The news that 7DAYS readers have been waiting for: Etisalat have finally
decided to unblock a number of hugely popular web sites that, over the last few months have not been accessible to the public.
[...]
the public is once again free to enjoy sites such as Myspace.com, Youtube.com, Piczo.com, Metacafe.com and Hi5.com, among many others.
“Let’s say you write this awesome entry - you research, you dissect your sources, you analyze, and you write a most stellar entry that you feel really shows your abilities as a writer. You check your email obsessively for the next couple of days waiting, waiting for the comments that are bound to flood your inbox. Only nothing comes, just some junk mail from the newsletter you signed up in class last month and a service promising to boost your penis size.
The next day you write an entry about how your dog Lucky just knocked over your aloe plant, spilling dirt and aloe babies all over your kitchen floor and about how you proceeded to slip on the dirt, thus whacking your head on the edge of the kitchen table and how you now have a lump the size of Nova Scotia on the back of your head and about how you think you are going to drop out of college to become a squirrel herder because you are pretty sure your fall in the kitchen was a “sign.” And, lo and behold, twenty people leave you a comment in the next five minutes.
What the heck?”
...there’s Scientology’s booklet, ‘The Way to Happiness’, which gives guidelines to better living such as ‘be competent’ and ‘don’t do anything illegal’. Whereas the bible makes do with ten commandments, the book runs to 21. But the leaflet, according to Miscavige, can work miracles. After being given a copy, no inmates in an Israeli prison were ever readmitted. A US cop handed out copies to known troublemakers and crime dropped 38 per cent.
(...)
Using a little science of my own, it’s time to turn to Google. Scientology was
founded by pulp fiction writer L Ron Hubbard.Hubbard is either a great man
who crossed the globe in search of answers, or a complete fraud, depending on
who you believe. His son, L Ron Hubbard Jr, claimed on TV in 1983 that “99 per
cent of what my father ever wrote or said about himself is totally untrue.” What
is true is that Reader’s Digest quoted Hubbard as saying “writing for a penny a
word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best
way would be to start his own religion.”
Several other people say Hubbard made similar statements to them. Following Scientology is certainly not cheap. To progress to the top level, study fees have been estimated at as much as $500,000. While it’s billed as a religious non-profit organisation, the Washington Post reported in 1994 that many US lawmakers considered it an unscrupulous commercial organisation. The German government considers it a commercial business.
But what is it? Scientology was originally a self-help philosophy, but Hubbard then began to add religious aspects. It aims to help humans achieve awareness of their spiritual existance, and ultimately regain ‘total freedom’. It’s made up of a series of levels – Hubbard believed rehabilitation takes place on a step by step basis. Believers follow the ‘Bridge to Total Freedom’, with each step allowing a little more freedom, and a little more knowledge about Scientology.
The basic beliefs are that people have an immortal soul, which will be reincarnated after the body dies, and it’s possible to retain emotional problems from previous lives. The other main belief is that psychiatry and psychology are abusive, which we’ll come to in a moment. The main practice of Scientology is known as auditing. Each new believer sits down with a trained ‘auditor’ and is asked questions about their life while a machine measures electrical impulses. The idea is that this helps a person unburden themselves of past mistakes and traumas. Scientologists have claimed benefits from auditing including improved IQ, enhanced memory and alleviated dyslexia and attention deficit problems.
According to Hubbard, an alien called Xenu ruled a Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago. Faced with overcrowding on the 76 planets he ruled, and a plot to overthrow him, the evil Xenu used psychiatrists to drug billions of people and load them onto transports, which explains Scientology’s dislike of psychology. The people were taken to earth, stacked around volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs.
The souls of these people were then rounded up and forced to watch a kind of propaganda video for more than a month. Given that the souls are reincarnated, many psychological problems today apparently result from this misleading information. The media, including 7DAYS, is routinely accused by Scientologists of being inaccurate, or even malicious, when it comes to the group.
But taking what’s been written about Tom Cruise’s bizarre behaviour as an example, it’s all pretty much true. Katie Holmes gave birth in silence because Hubbard believed that words heard at birth could later trigger trauma in an adult. Cruise’s rant against psychiatry on the ‘Today Show’ also stems from Hubbard’s beliefs. Far from changing my mind, an afternoon researching Scientology has made me think it’s weirder than ever. Or is that Xenu’s brainwashing talking?
A seraph (Hebrew שׂרף, plural שׂרפים Seraphim) is one of a class of celestial beings mentioned once in the Old Testament (Tanakh), in Isaiah. Later Jewish imagery perceived them as having human form, and in that way they passed into the ranks of Christian angels.
Certain parallels can be drawn between William Shakespeare's plays, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and "Romeo and Juliet". These parallels concern themes and prototypical Shakespearian character types. Both plays have a distinct pair of ‘lovers', Hermia and Lysander, and Romeo and Juliet, respectively. Both plays could have also easily been tragedy or comedy with a few simple changes. A tragic play is a play in which one or more characters is has a moral flaw that leads to his/her downfall. A comedic play has at least one humorous character, and a successful or happy ending. Comparing these two plays is useful to find how Shakespeare uses similar character types in a variety of plays, and the versatility of the themes which he uses.
Prohibited love, romance, controlling families, both plays have it all. With a few simple modifications, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" could have been a tragedy, and "Romeo and Juliet" could have been a comedy. Shakespeare however, uses many of the same character types, young, prudent, rebellous lovers, and controling family members, in both comedies and tragedies. The end results are character molds, along with theme molds that can be easily translated into almost any plot, in any play.
So why do people think that tragedies are stronger? If you were a movie director and had a story of a certain plot, would you adjust it to make it comedic or tragic? And why?
In 2002, London-based IT consultant Matt "Blackbelt" Jones came up with an idea for Wi-Fi users to help each other get online. Jones proposed marking sidewalks, walls, or telephone poles where networks could be found with a set of chalk-mark symbols based on the old sign language that hobos used to alert one another to food, shelter, or potential trouble during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Jones dubbed this practice "warchalking," a pun on "wardialing," introduced in the 1983 movie Wargames, in which a young hacker has his computer automatically dial all the phone numbers in the area looking for other computers. Geeks termed the practice "wardialing." Add that familiar erasable writing technology and you wind up with "warchalking." Here are the universally accepted trio of symbols for warchalking:
Apparently, the most common used symbol is the one to the left. It reminds me of the Chanel logo with the opposing brackets. The ones to the right mean or symbolize closed networks. That means that they're closed access and no one knows how to access them. The one with the W in the middle means that you need a WEP or WPA key.
You'll find a few marks here and there in the big cosmopolitan cities such as London or New York, but most of them were made by the business owners themselves in order to attract passers-by by offering free internet access.
It's funny how some people would go to extreme extents for the sake of free internet access. A friend of mine told me that her driver would drive to Beach Center where there's an internet place for kids, which has a lot of games in there. The place is filled with 10-year-olds who would get bored after using the computer for 10 minutes that they'd just leave it. He'd go there and wait for a kid to get bored so that he could sit after the kid who left the computer and use the internet for free for almost an hour.
That's smart, funny too.
I wonder what sort of new trend will come along after the wireless craze fades out.
For more information on chalking visit this link. Read the story that BBC did on warchalking here.
Breaking the Chains:
"The days of the digital watch are numbered."
Tom Stoppard
