If The Truth Fits

I often feel that I’m focusing on the negative’s a bit much on this blog, so I’m really happy (good breeds good, it’s self-perpetuating!) that I’ve found enough stories in the news today that genuinely make me think that some pretty awesome things have been happening on Earth recently.

U.S. teen lives for 118 days without heart. When I saw that headline I was hoping for some Mike the Headless Chicken style action, but the reality was actually far more impressive (yes, more impressive than a headless chicken that didn’t die). A 14 year-old girl from South Carolina who suffered from “dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently,” spent 118 days having her blood pumped by an artificial device until a transplant became available. The girl did find the whole situation distressing, I imagine I would too if I were living without a heart, but I think its pretty incredible that modern medicine can keep people alive when they can’t pump their own blood, and apparently adults have been kept alive for up to a year with the same process. Incredible.

Scientists, having almost completed sequencing the DNA of a wooly mammoth, are getting all cocky and saying that they can create a living mammoth for less than $10 million dollars. Considering how little you can do with $10 million dollars nowadays, I’d say that resurrecting a long extinct animal is actually a pretty good deal. Apparently this is still firmly in the realms of science theory rather than science practise, which drops this a notch on the awesome-o-meter, but the very possibility that ‘we’ could bring back a beast that last lived around 60,000 years ago is pretty cool.

Next up on the “hey, cool things are happening” list, Shaq, aka The Big Aristotle, is now on Twitter (a micro-blogging network where people post short messages), which makes me feel like less of a nerd for also being a member and tweeting about things that happen during my day. I was under the impression that the jury was still out over whether @The_Real_Shaq was actually the real Shaquille O’Neal, so I did a bit of hunting aqround, and it turns out that its true, Shaq is actually tweeting along with the rest of us. The account was set up after someone created a fake account pretending to be the legendary center (for fun, there was no malice intended), and he wanted to set the record straight. What I really like about this story is that the messages are actually coming directly from the big man himself, most celebrities on Twitter don’t actually write the messages themselves, their assistants and PR reps will do it for them (Britney Spears & Barack Obama are good examples), which I don’t particularly have a problem with, but I think its really cool to see a sports star who is a role model to a lot of kids connecting so directly with his fans.

Guns N’ Roses have finally, finally, released ‘Chinese Democracy’ the bands first release in approximately 75 years. I say released, you can’t actually buy it until Monday, but that album has more leaks than a Welsh village (note: joke may not translate internationally, basically, that’s a lot of leaks), you could just be surfing CNN and somehow end up downloading one of their songs. I know that this item doesn’t really fit in with the spirit of the other stories I’ve mentioned, but I am just so glad that the Chinese Democracy ordeal is coming to an end, not because I’m a particularly big fan of the band, I’m just utterly sick of that album being a punchline, maybe now we can all move on. Oh, and from what I’ve read, the most expensive album of all time kinda sucks.

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I just heard about a story that left me absolutely amazed at the lack of self-awareness that exsits within corporate America, and presumably around much of the rest of the world, as well.

The ‘Big Three’ car makers in America, Ford, Chrsyler, and General Motors, made their way to Washington D.C. with caps in hand today to request that the American taxpayer bailed them out to stop the auto industry in the U.S. from collapsing. I can’t find a figure anywhere saying how much they were asking for, but I’m willing to bet that it has a whole load of zeroes involved. I’m not specifically for or against this bailout, I’m not too aware of the issues involved or whether the companies involved are victims of the current economic climate or victims of their own stupidity. The bailout isn’t really what concerns me in this article, it’s how the CEOs of those three companies made their way to Washington.

Private jet.

Yes, the people who are desperate to have their industry saved by money for the American taxpayer each took a private jet took their meeting, a move that Gary Ackerman, a Democratic Representative from New York described as being like “seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.” Do you think that when they were sitting in their leather chairs, 30,000 feet up in the sky, they wondered how their travel arrangements were going to look to the public? If they did, I wonder if it happened before or after the champagne was served.

CNN are estimating that the flights would have cost about $20,000 for each CEO, which in terms of the scale of money that they’re talking about isn’t really that much, and reps for the companies have said that the private jets are a matter of safety for their CEOs, but come one, if there’s ever a time when a bit of humility is important, its when you’re asking for a loan! Especially when the money for that loan comes from the people who have already bought your cars.

