Blog of Parag

Blame it on women...

Vatican Says Modern Feminism Dangerous for Family

This is the oldest trick in the book. Rather than accepting the much needed change in the social structure, the men-dominated Catholic church is back to blaming those dirty, weak, wretched women for the ills of the society. It started with the 'Original sin' and is still going on. They are getting blamed for gay marriages. Isn't it surprising as in at least half of the gay marriages, women are not involved at all.

The pope makes an absurd argument that equality of a man and a woman in marriage weakens it, devalues it and then makes the society accept gay marriages. The bottomline to men is keep your woman supressed under your thumb as a slave; treat her as your property. If you start giving her lattitude, it will destroy our society.

What a disgusting message...

Dr. Francis Crick is no more

Dr. Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the 3-dimensional structure of DNA passed away on Thursday. He worked out the detailed structure of DNA while working with Dr. Watson at Cambridge University. Their discovery was published in 1953 and they were awarded a Nobel prize for that work. He was a distinguished research professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego and also served as its president earlier.

Anyone who works with nucleic acids knows his name and uses in day-to-day research conversations. The complementary pattern of nucleic acid base-pairs is described as 'Watson-Crick base-pairing'.

The world lost a great scientific mind today.

Prisons and religion

Another nugget of information from Time:

Percentage of France's population that is Muslim: 6%
Percentage of France's prison population that is Muslim: 50%

What does this mean?
- Muslims in France are more inclined to commit crimes?
- French courts convict muslims more easily than people following other religions?
- convicts get converted to Islam when they get into prison?

I think the last is true in US from my very limited knowledge about prisons gained by watching HBO's 'OZ'. Also, didn't Mike Tyson come out of prison as a muslim?

Blabberings of Mrs. Kerry

Mrs. Heinz-Kerry's tough talk with the reporters got a lot of negative coverage earlier this week. The latest issue of Time magazine has an interview with the wives of democratic presidential ticket. The following exchange is taken from that interview. I don't know if this conversation was edited to fit the word-limit.

TIME: In that first photo op you all had together, I was struck by that picture of Mrs. Kerry reaching for Jack Edwards' thumb to dislodge it from his mouth. Was that just the old reflexes of a mother kicking in?

Heinz Kerry: No, no, no. I had one thumb-sucker and two non-thumb-suckers, and I stupidly and naively forgot I was in front of a lot of cameras. And what I was trying to do was make sure he wasn't in the picture with a thumb in his mouth.

Two lines in the response given by Mrs. Heinz-Kerry seem completely contradictory to each other. She forgot that there were cameras and she did what she did to prevent the child from being photographed with a thumb in his mouth???

Hope she keeps quiet and don't blabber around too much to hurt her husband's chances in the election. That would be really sad.

Firefox 'tip of the day'

Create a new folder under bookmarks and put all the webpages that you open 'first thing every morning', in it. Under 'general' options, choose that folder as default home page. Whenever you start Firefox, it will automatically load all those pages in different tabs.

Cool, eh?

Thanks, Patrix!!

Firefox 0.9

Just upgraded to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (0.9). Just 4.7MB to download. It is amazingly easy to install and fast to use. It allows tabbed browsing with built-in pop-up blocker. There is a huge list of extensions that can be installed with it to do different kinds of things such as a gmail notifier to a built-in text editor.

I would highly recommend everyone to try out Firefox, if you haven't already. I bet that you'll not go back to Internet Explorer. Here is a link to download it.

MSFT jumbo Dividend announcement

The New York Times > Technology > Microsoft to Bestow $75 Billion Windfall on Its Shareholders

Microsoft, the world's largest software company, announced today that it will bestow on its shareholders a windfall totaling $75 billion.
...
As part of that package, the company will issue a onetime cash dividend of $3 a share at a cost of $32 billion. ... which will be distributed in December.
...
the company's decision to double its quarterly dividend from 4 cents a share to 8 cents a share.

I am glad to be a MSFT shareholder. Will have some of that $32 billion coming my way in December.

One other nice thing about this whole deal is:

Mr. Gates has already pledged that he will give all of the one-time stock dividend to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The contribution will increase the size of the foundation's assets by 11 percent to $30 billion, making it roughly three times as large as the next largest foundation in the United States.

The Gates Foundation has been doing a phenomenal job of supporting vaccination and other healthcare issues for people in developing countries. Kudos!

