h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

go to my user page. go to the bottom (ignore all the rubbish i put above) and look at the two urls. look at them both, but especially the one about ranting. OK?

um, very nice, that really has helped me a lot.
by the way i read your page so i've proved you wrong.

Just a note for PJ & Pillow; I'm away from home for a few days & have very limited PC use until I get back. I'll be in touch as soon as I get back home.

*sticks head round door*

Thought you might appreciate these.

"Welcome to Mrs Bush and my fellow astronauts."

"The future will be better tomorrow."

"Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it."

"It's clearly a budget. It's got numbers in it."

"The most important job is not to be Governer, or First Lady in my case."

"We're going to have the best educated American people in the world"

"A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."

"We have a firm commitment to nato; we're part of nato. We have a firm commitment to Europe; we're part of Europe."

"I know the human being and the fish can co-exist peacefully."

"I know how hard it is to put food on your family."

"Will the highways on the internet become more few?"

"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children."

"I understand small business growth. I was one."

"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"

"Republicans understand the need for bondage between a mother and child."

" I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future."

I've got a record, a record that is conservative and a record that is compasionated."

"It isn't pollution that is harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."

"A low voter turn out is an indication of fewer people going to the polls."

Go on guess.

I know! Dubya speaks! The voice from the unfortunately-not-burning Bush! What a pity we can't put URL's here.

:: picks himself up off the floor ::

Aha, you're here. Hot news over in my region: the execution of Mariette Bosch in Botswana. She was found guilty of the murder of Mrs. Ria Wolmarans. There seem to be doubts if she was really guilty. For very long there were appeals that she should not be hanged, but in the end all visitors were refused. She was hanged on Saturday. She was not allowed to see any of her relatives to tell them goodbye, she was not allowed to see a priest. She was told she was going to be hanged on Thursday; they hanged her on Saturday, without telling anyone, and buried her in an unmarked grave. The news that she was executed was made public on Monday.

she was a very ugly woman. im not shallow am i?
nice to see you sol.

Sounds like a big breech of basic human rights.

Forget about human rights, it's just not a very nice thing to do. Sigh... what do human rights mean anyway? Our old government used to do to stuff like throwing people into the sea from helicopters, or blowing their bodies to bits with repeated dynamite explosions to get rid of 'evidence'... We see so many people die over here it's hard to maintain any respect for life. My sis tells of how it goes at the hospital where they work. That place is hell on earth. She told of a woman who they brought in, she had a stroke, and she died after a few days because they couldn't care for her. She laughed when she told us of the woman's death. She laughed because it was all so senseless. People are better of staying and dying at home rather than alone amidst the horror of the hospital. People are dying so fast over here that funerals are limited to an hour, and we are running out of graveyards.

Sorry, I'm not trying to depress anyone over here!

the frailties of human nature

human rights matter, they may not be respected much in RSA but I think there is perhaps more respect now than a few years ago ? If the RSA is changing, (& I hope it is) it needs to have goals to aim for & the respect of basic human rights should be one of those goals.

Hot news over in Russia too, unfortunately. I don't know if you've heard of the battle between NTV/Media MOST/Gusinsky and Putin, going on for about a year now. NTV is (was) the only major TV station in Russia which is not essentially a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. It is also widely aknowledged to be the most proffessional station with the most professional staff. The problem is that the parent company owes a lot of money to the state owned company Gazprom, which also has 46 per cent of the shares. Guisinsky (the ultimate owner of 49 per cent, 19 of which are disputed, unfortunately) is under house arrest in spain waiting to see if he is going to get extradited to Russia to face fraud charges (all of that was yasterday's drama. I'm just filling in the background).

Anyway. The other day, Gazprom called a surprise shareholder meeting (said to be illegal by some)and outsted the whole of NTV's board replacing Guisinsky and other, more key people (like Kiselov, highly respected journalist and editor in chief of the channel) with gazprom flunkies and this chap called somebody Jordan (russian american with a rep for coming in and stripping companies) and essentially destroyed forever any lingering idea of press freedom in Russia. I mean, forget Moderation, this is serious.

However. Not quite the end of the story. The staff of NTV, having had an all star on air protest meeting which lasted most of Tuesday evening, are staging a sit-in at NTV's studios. They are broadcasting nothing but news (and that news is mostly about their situation) and shots of the studios themselves. I suspect they have set up this network of cameras around the studios as they are expecting to be raided and evicted by the police. The police have already shown NTV staff that they are willing to, er, manhandle them a bit. They were still there this morning though.

So far their only hope of salvation seems to be Ted Turner, who is involved with Gusinsky to buy his shares. Maybe. But it doesn't look too hopeful.

I agree, that sounds like a bad situation. Press freedom is very important. A government who cannot stand being criticised is one that deserves strong criticism.

Sky News did a big feature today on the Russian TV thang.

'Bout time too. I went searching the BBC site so I could link to it from my home page and couldn't find a thing in English. Which surprised me cos the Brit newspapers seemed to be carrying it. Course, I may have misunderstood something about the bbc's search engine... I went to a protest about it today, but normal service has been restored on the channel if you don't count the big protest thingy and the fact that every comercial break is preceeded by a statement of how the reporters are revolting.

BBC News has its own Search Engine, goto BBc News And Search from there. The World Service pages is also a good place to look for Russia story's.

try http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1265000/1265764.stm

*nods sagely*

why ?