I’ve complained about the media focusing on the wrong things in the past, and I realise that this story isn’t one of the major issues facing the world today, no one is really surprised that fat cat executives live in the lap of luxury, but I think that a story like this highlights how out of touch these people are with the general public, and when you consider that they’re the CEOs of American car companies you’d have thought that their public personas would have been finely manicured to ensure that they appeared like ‘normal’ American people, even if they secretly dreamed of driving a BMW or Mercedes. Of course, the media is all over this, everyone’s talking about it, even Perez Hilton has managed to stop gossiping about celebs to gossip about CEOs, its the perfect story becuase it doesn’t appear that anyone really gets hurt, and everyone can have a good laugh about it.

But, actually, people do get hurt. Apparently, in 2006, the median salary for someone in the US was around $26,000, the estimated cost of the flight for one of the CEOs was $20,000, and that ignores the millions of dollars that it cost for the companies to buy the private jets. The cost for the CEO to fly in coach class was $288, or $857 if they went first class. Every time that CEO takes a flight instead of rubbing shoulders , it costs the same amount as paying an American to work for the majority of a year, so when they say that they’re trying to streamline their business, and that involves laying people off from their jobs, perhaps they should consider that by cutting back on their perks and rubbing shoulders with the proleteriat in first class that they might be able to stop someone from becoming just another statistic amongst the unemployed in America.

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I wouldn’t really describe myself as being an Apple fanboy, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m an iPhone fanboy, I know it has a fair few failings, but I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me gush for just a minute about the shiny slab of magic in my pocket.

This morning I downloaded the updated version of the Google Mobile app (here’s an iTunes link if you want to check it out yourself) to my phone because I’d heard quite a lot of buzz about it. That buzz related to being able to conduct searches using voice recognition. I’ve never found voice recognition software to be particularly accurate, and if you ever see me in public Googling with my voice rather than tapping away at the keyboard you have my permission to strangle me until I can no longer conduct voice searches which will almost certainly be based around pop culture facts just so that I can settle bets amongst my friends.

On a quick side note, having an iPhone has almost become a threat. If I’m sat in the pub with my friends and someone says something slightly dubious, like, for example “when scared, a squid will balloon to twice its size and turn red,” all I have to do is mutter “I have an iPhone” and all of a sudden their confidence and bravado will be shattered, because people now believe Google results more than their own memories. Hopefully, as smartphones become more prevalent in society, there will be less BS spoken in bars around the world, though being the guy that just sits there fact checking what people are saying all-night between sips on your beer is hardly a good way to be the life and soul of the party. Also, I try and keep my iPhone in my pocket as much as possible when I’ve had a drink or two, because as we’ve discussed before, drinking and e-mails do not mix.

I don’t believe that the ability to search the internet is someone that will catch on too quickly (maybe one day when everyone is comfortable with using those stupid bluetooth microphones), but I think its pretty amazing that ‘we’ seem to have reached a point in technological evolution where we can do things that were in science fiction not so long ago. Imagine if you told someone in the 80s that in about twenty years time that they would be able to pull a phone out of their pocket (that wouldn’t be the same size and weight as a brick) speak into it, without speaking to someone else, and the answer to your query would then be displayed on a screen, how do you think they’d react? Oh, and then you told them that the phone could also hold and play hundreds of hours of music and video. Hell, when I was a kid, I was impressed that ‘they’ could get Tetris to fit onto a wristwatch!

Oh, and in case you missed it, a spider has gone missing on the International Space Station, and that is a genuine story, not the set up to a low budget scifi movie.

Whenever I see a piece of spam pop up on in my e-mail client, its a slight annoyance, but I just accept that its ‘one of those things’ and that we can’t stop it being sent to my inbox, but hopefully a filter will be able to stop me from having to read it. I guess that there are people that are more pro-active than me, because instead of just trying to stop themselves from reading the spam, they’re trying to stop those billions and billions of junk e-mails even being sent to your inbox.

According to this article from the Associated Press, a company called McColo Corp. was shutdown last week after it turned out that they were the half of almost half of the world’s spam e-mails. Spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail sent around the world, so if these guys were responsible for half of all spam, that means that there is about 45% fewer e-mails being sent around the world right now. I know that sounds really impressive, but the article goes on to say that you can never really kill the spam monster, within a few days or weeks there will be just as many e-mails circulating around the world telling you about some great v1agra offers that you should really be interested in.