This in no way changes my opinion about Microsoft products. There is a difference between liking the stock of a company and the company itself for its products and practices.

Update: As Warren Buffett says, one should differentiate between the company and the stock. They are connected but different entities. Just because one likes a company, it doesn't mean it is a good stock to invest in and vice versa.

I don't like Microsoft as a consumer because I think their products are crappy. It is fine with me that others like them. Microsoft has a hold over a huge market as most everybody uses these products. That makes the company profitable, hence, a good investment and makes the shareholder part of me like it.

Update: Crisis in Sudan

The neglect of the world community continues. The UN is trying to decide if the situation in Sudan is a genocide or ethnic cleansing before deciding on a plan to send help. The US senate wasted 3 days discussing a constitutional amendment to ban Gay marriage, but nobody did anything to move the government machinery to help the Sudanese.

There is one organisation, "Doctors without borders", among many others that has setup medical and food help in Sudan since late last year. This group has a well known track reocrd of providing help in areas affected with war, famine and other disasters. They received the Nobel prize for peace a few years ago. If anyone wants to help the Sudanese, I'd suggest to make a donation to this group. Your donation will be used wisely and make an impact where it is really needed.

Darfur Genocide

News has been slowly trickling in over the last month or so about the horrendous ongoing genocide in Sudan. The UN, US and rest of the world has been busy fighting the unneccesary war in Iraq or fighting over the war in Iraq. They have completely ignored the situation in Sudan which will claim more than 300,000 lives this year even by the most conservative estimates.

Arab-dominated government backed group called 'Janjaweed' has been going on killing, raping, looting rampages for months now, through the towns where members of the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes live. Their aim is to drive out these African tribes and capture more land for Arabs. Interestingly, both parties in this conflict are muslims. So much for the religion of peace that doesn't discriminate among its believers.

After a visit by Colin Powell and Kofi Annan in recent weeks, more attention is being focused on getting a multinational peacekeeping force to provide protection and humanitarian help to the African tribes. These plans are still on paper. Hopefully, they will turn into reality soon.

Click on the link below to read two articles that appeared in New York Times and Washington Post describing the plight of West Sudanese.

Thanks for the links, Mayuresh.

Sudan's Ravines of Death

July 15, 2004
By JOHN PRENDERGAST

IN NORTHERN DARFUR, Sudan

While Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary General
Kofi Annan of the United Nations, and several members of
Congress were in government-controlled areas of Darfur a
few weeks ago, I crossed into Darfur's rebel-held
territory. This is the part of Sudan that the regime
doesn't want anyone to see, for good reason.

I expected to see a depopulated wasteland rife with
deteriorating evidence of the ethnic cleansing campaign
pursued by the government of Sudan. The regime, in response
to a rebellion begun by primarily non-Arab groups in early
2003, armed the Janjaweed militia, giving them impunity to
attack.

I did indeed see numbing evidence of such a campaign in
this Muslim region of Sudan, which is populated by Arabs
and non-Arabs. Burned villages confirmed harrowing stories
we had heard from Darfurians who were lucky enough to make
it to refugee camps in Chad. About 1.5 million people have
been left homeless, and as many as 300,000 may be dead by
year's end. In village after village that I visited, the
painstakingly accumulated wealth of the non-Arab population
of Darfur - their livestock, their homes, their grainstocks
- had been destroyed in a matter of minutes.

I was not prepared for the far more sinister scene I
encountered in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert. Bodies
of young men were lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by
the 130-degree desert heat. The story the rebels told us
seemed plausible: the dead were civilians who had been
marched up a hill and executed by the Arab-led government
before its troops abandoned the area the previous month.
The rebels assert that there were many other such scenes.

The government's deadly portfolio in Darfur already
includes the wanton burning and bombing of villages, the
raping of women and girls, and the denial of humanitarian
aid, all of which have so far claimed tens of thousands of
lives. But judging from the scene in the ravine, executions
may also be part of the assault.

My colleague Samantha Power, the author of "A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," and I traveled
together through the refugee camps and the rebel-held
villages. Refugees in Chad claimed their loved ones had
been stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed to poison the
water supply. We went looking for these wells and found
them covered in sand, in what might be construed as an
effort by the Sudanese regime to cover its tracks.

