Advent Calender

Leslie Harpold's Advent Calendar. 25 fun filled Days with surprises

Secrets

The other night Radio National had Philip Adams interviewing Daniel Ellsberg about his book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg made some interesting comparisons between the war in Vietnam and the present conflict in Iraq.
Phillip Adams seems to be the number one enemy of the many of Right Wing Australian Blogs on the net. Most of their readers seem to be Septic Tanks, pretty depressing really.
However found a couple of decent political Aussie blogs which I will read from now on, one being Tug Boat Potemkin and even better is Back Pages by Christopher Sheil.

Living Dead

An estimated 35,000 people in Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have been declared dead, by unscrupulous relatives, in order to steal their property.
Transparency International via The Man in Blue

and more on the living dead

"I'm here. I'm alive," Lal Bihari told revenue officials after discovering he was listed as deceased in 1976. "That may be so," an unruffled clerk replied, "but according to my books you're dead." It took Lal Bihari 18 years to get his life and his land back. During that time, he added the word Mritak, or Dead, to his name and to prove that he was living sought arrest, tried to run for parliament, kidnapped the son of the uncle who had stolen his property, threatened murder, insulted judges, threw leaflets listing his complaints at legislators in the state assembly and demanded a widow's pension for his wife. Each time he was either beaten up by police or rebuked for wasting officials' time. Unable to make headway, Lal Bihari The Dead sought the company of other ghosts in Uttar Pradesh and found an entire underworld of the deceased and dispossessed. Last month a dozen of them demonstrated outside the Uttar Pradesh assembly to publicize their fate, demanding an official investigation into land registry transactions to prevent others from being robbed.Time Asia

Hot Adelaide Nights & Carpet Seaweeds

Had one of our first hot days this summer, and I haven't acclimatised yet. Fortunately a cool change is coming tonight. Found this strange little archive of machine translated text when I googled term Hot Adelaide:

When me this thought came, I was even before the carpet seaweeds, which zierte at that time each backyard and thus also our meadow, because she had the function of a backyard, in which one beat out evenly also the carpets of the dwelling. Laying out commodity was likewise not yet invented. Some parents used the Teppichklopfer also for the corporal punishment of their children. That was very painful, but I knew only from an argument with my older brother, with which we had mutually struck ourselves with the Klopfer.

Baghdad Burning
Have been reading the Blog Baghdad Burning by a young woman from Iraq. Posts that are informative about the occupation of Iraq and political situation are mixed with accounts of everyday family life.

New Blog

Have put togethor a new blog with iblog.
the blog is called Zenith Blue (see sidebar)

Odd Spot - Monday, 1 December 2003

Extracts from the Odd spot column of The Age.

Tuesday November 18, 2003
A man's year-old corpse hung for nearly a day in Budapest's Arts University after builders and students mistook it for a modern sculpture. The man hanged himself a year ago but was found only after the closed building was reopened for repairs.

Saturday November 15, 2003
Nazi saboteurs plotted to blow up Buckingham Palace using exploding cans of peas, according to MI5 files just made public. Three men captured in Ireland in 1940 were carrying explosives, including tins labelled "French Peas" containing nitrocellulose.

Friday November 28, 2003
One-third of all American visitors to Scotland believe haggis is a real animal, according to a survey. Almost one in four (23 per cent) of those questioned said they had come to Scotland believing they could hunt and catch Scotland's most famous dish.

which reminds me of something I read recently on Scottish Food.
via Senior Citizen.