The Great Stall of China

LOL! I didn’t coin that. Saw it in one of the news reports about the massive traffic jam in northern China. Various reports say it is going on 10 days now and is 100 km long, almost reaching the outskirts of Beijing from northern China. The epic traffic jam of all time, for now at least. Things are only likely to get worse in China, although I would think that the Chinese government would take some draconian steps to prevent it from happening again. They aren’t bothered by individual freedoms or human rights when it comes to taking action so whatever is expeditious will be done. Will be interesting to see what that is.

Inception maybe worth a look for its lucid dreaming angle

I don’t watch movies very often because I am almost always disappointed with them. The Hollywood blockbusters are nearly always trash. I guess I am just too far removed from the mass mentality. Avatar? Jeez, a big production cartoon with a tired old story line. Give me back the one hour plus I wasted on that one (I didn’t make it to the end).

I’ve seen a bunch of rave reviews of the movie “Inception”. Is this one going to be worth the 100 baht ($3) I pay for a DVD to see it? More importantly will it be worth two hours of time I could be doing something more useful and interesting. I see that the subject of lucid dreaming is part of the story. That might be interesting. I have read a little about that and compared some of my own dream experiences with what other people describe as lucid dreams. I have had those but I never much thought about it. Apparently you can induce lucid dreams with a little training and practice.

So I might give “Inception” a shot just for the look at the lucid dreaming aspect.

News fail that takes some reading

I am sort of a fan of ProbablyBadNews.com. I check it regularly for some funny examples of news reporting mistakes and odd juxtaposition of ads and headlines. Their tag line is “News fails, because journalism isn’t dying fast enough.” Most of the news fails don’t require a lot of reading or thinking, often just a funny headline and photo combination. I was thinking about this news fail I read today but it doesn’t really fit on PBN, it’s a little more subtle than most of their posts.

The story I saw was from AP about the two New Jersey men who were arrested as they were about to board a plain to (allegedly) go overseas to learn how to kill Americans. Great headline material, eh? The interesting part was this sentence:

Somalia, an impoverished East African nation of about 10 million people, has not had a functioning government for more than a decade, although the U.S. is backing a transitional government there.

Followed in the next paragraph by this sentence:

Somalia has welcomed the arrest of two New Jersey men who allegedly planned to join al-Shabab.

So an American-backed puppet government came out in support of some action by American authorities. Now that is news folks.

WordPress.com extremely slow

Is it only me? Or is WordPress.com extremely slow for everybody? All the time. When I click on the link to write a new post it takes no less than 2 to 3 minutes to finally get the Write Post screen. It has always been like that for me. It isn’t my connection, which is broadband. And it isn’t the WordPress software because I use WordPress installed on my own server for some of the blogs in my vast empire of blogs and I never see these kind of delays. It is only when trying to do something with this blog, my little doodle blog for some of the stuff that doesn’t belong in my super cutting edge and top secret blogs.

Initial post

Some previous posts in my more narrowly focused blogs may be re-posted here in the future. This blog will be wider ranging in scope; I’ll post on a range of topics I find interesting.