While Western dignitaries visited the camps teeming with
refugees from Darfur and elsewhere, I encountered large
numbers of displaced civilians inside the rebel-held areas
of Darfur, where no camps exist and not a drop of
international assistance has been delivered. There are
potentially hundreds of thousands of survivors who have
fallen through the cracks. Some of them say they are afraid
to travel to government-controlled camps and unable to make
it to the border. They are running out of food.

It is urgent that the United Nations, donors and
nongovernmental organizations demand access to these
desolate areas, to deliver aid to the people left behind.

And it is not enough to collect testimonies only from
refugees in the government camps, as the State Department
is beginning to do. Investigators must cross into the
rebel-held zones of Darfur to exhume evidence and conduct
inquiries there as well.

Obviously, in such a dire situation security is paramount,
both for the delivery of humanitarian aid and for the
creation of conditions to allow Darfurians to return to
their homes. For all the visibility of Darfur lately, the
United Nations and others have accepted a Sudanese plan
under which the wolf will guard the henhouse. The
international community has called on the government to
disarm the same militias it helped create and arm, and to
use the government police to patrol the same camps the
regime has been terrorizing. A mere 300 African Union
troops spread over an area the size of France are meant to
ensure the government's change of heart.

This formula guarantees that six months from now the
Janjaweed will still be in a position to kill, rape and
pillage, leaving unchallenged the ethnic cleansing campaign
that has changed the map of Darfur.

In one interview after another, Sudanese refugees and those
displaced but still within Sudan's borders told us that
they would never trust the government to disarm the
Janjaweed, that only an international force could protect
them. Sufficient numbers of elite Rwandan and Nigerian
forces, now conceived of as the bulk of the African Union
contingent, could lead such an effort if they were properly
financed, equipped and otherwise supported by Europe and
the United States.

There has been a great deal of tough talk since the visits
of Mr. Powell, Mr. Annan and others, but the United Nations
Security Council so far has failed to act decisively. It is
time to move directly against regime officials who are
responsible for the killing. Accountability for crimes
against humanity is imperative, as is the deployment of
sufficient force to ensure disarmament and arrangements to
deliver emergency aid. The sands of the Sahara should not
be allowed to swallow the evidence of what will probably go
down as one of the greatest crimes in our lifetimes.

John Prendergast, who worked on African affairs for the
Clinton administration from 1996 to 2001, is an adviser to
the International Crisis Group, an independent
conflict-prevention group.

__________________________________________________________________

'We Want to Make a Light Baby'

By Emily Wax

GENEINA, Sudan, June 29 -- At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said.

"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "

Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed.

Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

"The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing," said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations.

She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. "It's systematic," the aid worker said. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realize the extent of how widespread this is yet."

Another international aid worker, a high-ranking official, said: "These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It's hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it's true. It's systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell flew to the capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday to pressure the government to take steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. U.S. officials said Powell may threaten to seek action by the United Nations if the Sudanese government blocks aid and continues supporting the Janjaweed. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to arrive on Khartoum this week.

The crisis in Darfur is a result of long-simmering ethnic tensions between nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. In February 2003, activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, which is dominated by an Arab elite.

Riding on horseback and camel, the Janjaweed, many of them teenagers or young adults, burned villages, stole and destroyed grain supplies and animals and raped women, according to refugees and U.N. and human rights investigators. The government used helicopter gunships and aging Russian planes to bomb the area, the U.N. and human rights representatives said. The U.S. government has said it is investigating the killings of an estimated 30,000 people in Darfur and the displacement of the more than 1 million people from their tribal lands to determine whether the violence should be classified as genocide.

The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in a June 22 report that it investigated "the use of rape by both Janjaweed and Sudanese soldiers against women from the three African ethnic groups targeted in the 'ethnic cleansing' campaign in Darfur." It added, "The rapes are often accompanied by dehumanizing epithets, stressing the ethnic nature of the joint government-Janjaweed campaign. The rapists use the terms 'slaves' and 'black slaves' to refer to the women, who are mostly from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups."

Despite a stigma among tribal groups in Sudan against talking about rape, Darfur elders have been allowing and even encouraging their daughters to speak out because of the frequency of the attacks. The women consented to be named in this article.

