Alcohol - a perfect substitute for achievement

Meet Anna Coddington.

Anna, at age 26, is releasing her debut album, 'The Lake'.

Anna also has a black belt in karate and a Masters degree in socio-linguistics. I feel so inadequate.

However, I have my wash-hose, and I could do Elephunk before the Black Eyed Peas ever heard of it.

The problem with trial by public opinion

These are the facts of a recent case as given by police to the media, prior to the trial:

i, The victim, a 10 year old girl, died from suffocation, She had been found in her bed with trouble breathing.
ii, There were injuries to her genitals, including a rectal tear consistent with penetration.
iii, DNA from the semen of the uncle had been found on her underwear.
iv, The family, maintaining the uncle's innocence, washed her bedding and clothing after she was found.
v, The family was from a part of Africa in which the myth that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS is common.

The uncle was arrested and charged with murder. He was, of course, vilified in the newspapers.

These are the facts that showed up in the trial:

i, The victim was indeed found in bed with problems breathing. She was also unconscious and having severe, chalky diarrhoa, which had drenched the bedding. By the time she got to emergency, she had a severe fever, a racing heart beat, and no measurable blood pressure. She had lost so much fluid from diarrhoa that she had gone into hypovolemic shock, depriving the brain of oxygen.
ii, The victim had contracted HIV at birth, from her mother.
iii, The anal injuries consisted of small lateral tears, otherwise reported in HIV/Aids patients. The rectal tear (about 7 cm) was actually a swollen and distended anal canal, probably due to the combination of Aids, diarrhoa, and the fluids desperately pumped into her by the medical team. There was pinprick haemorrhage to her genitals and hymen, but no sign of penetration.
iv, There was no sign of the uncle's semen anywhere else on the girl or bedding. The amount of DNA was about one 100,000th the size of a sugar grain. The girls' clothing had been in the wash after she was taken, the family had a habit of handwashing underwear, and DNA manages to survive through washing quite often.
v, The medical team and police appear to have fixated on sexual abuse, and interpreted all the evidence in that light.

The uncle was acquitted.

Moral: Be damned careful of what you read in the papers, do not assume the worst until proven ESPECIALLY for the most horrific of charges, and don't allow your prejudices and prejudgements to blind you to alternatives.

Source here.

More demands on me from uppity females

I have just been handed a To Do list from an eleven year old, who will be known as K.M. - it reads:

- Grow some hair on the top of your head
- Comb your hair
- Give K.M. (the innocent child) lots of chocolate
- Buy K.M. expensive presents on her birthday and Christmas
- Give K.M. chocolate eggs on Easter
- Consider a job with more pay and no annoying children
- Realise how much children love you
- Learn to smile nicely

Wonderful - now eleven year olds are telling me what to do. Clearly, this child's parents have failed to beat her enough. I will be forced to do so on their behalf.

Addenda: And now the extremely annoying P.A. is requiring me to hang around with her shopping until her boyfriend can pick her up. To quote:

Annoying PA: You sucks
Harassed PiaToR: Shuddup
Annoying PA: I love harrassing you

That's it - I'm joining a Trappist brotherhood. Do they accept agnostics?

And it's not even in the Wikipedia yet...

This, or something like it, is going to be huge. The ramifications for the way people (and people and businesses) interact on a day to day basis will be staggering as it becomes more sophisticated.

Remember "aka-aki" and "mobile social networking" - you're going to hear a lot more about them in the next couple of years.

If this is Thursday, I must be psychotic

This looks like fun - Joss Whedon's new series, Dollhouse:

Dollhouse follows Dushku's Echo, a mysterious agent with no identity except for the personalities imprinted on her and then deleted by her employer depending on the wishes and needs of wealthy clients. Between assignments, Echo lives inside a cushy secret HQ with other blank-slate dolls in a state of oblivious, hyper-healthy bliss...though as the series unfolds, she's starting to remember stuff she shouldn't.

Yeah, I've had days like that. They usually involved alcohol.

But... Canterbury is full of zombies already...

I have a really bad feeling about this movie. I haven't been impressed by NZ movies, although "Bad Sheep" did try hard. This, however, looks like the sort of cretins I spent my teenage years escaping let loose.

Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised. And perhaps Scarlett Johansson will declare her true love for me tomorrow. Seems about as likely.

On the advantages of totalitarian communism

I heard on the radio today an account from a Kiwi stuck in the middle of the Chinese earthquake zone. He was impressed by the massive response of the Chinese government to the crisis. I note reports such as this:

More than 50,000 troops joined disaster relief efforts or were advancing to the area. The Chinese air force said 6,500 troops were parachuted into hard-hit areas where rain and clouds had prevented military helicopters from landing.

Premier Wen ordered troops to clear roads to Wenchuan. "Please speed up the shipping of food. The kids have nothing to eat now," he said amid crying children.

and this:

Premier Wen Jiabao was quick to reach the scene and urged rescuers to clear roads into the worst-hit areas as fast as possible.

"As long as there is even a little hope, we will redouble our efforts 100 times and will never relax our efforts," he told crying locals through a loudhailer in the badly hit Dujiangyan city, south-east of the epicentre.

The health ministry has made an urgent appeal for people to give blood to help the injured.
[...]
China said it would accept international help to cope with the quake - the worst since 1976 when 242,000 people were killed in Tangshan - and offered its thanks.

The government response was praised as "swift and very efficient" by Francis Marcus of the International Federation of the Red Cross in Beijing.

But he added the scale of the disaster was such that "we can't expect that the government can do everything and handle every aspect of the needs".

Make no mistake about it - the Chinese government is an oppressive totalitarian State whose only justification is the Chinese fear of anarchy.

But compare and contrast.