I don’t think I’ve actually opened or read a spam e-mail for at least a couple of years. I use Gmail and it seems to catch just about everything and put it into the spam folder, which I’ll give a quick browse to check that it hasn’t been overzealous and picked up something I actually want to read, then I might have a swift chuckle at the titles of the spam mails, and click delete all. I’d always presumed that everyone else did the same, but apparently not. 1 in 12,500,000 spam e-mails actually result in someone signing up to that porn site, buying those cheap medications from Canada, or, of course, trying to pick up some little blue pills on the cheap in the hope of stirring things up in the bedroom. Those figures come from the results of a study by computer scientists at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego, who decided that the only way that they could get accurate data about spam was to actually spam people, and in a 26 day period they sent 350 messages, yielding them just 28 sales, a record that even poor ol’ Gil Gunderson from the Simpsons wouldn’t be proud of, but apparently that’s enough of a hit-rate for big-time spammers to rake in a couple of million dollars a year, and whilst they can bring in that kind of cash I’m sure that they won’t be stopping any time soon.

Oh, and if you thought that you had it bad when it came to annoying spam clogging up your inbox, think about poor Colin Wells, who has around 44,000 spam messages going through his server every day. He used to spend up to two hours a day tapping away at the delete key, but seems to have got things under control now with some effective filters, so if there’s one lesson that you can learn from this article, its that whilst spammers never quit, neither do the good guys, and you can almost always take back control of your inbox.

When something as momentous as a black man becoming President, apparently knocking down many racial barriers in the US, and causing a lot of people in the world to stop hating America, it feels quite hard for me to start writing about something else. Talking about what Lindsay Lohan is doing now, or which star of The Hills hates another star of The Hills just doesn’t seem to hold as much historic weight as my last few posts. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that I can’t cover something groundbreaking every day… or can I?

The Dow Jones made its third-biggest ever points gain today, which I guess would be big news, but there seems to have been a story like that every day over the past few months. I guess I’m getting a bit cynical of this whole economic apocalypse, but it seems to be up and down every day to the point where the only point at which I’d be surprised was if a financial correspondent on TV opened a report by saying “nothin’ much doing on Wall Street today, no ones jumped out the window yet, and no ones having a shower with vintage Dom Perignon champagne… sigh… and now here’s Steve with the weather.”

Someone might, and I’d like to stress the might, and stress it again, might have cured HIV.

Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells — appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.

Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.

I can understand how Obamania has taken over the news somewhat over the past week, but how on earth has this story slipped under the radar? I hadn’t even heard about this until I went hunting for news on Google, and I’ve had the news on TV for about 3 hours today (I think that in that time they managed to discuss about five or six stories, but that’s another matter altogether). Added to my earlier caution, the doctors involved have warned that the patient had a rare strain of HIV, and that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be a routine treatment for HIV. Still, despite those caveats, that’s still a pretty amazing story.

Right, now I have found a story that truly deserves to follow-on from the momentous occasion that was the 2008 American election. Jennifer Aniston has finally broken her silence over the Brangelina affair in an interview with Vogue magazine, branding what Angelina did (breaking up Brad & Jen’s marriage) and “very uncool“. In turn, Brad Pitt has told Jen to ’shut it’. The whole affair appears to have made the internet explode. Isn’t it great to hear that even impossibly good looking people have problems to?

When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.

It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).

It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.

Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.

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Yes, I know that most people would have reported this story yesterday when it actually became a reality, but I thought that it would be a pretty good idea to wait a day to let it all sink in, and to make sure that Barack Obama was in fact the President elect, and that this wasn’t all some cruel hoax and that George Bush was going to have a live address to the nation in which he decides that his Presidency is going to turn the corner right around 2011 and that it’ll probably be for the best if he just stayed in his current job. To be fair to GWB, with the job market the way it is at the moment (especially as a man over 60), its probably going to be easier for him to change the constitution to allow him a third term than to try and get another job that isn’t being a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, Barack Obama is really going to be the President of America, as long as he spends the next few months surrounded by bullet proof glass (come on, not everyone in the US has made enough ’social progress’ quite yet). The official party line here at Pop Vulture was that we weren’t backing one candidate over the other, but I think it was pretty obvious whose side we were on, which is why I had goosebumps at around 11pm (EST) on Tuesday night. I mentioned in my last post that I was staying up here in France to watch the election, and I made it all the way to the end (or the beginning, if you’d prefer), and I think that the tiredness of staying up until 6:30am heightened my emotions to a level that Americans were feeling. When Obama came out an made that speech in Grant Park, and my God what a speech it was, I’m willing to admit that at moments I was welling up, and I’m well known for my heart of stone, so Barack Obama has done something pretty there, in terms of emotion for me, he’s reached the heights of the OC series finale (yes, I went there).

A lot of people on the news that are rather older than me have been saying for the past couple of days that they never thought they would see a black man as a President in their lifetime. Most of them have probably got 20-30 more years ‘experience’ than I do, but I didn’t think that I’d see it in my lifetime either. I just kept thinking that something was going to go wrong, millions of people going into voting booths and with a pen hovering over the Obama/Biden box, they thought “sure, there’s no actual evidence that Barack Obama is a muslim/terrorist/elitist/socialist/communist… but… I dunno” and lowering their pen to McCain/Palin, or deciding to just throw their vote away altogether and vote for Bob Barr.