In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, about 200 miles east of Geneina, Aisha Arzak Mohammad Adam, 22, described a rape by militiamen. "They said, 'Dog, you have sex with me,' " she said. Adam, who was receiving medical treatment at the Abu Shouk camp, said through a female interpreter that she was raped 10 days ago and has been suffering from stomach cramps and bleeding. "They said, 'The government gave me permission to rape you. This is not your land anymore, abid, go.' "

Nearby, Ramadan Adam Ali, 18, a frail woman, was being examined at the health clinic. She was pregnant from a rape she said took place four months ago. She is a member of the Fur tribe and has African features.

"The man said, 'Give me your money, slave,' " she said, starting to cry. "Then I must tell you very frankly, he raped me. He had a gun to my head. He called me dirty abid. He said I was very ugly because my skin is so dark. What will I do now?"

In Tawilah, a village southeast of El Fasher, women and children are living in a musty school building. They said it was too dangerous to leave and plant food.

Fatima Aisha Mohammad, once a schoolteacher, stood in a dank classroom describing what happened to her three weeks ago, when she left the school to collect firewood.

"Very frankly, they selected us ladies and had what they wanted with us, like you would a wife," said Mohammad, 46, who has five children. "I am humiliated. Always they said, 'You are nothing. You are abid. You are too black.' It was disgusting."

During a recent visit, government minders warned people at the school to stop talking about the rapes or face beatings or death. Minders also were seen handing out bribes to keep women from speaking to foreign visitors. But those at the school spoke anyway. A group of people handed a journalist two letters in Arabic that listed 40 names of rape victims, and wanted the list to be sent to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia, Republicans who were touring the region and pressing the government to disarm the Janjaweed.

"I was sad. I am now very angry. Now they are trying to silence us. And they can't," Mohammad said. "What will people think of all of us out here? That we did this to ourselves? People will know the truth about what is happening in Darfur."

Later that day in Tawilah's town center, Kalutum Kharm, a midwife, gathered a crowd under a tree to talk about the rapes. Everyone was concerned about the children who would be born as a result.

"What will happen? We don't know how to deal with this," Kharm lamented. "We are Muslims. Islam says to love children no matter what. The real problem is we need security. We don't trust the government. We need this raping to stop."

Aid workers and refugees in Geneina said that despite an announcement last week by Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, that the Janjaweed would be disarmed, security had not improved. Janjaweed dressed in military uniforms and clutching satellite phones roamed the markets and the fields, guns slung over their shoulders. Last week, the Janjaweed staged a jailbreak and freed 13 people, aid workers said. They also killed a watermelon salesman and his brother because they did not like their prices, family members of the men said.

A government official, speaking with a reporter, described the rapes as an inevitable part of war and dismissed accusations by human rights organizations that the attacks were ethnically based.

In Geneina, two women told their stories while sitting in front of their makeshift straw shelter. One of the women, a thin 19-year-old with dead eyes, moved forward.

"I am feeling so shy but I wanted to tell you, I was raped too that day," whispered Aisha Adam, the tears rushing out of her eyes as she covered her face with her head scarf. "They left me without my clothing by the dry riverbed. I had to walk back naked. They said, 'You slave. This is not your area. I will make an Arab baby who can have this land.' I am hurting now so much, because no one will marry me if they find out."

Sitting on mats outside the shelter, Sawela Suliman's father talked with village elders about what to do if his daughter became pregnant.

"If the color is like the mother, fine," he said as a crowd gathered to listen. "If it is like the father, then we will have problems. People will think the child is an Arab."

Then his daughter looked up.

"I will love the child," she said, as other women in the crowd agreed. "But I will always hate the father."

Then the rains came. They pounded onto the family's frail shelter, turning their roof into a soggy and dripping clump of straw. Suliman started to shiver as the weather shifted from steaming hot to a breezy rain. She will no longer leave the area of her hut to collect straw. She will stay here, hiding as if in prison, she said, and praying that she is not pregnant.

More reservation.

AP declares 5 pc quota for Muslims - Deccan Herald

I wonder what is the percentage of college admissions/jobs that is under "unreserved" category? Must be less than 50%.

Think about it: Half of the people in government jobs (includes many colleges and universities) in India are employed on the basis of their birth and not chosen because of their capabilities. No wonder we can't progress as a nation. Half the government workers are potentially unqualified to do their job. There was news about new legislation to extend reservation in Private sector. Hope that doesn't get through.

