Posted by: octobervine on: February 18, 2008
“Thierry Khalfa says he had a good excuse to copy: His English isn’t so good. The 44-year-old Frenchman first cobbled a ho-hum profile that said he liked to cook and enjoyed walks on the beach. Then he stumbled across the profile of Mike Matteo, 47, a screenwriter in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Matteo’s profile had such nuggets as, “I have a sweet tooth, love my strawberry twizzlers and cheesecake jelly beans.”
Without thinking twice, Mr. Khalfa says, he copied Mr. Matteo’s prose because it also fit him to a tee. “That guy should be proud,” says Mr. Khalfa, of Largo, Fla., who runs an auto-glass business. “In France, in the fashion business, when you see something that looks good, you take it and you copy it.”
Mr. Khalfa caught the eye of preschool teacher Marjorie Coon, 48. They exchanged emails, and Ms. Coon wanted to meet Mr. Khalfa in person. Then she discovered he had copied the profile of Mr. Matteo, by coincidence her friend. She let Mr. Khalfa know she knew and dumped him. “I felt he was less than honest, a manipulator and downright stupid,” says Ms. Coon, of Largo, Fla. Mr. Matteo wasn’t too happy, either. “I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac,” he says, referring to the 19th-century play about a man penning love letters for a rival.”
The human race evolves. Seriously. This is evolution from ‘I only copied your diary into mine because you are so much cooler than me and all the guys and gals like you and I don’t want life to pass me by in primary school, alright?’
Posted by: octobervine on: February 17, 2008
5-lakh strong Koli community says they’re Mumbai’s original inhabitants and everyone else, including Maharashtrians, are outsiders. Their verdict: “If they cannot live in harmony without provoking one another, they must all leave.”
Posted by: octobervine on: February 17, 2008
Free Speech and Radical Islam by Flemming Rose.
“It is not cultures, religions or political systems that enjoy rights. Human beings enjoy rights, and certain principles like the ones embedded in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are universal.
Unfortunately, misplaced sensitivity is being used by tyrants and fanatics to justify murder and silence criticism. Right now the Organization of Islamic Countries is conducting a successful campaign at the United Nations to rewrite international human-rights standards to curtail the right to free speech. Last year the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution against “defamation of religion,” calling on governments around the world to clamp down on cartoonists, writers, journalists, artists and dissidents who dare to speak up.
In the West there is a lack of clarity on these issues. People suggest that Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen and Kurt Westergaard bear a certain amount of responsibility for their fate. They don’t understand that by doing so they tacitly endorse attacks on dissenting voices in parts of the world where no one can protect them.
We need a global movement to fight blasphemy and other insult laws, and the European Union should lead the way by removing them. Europe should make it clear that democracies will protect their citizens if they say something that triggers threats and intimidation.”
Posted by: octobervine on: February 13, 2008
This is extremely interesting. Water supply was erratic in our area once. Now we have water tanks for storage and our own well, which helps a LOT.
Posted by: octobervine on: February 10, 2008
A completely excellent and hilarious article by Jonathan Franklin.
At first glance, Bluefields in Nicaragua looks like any other rum-soaked, Rastafarian-packed, hammock-infested Caribbean paradise. But Bluefields has a secret.
People here don’t have to work. Every week, sometimes every day, 35kg sacks of cocaine drift in from the sea. The economy of this entire town of 50,000 tranquil souls is addicted to cocaine.
Bluefields is a creation of the gods of geography. Located halfway between the cocaine labs of Colombia and the 300 million noses of the United States, Bluefields is ground zero for cocaine transportation. Nicaraguan waters are near Colombian territorial limits, making the area extremely popular with cocaine smugglers using very small, very fast fishing boats.
To escape American Drug Enforcement officers, the smugglers off-load the cocaine into the ocean and the floating bales drift in the direction of Bluefields, where they are picked up by fishermen and beachcombers.
So what do the locals do with all this cocaine? They sell it to travelling buyers who cruise the coast, disguised as used clothes vendors.
When the drugs come in, everyone is happy, the banks, the stores, everyone has cash.
The cocaine business is reshaping the face of these Indian communities. Tasbapauni Beach is now nicknamed “Little Miami”, because so much cocaine washes up on its long shoreline that it has fuelled a construction boom. Luxurious oceanfront condos protected by security guards now sit side by side with wooden fishing shacks.