I think that 10 years ago, no matter how well qualified or deserving of the office, a black person could not have been President, I realised that technically they could, but I don’t think America was ready for it. Even a couple of years ago I think it would have been a much tougher task, which is why I think that the Onion (yes, the website dedicated to news that isn’t true) hit the nail on the head with their article ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress‘. Still, way to go, America.

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As I type this blog post, the results are starting to come in for the 2008 US election. I’m going to be staying up until this thing is decided, and as Wolf Blitzer just said “its early in the night” on CNN I get the feeling that I could be in for a fairly long night. It would be silly for me to try and call states and inform you about the polls, but the team over at Mashable (a blog about social media and websites) have put together a great list of sites that can guide you through what is a pretty confusing process. They’re calling it the Ultimate Election Day 2008 Toolkit and whilst I haven’t exactly been hunting around for other Election Day Toolkits, if you’re intending to follow the election online it will probably be a very good place for you to go for links.

Whether Obama or McCain is the winner, one thing that has really inspired me about the past couple of days is the level of activism and interest displayed by the American people in this election, resulting in what will probably be one of the highest levels of voter turnout in US history. I know that Obama has energised a lot of voters that wouldn’t have necessarily been too interested, and the McCain has managed to awaken a lot of Republicans, but I still found it very impressive. It almost seems that amongst young people its actually ‘cool’ to be interested in politics and that there’s a bit of a stigma if you don’t vote, which is pretty amazing amongst a voting bloc typically known for stubbornly sticking to apathy.

In Britain I remember things being extremely different in the past couple of elections that I’ve been involved with (I’ve only been able to vote in 1 general election, and a couple of local ones). Voter disinterest and apathy is rife amongst all races, classes, and backgrounds, something which I find pretty depressing. I don’t really know why, maybe people have lost faith in the process, maybe they’ve lost faith in politicians of all ideologies (why bother voting when you don’t believe in any of them?). Or perhaps, and this is a theory that’s fairly ‘out there’, they’re actually all pretty happy, and figure that whoever is in charge things will be pretty much the same. Still, as someone who studied politics at university for 3 years and has had a keen interest for many years more than that, I’ve always believed that voting is important and that if you don’t vote, then you haven’t made your voice heard and you don’t deserve the right to complain about the peopke who represent you. I’m not saying that people who don’t vote shouldn’t have the same human rights as voters, but I feel that there’s something disingenuous about people bitching about their government when they couldn’t even be bothered to send in a postal vote or head down to the polling station.

We Brits and other people in Europe often sling a lot of mud at Americans for a lot of reasons, but its days like this that make me really believe in people, and it makes me proud to be coming to America next month.

The world is a scary place, this much we know, but on Halloween it actually becomes a lot less scary to me. It’s like someone is having a fancy dress party, and absolutely everyone is invited, people give each other chocolate, candies, and all kinds of other treats just because you turn up at their door. Try doing that on any day other than October 31st and I guarantee that your candy to slammed door ratio with change very drastically. Also, don’t you think that its kind of funny that a night that is meant to be scary and filled with dark rituals has largely been transformed into a clean and sanitized day in which kids have fun, are told that its okay to take candy from strangers “just for today”, and that if you don’t get given any candy its totally cool to chuck eggs at their door and throw toilet paper over the carefully manicured tree in the middle of the lawn. Oh, and for the adults, parties where all the drinks are green and all the women turn up in costumes that come with the prefix of ’slutty’.

Let’s take a look at the history of Halloween, according to that actually quite reliable resource, Wikipedia:

Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain. The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.” Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

Like I said, that is a pretty dark story, oh, and the fun pumpkins that you carve with your kids? Also kinda dark:

Originating in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the “head” of the vegetable to frighten off any superstitions.

As a man of science, I know that superstitions are actually have a very high likelihood of being ’supersilly’, but are we really meant to believe that the Celts thought carving a face in a turnip (a turnip!) and putting a candle in it had the awesome power of being able to frighten off any (any!) superstition?

Now that I think about it, the turnip with a candle in it actually did work, in much the same way that Lisa Simpson’s Tiger-repelling rock does, you carved a face into a turnip, stuck a candle in it, and none of the dead returned to the land of the living to kill you and ruin your crops for the coming year, so its hardly surprising that they continued to employ the TCDS (Turnip + Candle Defence Mechanism) for so long.

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