Cheney-Edwards Debates

This is just hilarious! Taken from The New York Times

PLANNING for the 2004 vice presidential debate is already under way. In an attempt to level the playing field, Senator John Edwards's image will be digitally altered to make him 40 percent less "hot looking," and Vice President Dick Cheney will be on a five-second delay. Finally, each man has submitted a wish list of questions to ask the other during the high-stakes face-off.

Click on the link below for the list of questions...

Sneak Preview! The Cheney-Edwards Debate

July 11, 2004 By ANDY BOROWITZ

PLANNING for the 2004 vice presidential debate is already under way. In an attempt to level the playing field, Senator John Edwards's image will be digitally altered to make him 40 percent less "hot looking," and Vice President Dick Cheney will be on a five-second delay. Finally, each man has submitted a wish list of questions to ask the other during the high-stakes face-off.

QUESTIONS FOR DICK CHENEY

1. Former Senator Alfonse D'Amato has suggested President Bush dump you from the ticket. What's your response to him, in two words?

2. If Halliburton and the Carlyle Group both invited you to the movies on the same night, who would you go with?

3. Over the past four years, how many days would you say you spent above ground?

4. Describe in detail your favorite high-impact aerobics routine.

5. Didn't "Fahrenheit 9/11" totally rock?

6. Exactly when did you remove Kenneth Lay from your online buddy list?

7. If there really are no plans to reinstitute the draft, why did you just request a sixth deferment?

8. Is it true that you wept during Darth Vader's death scene?

9. If anything happened to you while serving a second term, would George Bush be fit to be president?

10. Here's something I've always wondered: Does the other side of your mouth work?

QUESTIONS FOR JOHN EDWARDS

1. Who made the final out in the 1954 World Series?

2.What do you have that Dick Gephardt doesn't have, besides eyebrows?

3. Agree/disagree with the following statement: "Litigators are opportunistic leeches who are sucking the lifeblood from our nation's economy."

4. On average, how many times a day do you check yourself out in shiny surfaces?

5. Is it true that your son, Jack, said of Senator Kerry, "Daddy, please don't make me play with that weird old guy anymore"?

6. On the night Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, which pajamas were you wearing, the ones with the cowboys or the ones with the ducks?

7. What's your secret to remaining fully conscious when Senator Kerry is speaking?

8. What's Malibu Barbie really like?

9. If, as you say, there are two Americas, which one is your vacation home in?

10. Do you have any idea how late it is? This is a school night.

Whoa!

Read in Paul Krugman's NYTimes article titled "Machine at Work" on July 13, 2004.

Mr. DeLay (House majority leader) in the debate over gun control after the Columbine shootings, insisted that juvenile violence is the result of day care, birth control and the teaching of evolution.

I can understand some relation to day care. Birth control??? Maybe. A very very long shot. But, why "Teaching of evolution"??? I can't see any relation.

How teaching children that the universe was created by a God who also sent locusts and pleagues on Egyptians and destroyed people living Sodom and Gomorrah among other violent acts, is going to make them understand the value of human life????

Could someone please help Mr. DeLay take his head out of his a**???

The blazing speed of Gmail

A recent article in MIT Technology review talks about the pros and cons of Gmail. It is not just about 1GB storage space, but, a simple interface that delivers email at lightening speed, even better than an application that is locally run on the PC.

Like most of Google’s infrastructure, Google’s Gmail service is probably hosted on racks and racks of Intel-based computers running some variant of Linux. Google’s expertise is in making thousands of these machines run in concert as a single computational resource—a resource that can store thousands of terabytes and satisfy simultaneous requests from millions of users.

Gmail validates a claim that Sun has been making for nearly a decade—that it’s possible to replace a network of PCs running Windows with world-class computers offering computing services to low-cost and easily-managed desktop machines—perhaps machines so inexpensive that they don’t even have a hard disk. Sun called such computers “thin clients.”

But Gmail does work just as well as a copy of Outlook Express running on the desktop. In some way, in fact, it works better. This is big news—bigger, in fact, then most people seem to realize.

Until Gmail, practically every Web-based application was a pale imitation of that same application running on a PC. Web-based applications had the advantage that they were accessible from any computer on the Internet on professionally managed servers, that the data was backed up, and that the applications themselves were constantly updated. But compared to applications running on your local machine the web versions had fewer features and performed more slowly.

