example, a very poor white community turns on an even
poorer Asian one over ever scarcer resources. On a global scale, inequality
and injustice breed the growing confrontation in the world between the US and
its allies and its enemies.
'Many Muslims are among the poorest of the world. It is no wonder that millions
consider this discrimination against Muslims. It is a terrible social system
that discriminates against the vast billions whose lives are blighted by hard
labour and poverty.
'We need a society that is dedicated to equality in every field of life
and we need political leaders with the courage to say so. It's a small word,
equality, but it is the key to all our futures.' [Guardian].
We are Google: Google currently delivers 3,190,000 entries for 'Islam'; 832,000 entries for 'Judaism'. Which tells us what? More Jews than Muslims use the internet? Jews have a greater interest in comparative religion? 'Man' gets 69,400,000 entries; 'Woman', 22,400,000; 'Mars', 7,700,000; 'Venus', 2,390,000. So? We're living in a feminised world that's desperately searching for a better understanding of what men want? [Smackdown].
Imagine a world in which everybody had access to the internet. The ability to peer into the word rankings of particular communities would give an amazing, dynamic insight into collective thought processes. Reworked continuously, word rankings would mirror our minds, the minds of our neighbours, our enemies.
English and Brazilian word rankings are bound to be quite different from each other. Would subtle changes in Google word rankings precede sporting fixtures? elections? wars? earthquakes. . ?
The zeitgeist according to Google is currently biased towards the West and the US and towards English. But Google's ability for capturing the essence of what's going on can already be seen: the top word for September 2001 was 'Nostradamus'. [Google Zeitgeist].
Want to know if the Brazilians are shaking at the prospect of meeting England in the World Cup? Give it a couple of years. By 2006, the 10 O'Clock News will consist of nothing but analyses of the Google sporting zeitgeist by the BBC's chief Google editor and a professor in Google studies. [First Monday].
In a nutshell: Wacky theories survive and become religions when they contain, beneath the mind control and the imposition of absurd rules, the idea that runs through all enduring institutions of humanity: the ethic of reciprocity. Amen to that. [The golden rule].
Identity crisis: Hanif Kureishi, Karachi, 1985: 'The colonized inevitably
aspire to be like their colonizers—you wouldn't catch anyone of my uncle's generation
with a joint in their mouth. It was infra dig, for peasants. They shadowed the
British, they drank whisky and read The Times; they praised others by calling
them 'gentlemen'; and their eyes filled with tears at old Vera Lynn records.
'But the kids discussed yoga, you'd catch them standing on their heads.
They even meditated. Though one boy who worked at the airport said it was too
much of a Hindu thing for Muslims to be doing; if his parents caught him chanting
a mantra he'd get a backhander across the chops. Mostly the kids listened to
the Stones, Van Morrison and Bowie as they flew over ruined roads to the beach
in bright red and yellow Japanese cars with quadrophonic speakers, past camels
and acres of wasteland.'
[...]
'Although Pakistanis still wanted to escape to England, the old men in their
clubs and the young eating their hamburgers took great pleasure in England's
decline and decay. The great master was fallen. It was seen as strike-bound,
drug- ridden, riot-torn, inefficient, disunited, a society which had moved too
suddenly from puritanism to hedonism and now loathed itself. And the Karachi
wits liked to ask me when I thought the Americans would decide the British were
ready for self-government.
'Yet people like Rahman still clung to what they called British ideals,
maintaining that it is a society's ideals, its conception of human progress,
that define the level of its civilization. They regretted, under the Islamization,
the repudiation of the values which they said were the only positive aspect
of Britain's legacy to the subcontinent. These were: the idea of secular institutions
based on reason, not revelation or scripture; the idea that there were no final
solutions to human problems; and the idea that the health and vigour of a society
was bound up with its ability to tolerate and express a plurality of views on
all issues, and that these views would be welcomed.' [Granta].
A Wi-Fi high: Free wireless internet is the new crack?: 'It seems that
moving megabytes on the move is almost mystical, like an out-of- body experience.
"Once you are untethered from a wall it becomes like candy; it’s a really
insatiable appetite," says Michael Chaplo, the CEO of one Wi-Fi start-up.
"You just want it everywhere."' [MSMBC].
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould on statistics, cancer and death: 'It has become,
in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something
tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes
that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out
I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however,
I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find
nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.'
[Cancerguide].
What's left?: Matthew Parris contrasts the politicians, the broadsheet journalists, the insiders, so 'curiously decadent', with Pim Fortuyn's constituency, the nervous, the insecure, the nostalgic.
According to Parris, a sense of not belonging leads to two contradictory responses. Those left behind, left outside, yearn to conform. At the same time, they yearn to break free. A perfect mix for populism with an authoritarian streak. [Times - Reg Req].
