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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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?

Guess what subject I still don’t understand? The economy, stupid! I thought I’d had it all figured out, the bailout bill would pass, the economy would stabilise somewhat, the banks would be more confident and have less fear of lending to each other, and the world wouldn’t be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to start stockpiling turnips for the winter because my money is worth less/nothing/going to be replaced with Chinese Yuan (please delete as necessary relating to when you read this article). Clearly, that hasn’t happened, as the markets are continuing to tumble like people from Gloucester chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill, which sounds a lot more entertaining than the stock market, but I’m pretty sure that more people are getting hurt on Wall St.

After the Chinese milk scandal, which has seen some 53,000 people people ill and caused the death of four infants (that we know of, who knows what the real number is), the Chinese government has seen fit to issue official limits on the amount of melamine (the chemical which caused all the problems) that can be used in baby formula. I guess this is the second time that I’m accusing the Chinese of closing the gate after the horse has bolted after that mining corruption scandal, but its pretty amazing that its taken them this long to sort out how much, if any, melamine can safely be put in the formula.

Apparently Barack Obama ‘pals around‘ with terrorists. That’s the latest monumentally important debate point raging amongst the media. Not how they’re going to fix the economy, pull out of Iraq, lower crime rates, stop the prison population from continuing to rise, or deal with the myriad of foreign policy situations that the US finds itself embroiled in on a near weekly basis. Oh, and John McCain might be corrupt. It’s getting really hard to see the issues on the road to the election with all this mud being thrown at the windscreen.

Oh, and the debates between Obama and McCain are really, really boring. All they do is go over the talking points, pretend to agree with each other, avoid the questions, act all folksy (okay, not as much as Sarah “Don’t ‘cha know” Palin), and then stand around shaking hands for a while afterwards. It’s boring, where’s the zazz? Where’s the interrogation? Where’s someone calling them out on all the ‘facts’ that keep getting cited that simply aren’t true. There’s a news presenter here in the UK called Jeremy Paxman who is respected by pretty much everyone because he really goes for the jugular. Not because he’s after the fame, just because he doesn’t let them get away with lying to him, I think that CNN, MSNBC or maybe even crazy-old Fox News should have borrowed him from the BBC to try and get some real answers out of politicians for the upcoming election. If you’re wondering who I’m wittering on about, try checking out Paxman on YouTube if you’re in the mood for seeing some politicians getting a well deserved nailing.

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I’ve read about this story a few times on my travels around the web today, and I’ve found that every single one of those stories felt the need to point out that this is NOT an April Fool’s style prank or faux-feature, possibly because Google are so well known for the hoaxes that they spring upon a very skeptical public every April 1st, some of which were pretty obvious (does anyone else remember Google PigeonRank?), and some of which were so crazy that they had an air of plausibility about them (Virgle? It made so much sense!). I’ve always thought that one of these years, Google would pull the old switcheroo and launch a real product on April Fools Day and not get involved in the web’s April 1st shenanigans, since I’m sure it would confuse the hell out of people, which would probably be the funniest thing they’ve done for Fool’s Day for a few years.

Sorry, I’m afraid I went off on a bit of a tangent there, Google announced a new product today which seems to have caught a lot of attention. It is called ‘Mail Goggles‘ and can be enabled in the Settings>Labs tab when you’re using Gmail. The idea behind it is that there are quite a lot of people who after a night out on the sauce might come home and decide that they’d better check their e-mails before they go to bed, just to see if anything really important has come up, but in the process they might decide to tell a few people what they really think of them in a few e-mails that they’ll probablycertainly regret sending in the morning. These people need protecting from themselves in their inebriated state, and that’s where Mail Goggles comes in. Once enabled, it will activate itself at certain times of night and over the whole weekend (Googlers must party hard at weekends!), and before you are allowed to send an e-mail it will ask you to complete a number of fairly simple maths problems (though you can alter the difficulty level) within a time limit. If you complete the problems, your e-mail will be sent, if not, Google will tell you to have a glass of water and go to bed (no, really).

Whilst I’m sure that if I were really determined to send an e-mail telling them that “they should go to hell” then I would make sure that e-mail got there, I might start by simply disabling ‘Mail Goggles’ (duh!), but I do think its a fun little feature, and it might actually be pretty effective. For one thing, I remember coming home (staggering home, some might say) from a night out, and for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to try and play sudoku on my phone (yep, you can even play sudoku on an iPhone, it can do anything!), after staring at the screen for a minute I’m pretty sure I fell asleep, so maybe Google are onto something with this whole numbers angle. Also, I think that if I were to fail at completing the maths problems once then it might set off a few alarm bells in my head that it might be a good idea to re-read that e-mail, maybe they shouldn’t go to hell, just New Jersey?

As Ars Technica comments, it would be really great if someone made something for cellphones on Friday and Saturday nights!

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I totally get where he’s coming from, on a philosophical level I even kind of agree with him (even if in practice I’m far too selfish to actually follow through on the message), but at a certain point I do think that there’s a certain level of hypocrisy going on here.

Pope Benedict XVI has told a meeting of bishops in Rome that “the global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless.” Aside from that being astoundingly depressing, it very much feels like a “why bother?” kind of approach to life to me, something about the Pope saying it feels a bit off to me. Yeah, I get the whole wealth angle when it comes to Catholicism, but it just looks odd when the man that’s spreading that message wears even more gold than the whole front-row at the BET Hip Hop Awards.

I’m sure that the argument for him being able to blind the congregation if the light came through the stained-glass windows of the church is that “he’s the freaking Pope” and he can do what he wants, and that I’d probably be just as annoyed if he turned up to mass wearing a pair of slacks and a t-shirt with rib sauce stains on, but I was under the impression that the Pope was meant to try and help people, and if he could help people by selling off some of the bling (I hate that word, by the way, but it seemed to fit with my point) then maybe the it might be a good idea. Also, the man wears Prada shoes, I’m sure he doesn’t pay for them, but his shoe rack could probably buy a house, though that’s not really saying much considering that I could buy a house for less than the cost of a beer (and not even imported beer either).

Why on earth shouldn’t people be striving for success? Seriously, what’s the deal with that? Maybe I’m taking it out of context a bit, but it does seem like a very odd thing to say. All throughout our lives we’re told to try our best and aim for our goals, and then the Pope tells us not to bother? And this little lesson is coming from the Pope, if it were coming from some guy that sleeps in the bus station and wears carrier bags for shoes then maybe I could get where they were coming from, but he’s the Pope. As far as being a Catholic goes, becoming the Pope is pretty much the best you’re going to do, as far as I understand it, you’ve got God, then Jesus, then the Pope. I think you can classify yourself as being a bit of a success if you’ve landed the number one job in the world for your industry (some of us just have to make do with being one of the top t-shirt bloggers in the world). Also, once people start designing cars especially for you, you’ve got to think that you’re kind of a big deal, and that you can tick ’successful’ off the big list of ‘things to do’.

Wouldn’t it be nice if just once you heard a story about the Pope and he actually had something nice to say? Maybe people would be sticking with the Church rather than going down the atheism route is someone told the Pope that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

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