Gmail is different. For starters, it’s blindingly fast—so fast that it feels like it is running on your local computer and not in some data center. Click on a message’s subject and it instantly appears. When you are done reading a message you click “Archive”—the message is instantly stored, and you’re looking back at your inbox. (As with other Web-based mail systems, you can report spam simply by clicking “report spam.”)

Gmail gets its speed from some of the cleverest JavaScript ever written. Lots of information is stored inside your browser and redisplayed from memory; this avoids the need to constantly download pages from Google’s servers. The JavaScript can "listen" directly to your keystrokes, allowing you to drive Gmail with single-letter commands: press “y” to archive a message, “c” to compose a new message, and so on. You don’t even have to depress the Ctrl key, making Gmail even faster to use.

Gmail shows that Web applications with thin clients can have advantages over software running on your desktop. The most obvious is reliability: Gmail runs on Google’s servers, not your hard drive, and Google almost certainly does a better job than you do with routine maintenance, backups, and the like. And because everything is kept on Google’s servers, you don’t have to wait for long downloads. Google’s computers are blazingly fast: searching through the few thousand messages stored in my Gmail account is essentially instantaneous. Searching through the same amount of mail on my local computer takes ten seconds or more.

As my last note of singing Gmail’s praises, I need to point out that it seems to work equally well with practically every other browser that I’ve been able to throw at it, including Internet Explorer for Windows, Apple's Safari for MacOS 10, and Mozilla Firefox for both. This is no easy feat for an application this sophisticated in its use of JavaScript. Google has clearly gone out of its way to show that complex Web-based applications can be developed and deployed without relying on all of that Microsoft-specific junk that’s been crammed into IE.

Huh!?

Hopefully, we won't be facing this same question from Ashwini in another 4-5 years.

Shrek 2 is for perverts.

A conservative Christian group, "Traditional Values Coalition" is asking their Christian brethren to boycott "Shrek 2" because it promotes transgender agenda.

The [Traditional Values Coalition‘s] advisory says, "Parents who are thinking about taking their children to see 'Shrek 2,' may wish to consider the following: The movie features a male-to-female transgender (in transition) as an evil bartender. The character has five o'clock shadow, wears a dress and has female breasts. It is clear that he is a she-male. His voice is that of talk show host Larry King."

The bartender is only the beginning. The warning continues: "During a dance scene at the end of the movie, this transgendered man expresses sexual desire for Prince Charming, jumps on him, and both tumble to the floor." ... And then, the warning says, "In another scene in the movie, Shrek and Donkey need to be rescued from a dungeon where they are chained against the wall."

The warning continues: "The rescue is conducted by Pinocchio who is asked to lie so his nose will grow long enough for one of the smaller cartoon characters to use it as a bridge to reach Shrek and Donkey. Donkey encourages him to lie about something and suggests he lie about wearing women's underwear. When he denies wearing women's underwear, his nose begins to grow."

I called Frank York, the editorial director for the Traditional Values Coalition, and asked him: "Are you serious?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I am." He said, "What they showed in the film was supposed to be humorous, but if you look at the transgender agenda ... there are more serious things going on here." ... Anyway, he talked about the whole transsexual agenda and how it wants to take over the world and stuff like that. He clearly spends a lot of time thinking about transsexuals, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Yay!

Yahoo! News - Enron Ex-Chairman Lay Indicted for Fraud

Sweet!!! It was so satisfying to see this SOB in handcuffs. If found guilty (I hope the prosecutors don't mess up), he will go to prison for 30 years or more.

Tour de France 2004

Lance Armstrong, the 5-time champion goes in for a record. No one has ever won the Tour de France 6 times. The race started on July 4th. This photo was taken on Monday, the second day of the tour. The number on the sign reminds the riders of the distance (in kms) that they must travel to finish the race. Quite encouraging, eh?!

More Tour de France coverage...

Bloglines

I was using a RSS reader module in My!Yahoo to keep tabs on my favorite blogs. Lately, it has been flaky, at best. Last week, I discovered another way to do the same using Bloglines | Free, Web-Based News Aggregator. The nice thing about this is that it comes with a 'update notifier' that can be integrated in Mozilla Firebird.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Watched it last Friday and was impressed by it. Very well made with a lot of information and emotions packed in. It is not even 2 hours long, but, I felt exhausted when I was walking out of the theater. Although there was a lot to talk about, we couldn't talk much during our car-ride back. I guess there was much more to think about. I am sure our faces just lit up to see Ashwini on the way home. It was a joy to pick her up from her daycare after the movie.

