apple store opens in sydney

...delusional crowd considers this worthy of camping out and queuing in the hundreds.

Seriously...why?

Dan Boud did take a couple of cool photos, though.

some people should just be eliminated

...or at the very least not allowed to breed.

Sylvia Gough, a college student in Canada, went out one weekend while her roommates were having a party. She came home to discover that some of her roommates' friends had decided that a fun party activity would be to put her three-month-old kitten through a washing machine cycle. Unsurpringly, the little orange and white tabby died.

Seriously, who gets their fun that way? Is a party not a party until you've traumatised a small animal? Bastards.

does any good news ever come out of china?

I hate that we still live in a world where a person can be arrested and detained indefinitely for telling the truth ~ particularly for telling the truth about their government ~ for trying to make the world a better or kinder place, or just for having a contrary opinion. Hu Jia is the kind of person this world needs more of. His government disagrees. Now his wife is under house arrest with a young baby while he is locked up following a blog entry they didn't like. It makes me mad.

And I know these things happen in many countries, but what's up with China in general. I'm dismayed by how many stories of injustice, cruelty and screwed up thinking come out of China. It makes me feel ill when various students who stay with me tell me about their normal life in China (a life that would grind me into the ground) and it doesn't seem to get any better when you join the workforce.

I know Chinese people I like, but every one of them that was born there is glad to be somewhere else. Even if they love their country they don't love its government. Some are working very hard to qualify for citizenship so they never have to go back. The way the Chinese government abuses their natural environment is second only to the way they abuse their citizens. I used to think that it would be wonderful to travel to China, but lately the idea holds no appeal. I think going there would make me feel frustrated and depressed.

I sometimes think that if China disappeared off the globe tomorrow, the only thing I would miss is their takeout.

cutting out the pocket money middle men

A Moldovan teenager has been arrested for ordering the contract murder of both his parents. The 15-year-old was reportedly incensed at the mere $US1,000 ($A1,120) per month pocket money he received and paid an (undercover officer posing as) a professional hit man around $US600 ($A670) to kill his parents. He would then, as an only child, have been the sole heir to the family business. If convicted of attempted murder, he'll face up to ten years in prison.

Still, who can blame him, right? I mean, when your parents are so stingy that they will only fork over the equivalent of just over six times the average salary (which in Moldova is around $US150 ($A168)) for your pocket money, obviously the only sensible course of action is to have them killed. Especially when you can do this for the bargain basement price of just over a week's pocket money per person.

window on our ugly world

Amongst other cheerless headlines on MSN's newspage, such as "Maddie case: Police search pet crematorium" and "Man forced to dig own grave, court told" come these two gems of humanity:

Student 'gave teacher oral sex on bus'

Riley, a teacher at the 17-year-old's school, had a two-month affair with her involving not just oral sex while he drove a minivan and chatted on a mobile phone with a colleague, but supplying her with cocaine as well, because apparently "sex and coke is mind-blowing." He told her this at the beginning of what ended up being 400 pages of emails, text messages and internet messages they exchanged during the course of the relationship, which reportedly started after the pair did mouth-to-mouth Sambuca shots during a drinking game at the high school.

Teen jailed over brutal rape of grandmother

A 15-year-old boy has been sentenced to 13 years in prison (non-parole period of only 8 years) bashing, raping and threatening to kill an 83-year-old woman. He dragged her off a path into a nearby creek bed and raped her. He punched her face so brutally that her own daughter (who had gone looking for her mother after she didn't return from her walk as expected and ended up hearing her cries and rescuing her) could not recognise her. The judge said:

The violence with which you attacked your elderly and vulnerable victim is simply beyond the comprehension of any decent person.

Exactly.

But decent people are getting a little thinner on the ground. People say the world is getting better. I don't think so. These are just two stories that made it to the press. What about all the abuse going on that we don't hear about, families where 'disfunction' is a pseudonym for cruelty and manipulation, teachers/scoutmasters/clergymen who use their authority to seduce and attack. And when you extend that to the world at large, with its 'shame' killings, child sex trade, human trafficking, websites where pedophiles get together to exchange tips on trapping children, female genitalia mutilation, sweat shops, drug mules, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc till you want to throw up just thinking about what exists outside (and for some people inside) your own four walls, some days it's hard to even see that good exists.

context is everything

I'm kind of stunned sometimes as just how stupid people can be. I'm usually fairly tolerant of cultural sensitivities such as the Indian taboo against kissing in public (even while raising an eyebrow at the fact that they won't show a kiss in a movie, but will spend half of the same movie gyrating in a near-frenzy of sexually-charged dance moves). But the furore over Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty on the cheek is making my blood boil.

It's the context that makes the whole thing so hypocritical. This "shocking" display of public affection ~ which prompted protests, effigy burnings, calls for the actors' deaths and public apologies, and three law suits ~ occurred at an AIDS awareness rally targeting one of India high-risk groups, truckers. Many of this group of men have helped spread the HIV virus across India by having unprotected sex with prostitutes during their trips and then infecting their wives with it when they go home. And this very public rally was not asking the truckers to stop cheating on their wives. Oh no, it was merely asking them to wear a condom while they do it.

Apparently though, they must have cheated on their wives (and later infected them with a deadly virus) in private, because amazingly there are no protests about this genuinely shocking sexual misconduct. No-one is burning effigies of truckers and creating public law suits against them. No, the protesters are going to save all their time, energy and flammable materials for two people who shared a friendly, consensual kiss on the cheek.

Seriously, is it any wonder the world is in the state it's in when so many people insist on being completely obsessed with trivial crap, while completely ignoring real and genuinely terrible issues that are right in front of their face?