Madness Beckons

Jesus smoked and drank. At least according to this picture found in and Indian textbook.

The controversial picture of Jesus was discovered in cursive writing exercise books published by Skyline Publications of New Delhi and being used at a private school in the Meghalaya state capital, Shillong.

State Education Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh said legal action against the publishers was being contemplated. And although private schools were not obliged to use textbooks prescribed by the Meghalaya Board of Secondary Education, his government has seized all the copies of the textbook from schools and bookshops.

In related news:
A Malaysian newspaper is facing calls to shut down after it published the image of Jesus holding a cigarette and a can of beer.

The Malaysian Muslim-led government has already shut down two publications for carrying a Danish author’s controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

By now everybody has heard about Google’s latest lack of privacy fiasco with their new MySpace wanna be, Buzz.

Google seems to have forgotten to mention that if you have a gmail account Buzz is automatically active and if you want to turn it off –oh, I don’t know, maybe to keep it from sharing your most popular contacts with the entire effin’ world– you need to navigate to the bottom of your gmail email page and look in the sub-microscopic print for a link that say “turn off Buzz.”

Google says if you don’t want the world to see your contacts you need to set your profile to private.

This is cool, except that you need to create a Buzz profile to do this, and all your contacts will still be exposed to anyone who you let see your profile.

BTW: You do not need a Buzz profile for the world to see your contacts. All you need to do is use something like reader to expose them.

Google officially dropped the “Don’t be evil” motto sometime around March of last year. —Hmmm, I wonder why?

According to an article in the RiaNovosti: A 73 year old Russian farmer planted three tripwire mines, that were armed with gunpowder and filled with salt, around his field because he was having a problem with potato thieves.

The farmer, Alexander Skopintsev, was arrested after a neighbor injured his lip when he walked down the path that separated his field from Mr. Skopintsev’s and tripped one of the devices.

Mr. Skopintsev was convicted for the unlawful construction and storage of weapons and received a two-and-a-half year suspended sentence.

Karaoke is a major form of entertainment in some neighborhoods in the Philippines. In fact it’s fans are so enthusiastic that fights and stabbings over the way a song is rendered are fairly common.

NYT: By NORIMITSU ONISHI Published: February 6, 2010 – The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Here in the states, a Seattle woman punched a man because she didn’t like the way he sang “Yellow.”

A friend of mine and I used to listen the Karaoke singers at a local bar and some of them were so bad that we would make fun of them but it was hardly worth getting in a fight over. –In the P.I.s on the other hand, an off duty policeman pulled his revolver when the people at the next table laughed at one of the singers. -I guess the cop was a big fan.

“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.

The lessons to be learned from this: Don’t hog the stage, if you can’t sing stay the hell away from the mic, and if you travel to the Philippines -a country with over a million illegal guns and a reputation for violence- Do Not sing Sinatra.

There are as many as 10,000 people protesting in Lome, Togo over the suspension of the Togolese football team.

The BBC online said in this article that the Confederation of African Football had suspended Togo for the next two tournaments.

The reason for the ban was Togo’s sudden withdrawal from the tournament in Angola.

The reason for the withdrawal was an attack on Togo’s team bus in January that killed two officials.

The reason for the suspension was what the CAF called the interference by the Togolese government. The CAF insisted that the team should not have been allowed to withdraw because they claim some of the players still wanted to play.

Welcome to Africa, where a little thing like an attack on the team bus shouldn’t interfere with anything as important as football