This Week In Short

My endlessly amusing (or, in fact, often incredibly depressing) look at the world around us for the first week in October brings me to the following:

1) Yet another observation that the more titles like "people", "democratic" and "republic" you have in your nation's name, the more likely it is that you have a crazy dictatorship on your hands. Case in point: Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea as the rest of us know it. Am currently reading the Human Rights Commission (now disbanded due to complete inefficacy, particularly on Darfur and Uzbekistan) report from 2001. Report from DPROK only a mere fourteen years late. There is a part of the criminal code which allows for punishment of offences not included in the criminal code - GENIUS!

I AM NOW GOING TO BE CHEERY!

2) Although this is very scary indeed - how much information they have about us... it's crazy.

3) Russians are ingenious.

4) The joke in popbitch today made my day. It's the Bono one, by the way, which hasn't been updated, as of time of publishing.

5) I still feel a sense of pride that my alma mater is a rather good place... but I don't get the American idea that Oxford is better than Cambridge, given that every bloody survey of this thing and rankings for the last umpteen years has stated, rather clearly, that the light side beats the dark side. But the US folks are convinced. Wrong, but convinced.

6) Buy a TOTALLY AWESOME T-shirt!