I wondered and the article explained -
With literally tonnes of cocaine buried in the hills, stashed in yards and piled up around town, why doesn’t the Colombian mafia storm into these remote communities and repossess their coke bales by coercion or brute force?
“Hell no,” says Peter, a local businessman. “The Miskito [local Indians] are guerrillas. They have been through war. They have AK-47s and up.”
So what about any real industry?
Snagging shrimp and trapping lobster are the principal – maybe the only form – of legitimate work in Bluefields. But by all reasonable observations, work itself is barely considered legitimate.
Why not just enjoy nature’s bounty? With so much fresh fish, coconut, bananas and mangoes, the idea of sweating or long-term planning seems foreign.
Posted by: octobervine on: February 10, 2008
A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity
I SO totally disagree with this article.
The writer says -
“So long as the Lexicon was a free Web site, Ms. Rowling looked kindly upon it. But when Mr. Vander Ark tried to publish part of the Lexicon in book form — and (shudder!) to make a profit — Ms. Rowling put her foot down. She claims that she wants to publish her own encyclopedia someday and donate the proceeds to charity — and a competing book by Mr. Vander Ark would hurt the prospects for her own work. “
The difference is obvious. The website is a not-for-profit venture. With the Lexicon in a published form the whole issue changes. Mr. Vander Ark’s intention, of course, is to make a profit here – why else would he go to the trouble of getting it published? And the problem IS with THAT exactly – he’s trying to make a profit out of someone else’s work.
Whether Mrs. Rowling intends to publish her own encyclopedia is really not an issue here – it doesn’t matter whether she does or doesn’t – Mr. Vander Ark has no right to infringe on the work and characters she worked so hard to create.
“They are her intellectual property. And in her view, no one else can use them without her permission.”
Yes, actually, no one can. That’s why we have copyright and trademark rules. To protect intellectual property.
“No one is saying that anyone can simply steal the work of others. But the law absolutely allows anyone to create something new based on someone else’s art. This is something the Internet has made dramatically easier — which is part of the reason we’re all so much more aware of copyright than we used to be. But it has long been true for writers, filmmakers and other artists. That’s what “fair use” means. “
I don’t think the Lexicon falls into the ‘creating something new‘ category at all. They are listing characters and events and other sundry details taken from the books she wrote, from the interviews she gave, from the information she provided on her website. They have just taken that and rearranged it. They have not created anything ‘new‘.
It may come under ‘fair use’ to quote her, it’s not fair use to use her work and call it your own.
Posted by: octobervine on: February 10, 2008
How a Lunar Eclipse Saved Columbus
“Columbus asked for a meeting with the natives Cacique (“chief”) and announced to him that his Christian god was angry with his people for no longer supplying Columbus and his men with food. Therefore, he was about to provide a clear sign of his displeasure: Three nights hence, he would all but obliterate the rising full moon, making it appear inflamed with wrath, which would signify the evils that would soon be inflicted upon all of them.”
Posted by: octobervine on: February 8, 2008
Posted by: octobervine on: January 27, 2008
Honour sought for ‘Soldier Bear’
“He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer – he drank a bottle of beer like any man.“
Posted by: octobervine on: January 19, 2008
Chefs’ New Goal: Looking Dinner in the Eye
Mr. Oliver said that he wanted people to confront the reality that eating any kind of meat involves killing an animal, even if it is done with a minimum of pain.
And –
Tamara Murphy, the chef at Brasa in Seattle, took delivery of 11 freshly killed piglets last Friday, destined for dishes of pork belly with braised greens and paprika-rubbed roasted chops. “I don’t name them,” said Ms. Murphy, who wrote a weekly blog in 2006, chronicling the short lives of some of the piglets earmarked for her restaurant from Whistling Train Farm. “They are being raised for food, and there is a respectful distance I need to keep” she said. Ms. Murphy visited the piglets weekly, starting the day after their birth, and accompanied them to the slaughterhouse before serving them in a dinner that was called a Celebration of the Life of a Pig.
“The hardest part of the slaughter was the betrayal,” she said. “The pigs get in the trailer because they trust you, they get out of the trailer because they trust you, they go into the pen because they trust you.”
—–
I once endured a chap expound on how the death penalty for serial killers and murderers lessened ‘our’ humanity. Because life was IMPORTANT, see? Life was SACRED.
And between the sound-bites, he chewed on a roast duck.
“What about that duck’s life then?” I asked.
“What about it?” he said and took another piece.
