Friday, January 2, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday, January 2, 2009)
(1)-OTHER FORMS OF INSULT-- George Bush had two shoes hurled at him by an Iraqi journalist who wanted to make an example of the outgoing President by paying him the highest insult in Baghdad. While in Iraq the act of throwing your shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. In other countries there are many weird and wonderful ways to cast an insult to those who you dislike. For instance: If you are handed a business card in Japan you can cause maximum offence by throwing it down on your desk or stuffing it in your back pocket. In the Philippines a curled beckoning forefinger isn’t used to summon someone over but rather to call them a dog.

(2)-CANNIBAL ETIQUETTE-- The jungles of Papua New Guinea are a different world - the land of headhunters and cannibals. Brave Italian photographer Iago Corazza travelled the country, the island at the end of the world, and took photos of its fascinating inhabitants, who still live a Stone Age existence. “You find people here who can describe the taste of human flesh,” the photographer said of his travels. Anthropologist Olga Ammann describes it more succinctly in the book. She quotes people who have eaten other humans: “The meat of white people smells too strongly and is too salty.”

(3)-DETROIT STEALS CANADA'S WATER-- Detroit has possibly been stealing Canadian water for 44 years. It seems the Motor City’s drinking-water intake pipe extends about 100 yards across the international boundary in the Detroit River, and it’s been siphoning as much as 32 billion gallons a year since 1964 without a water-taking permit. “The City of Detroit was unfamiliar with Ontario requirements for water takings and has never had a permit to take water,” the Ontario Ministry of the Environment told the Hamilton Spectator.

(4)-STUCK UP HIGH-- Fire broke out in the control room of the world’s largest Ferris wheel in Singapore Tuesday, trapping 173 people hundreds of feet above the ground for hours and forcing rescuers to lower 10 passengers to safety by rope. Two passengers were hospitalized with minor ailments. During the six hour-ordeal, passengers were able to talk with officials via intercom and rescuers tethered to harnesses brought them sandwiches and soft drinks, said general manager Steven Yeo.

(5)-NEWSPAPER SHARING-- Editors from The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun say that they have agreed to begin sharing certain stories, photos and other news content. The deal comes as both newspapers, like the rest of the industry, struggle to retain readers and cut costs as the economics of the business shift. The agreement takes effect Jan. 1 and primarily covers day-to-day news about Maryland and sports. Also, the papers can draw on one another's national, international and feature stories contributed to the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

(6)-WHERE ARE THE NEOCONS??-- Having wrecked the Right, will neoconservatives revert to their left-wing origins or double down on the GOP? As Barack Obama prepares to take the inaugural oath, it almost seems obvious to note that his victory represents a sweeping repudiation of the neoconservative movement. Though neocons such as Randy Scheunemann formed a kind of Praetorian Guard around John McCain during his presidential campaign, their truculent approach to foreign affairs sabotaged rather than strengthened McCain’s electoral appeal.

(7)-PARTICLE MAN-- It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans, he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism.

(8)-WHERE DID PLATO GO?-- Not far into Will Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy, I came across a startling fact. In his chapter on the Greek thinker Plato, after discussing the politics, history and geography of ancient Athens, he mentions that, due to political unrest, the philosopher was forced to leave the city-state in 399 B.C. “Where he went, we cannot for certain say,” Durant writes. “Twelve years he wandered, imbibing wisdom from every source, sitting at every shrine, tasting every creed.

(9)-DID YOU KNOW??-- Some years ago, the evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins pointed out to me that Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar — the calendar in use in England at the time. But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.
ENDIT