Some parts of the movie could be considered as a one-sided story, but, it is presented very well and unless the other side is told, it is very believable. It is also very hard for families of US servicemen and women to show that what they are doing in Iraq is useless or unwanted and they are losing their lives unnecessarily. I guess Moore is counting on convincing these families to go out and vote in Novemeber.

There is a lot in the movie that shocked me. Here are some of those things that I can remember.

• The prologue to Fahrenheit 9/11 revisits Bush's rise to power in late 2000, paying particular attention to democratic leadership counseling "acceptance" of the non-election. A scene of members of the House, all of them African-American, coming forward to contest the result of the election, while Gore calmly rules their objections inadmissible because no senator, not one out of 47 or 48, would satisfy Congressional rules by signing on to them. This was something that I had never seen, heard or read about before.


• The seven minutes that W spent reading 'My pet goat' after hearing about the second crash at WTC.


• The airlift of Saudi nationals, especially, bin Laden family members, when all the air traffic around the nation was grounded. Saudi ambassador, Prince bandar, dining at the White House on 9/13. Personal and financial ties of W with the bin Laden family and other Saudi interests.


• Up close and personal tour of destroyed houses and dead Iraqi civilians.


• American soldiers horsing around with dead Iraqis caught on tape. Other soldiers describing the music that they play in the tanks while attacking. Christmas eve raid of an Iraqi house to look for a suspect with Christmas music playing in the background was very eerie.


• Images of wounded and dead American soldiers in Iraq and interviews with wounded and recovering soldiers in US, showing their stumps of arms and legs.


• The recruiting tactics of the US Army.


• Only 1 out of 530 or so members of Congress have a child serving in the Military.

There were some things that were done very tastefully. The 9/11 incident was just implied through some images that didn't show the twin towers or planes hitting them or dead bodies. Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a US soldier who died in Iraq was given full freedom to tell her story. Her reading of the last letter that she received from her son is very moving. She manages to stay calm throughout the last part of the movie but, simply breaks down when goes to visit the White House. This whole story is very emotional and presented very well.

On a lighter note, Michael Moore goes around the Capitol in a Ice-cream truck reading out the US Patriot Act to the members of Senate and House. He confronts many members of Congress to sign up their children to join Army to go and fight the war in Iraq that they supported.

Saudi ambassador to US, Prince Bandar is very close to the Bush family and is supposed to be nicknamed 'Bandar Bush'. They wouldn't have done that, only if they knew the meaning of word 'Bandar' in Hindi. You can't have two people in a family with the same name. ;)

I highly recommend it to everyone. A must-see.

It's not what but how you eat it

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: You Are How You Eat

An Italian's take on the latest silly diet craze of America: Low carb diets (Atkins, South Beach, etc.)

The big problem behind the increasing the waistline of America is that there is no effort in tackling the real reason. In stead of focusing on what you eat more attention should be paid to how you eat it.

You Are How You Eat

July 6, 2004
By GIULIANO HAZAN

VERONA, Italy - I have just greeted a new batch of students here in Verona, the gateway to the Valpolicella wine region on the picturesque foothills of the Dolomites. Their mandate is a delectable one: to master the craft and artistry of Italian cooking. What greater pleasure than to
whip up - and eat - risotto with truffles, pasta with
porcini, homemade tortelloni filled with Swiss chard and ricotta. As their teacher and culinary guide, I have had the good fortune of growing up with parents who nurtured my passion for cooking and eating well. Some of my fondest memories are of times spent in the kitchen with my mother.
I would stand with her at the stove and carefully stir the risotto - something my 5-year-old daughter now does at my side. In Italy, cooking and eating are not chores, they are one of life's gifts that nourish the soul as well as the body.

Sadly, according to fans of the low-carb mania that is sweeping the United States, the Italian gastronomic landscape is the equivalent of a minefield. Our diet of pasta, rice and an abundance of fruits and vegetables is loaded with evil carbs.

So why is it that Italians are shrugging off America's latest dietary obsession? For one thing, the mere idea of giving up pasta would be
cause for severe depression in an Italian. I experience withdrawal if I go more than four or five days without it.

And why is it that the number of Americans who are overweight or obese continues to increase at an alarming rate while here the percentage of overweight or obese people is half of what it is in the United States? After all, those trim and fit Italian men with flat bellies and women with hourglass figures are all sitting in restaurants
eating pasta, polenta and crusty bread.

Ultimately, it's not the carbohydrates - or the next
unsuspecting food group that will come under attack - that will make us overweight. It's our relationship with food and our lifestyle. In other words, how we eat is just as important - if not more so - than what we eat.

Maybe that's the ultimate cooking lesson. In general, Italians take their time when they eat. Many businesses in Italy still close in the middle of the day for three hours to allow for a leisurely lunch. Family mealtimes are sacred. Cooking for one's family becomes an act of love. Family meals allow for conversation and strengthen the family bond. The antithesis of the Italian eating style is
fast food and "eating on the run," where little attention is given to what is being consumed and the quicker one is done, the better. There is a physiological benefit of eating more slowly, too: your body senses that food has reached the stomach and shuts off the feeling of hunger
before you overeat.

Italians also tend to lead less sedentary lives. Walking is a necessity not just in cities but also in smaller towns where cars are usually banned from the center of stown. Many people live in walkups, and elevators are usually found only in high-rises.

Above all, portion sizes in Italy are undoubtedly smaller than they are in America. According to a poll sponsored by the Union of Italian Pasta Producers, over half of Italians interviewed eat pasta every day. But pasta is generally only one of several courses in a typical Italian meal. So
although per capita pasta consumption in Italy is four times as much as in the United States, Italians actually eat less pasta at a single sitting than do Americans, who tend to eat it only once or twice a week. The trend in the United States seems inevitably headed toward larger and larger portions. To suggest that more and bigger is not
better seems almost un-American.

When I was growing up in Italy and then in New York, I remember having a one-liter bottle of Coke in the refrigerator. It took my parents and me almost a week to drink it. Now, a 32-ounce Coke is a single serving.

And when my grandmother came to visit from Italy, many years ago, we went out to eat at a restaurant in New York. She was served first and was baffled by the amount of food on the large plate placed in front of her. Then she had a
realization: "Oh," she said, "am I supposed to serve everyone?"

Let's not forget that bad habits begin in childhood.
Children's menus in American restaurants seem to be made up of fried foods, hamburgers, chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese (which my 5-year-old insists is not pasta). Restaurants will say that it is because that's what youngsters like. The truth is that it is what parents are teaching their children to eat. Once at a Japanese restaurant a family sitting at the table next to ours
looked in amazement as our daughter was thoroughly enjoying her eel sushi. They said they never would have even considered offering it to their child instead of ordering off the children's menu.

In Italy there are no children's menus, but half portions are always happily provided. You may be surprised that some restaurants in the States are willing to oblige as well.

Americans' quest for the ultimate miracle diet has
engendered a dizzying array of often contradicting
messages. Whether it's salt, fat and now carbohydrates, it seems as if no food group will be left unscathed. We might be closer to finding warning labels on our food telling us that "eating may be hazardous to your health" than we
think. That would be a very sad state of affairs indeed, as nothing could be further from the truth.

Eating sensibly is really the best diet, and the better we can teach our children to appreciate good food and the pleasure we can take from eating leisurely together as a family, the less likely we will be to feel the need to try the latest diet fad. Savoring a good meal simply makes us
feel good. Food should not be feared. It should be a source of pleasure and well-being. So saute a little sliced garlic in extra virgin olive oil until it sizzles, add ripe fresh peeled tomatoes, cook 15-20 minutes, stir in some fresh basil and toss with some spaghettini. Then sit down with your family and enjoy one of life's simple pleasures
together.

Giuliano Hazan is a cooking instructor and the author, most recently, of "Every Night Italian."

Isn't it ironic?

The conservative talkshow host Rush Limbaugh, who gets so riled up on morality and preaches the nation on family values can't keep his own family together, for the THIRD time.

Cassini in orbit

After 22 years of planning and hard work, the Cassini spacecraft is in orbit around Saturn. This begins a four-year long study of Saturn, its rings and 31 known moons. Some amazing photographs from Cassini are already coming in and can be found here.

Congratulations to the International Cassini-Huygens mission!!!