Turkey-Armenia-France

Turkey, Armenia, France And The Nobelist Novelist - A plastic.com thread

Mixed feelings of pride and anger in Turkey, when on the same day that acclaimed but controversial Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel prize for literature, France passed legislation making it a crime to deny the Armeniangenocide. Between 1915 and 1920 the waning Ottoman empire executed a campaign of deportation against the Armenian people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands to over one million Armenians. Official Turkish sources have always claimed that the deaths among the Armenians were not a result of a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination, but of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I.

Apparently, even Pamuk thinks that the French went a bit too far with their legislation criminalizing denying the Armenian genocide i.e. the French law is as reprehensible as the Turkish law he was charged with violating.

This IHT op-ed also basically says the same.. France in denial.

Legislating to make denying the Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks illegal deserves the scorn of France's greatest exponent of French speech - Voltaire (real name: François-Marie Arouet!!) must be turning in his grave!

Note: Actually, France is one of the few countries where thanks to the Gayssot Act (Loi Gayssot), voted for on July 13, 1990, it is an offense in France to question the existence of the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46


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Speaking of IHT, while seeing the 1959 French movie Á bout de souffle or Breathless - considered by many to be the first movie in the French New Wave - by Jean-Luc Godard, the heroine was selling the New York Herald Tribune along the Champs-Élysées ... so, I looked NYHT up on wiki and read that

Following the collapse of the World Journal Tribune, The New York Times and the Washington Post became joint owners with Whitney of the Herald Tribune's European dition, the International Herald Tribune, which is still published.

Aah... now I understand why NYT articles appear in IHT everyday..often the title is changed but the article is the same.

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Rocky

First there is Rocky Singh...owns an airline company in Slovakia now and wants to give you a Punjabi experiene. read about him at this post by Amit Varma.

And then there is Rocky Patel... I read about him in some Indian zine last week.

Seems he came to the US when he was 13.. became a lawyer in Hollywood.. after long days, went to a cigar club to unwind (where he met ppl like Mel Gibson and other celebrities)... then got into cigar business ...after it took off left his cigar business and moved to Florida, where he now lives the life of a multi-millionare, whose cigars are quite famous (though he is not a Cuban or a Honduran or Guatemalan, by sheer persistence and hard work he broke into the industry, the article said).

He even has a cigar named after himself... so, next time u want a smoke....ask for a Rocky Patel

So, now onwards, the next time anyone says Rocky...I'll be reminded of Rocky Singh and Rocky Patel and not of Sanjubaba (somehow never thought of Stallone but then I am not a fan of Sly's movies or his mumbling & in fact, have not seen the Rocky series - wtf, a 6th one - I didn't know they even went beyond 3!) :)

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Speaking of Sanjubaba, saw the Korean movie, OldBoy (won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004) yesterday - it was remade in India with Sanjay Dutt as Zinda.
:)

GoogleTube - I

1. didnt realize one of the 3 owners of youtube is still a grad student... Jawed Karim. After being bought out by Google for 1.65 billion dollars (yes..thats billion!!), all 3 youngbies (in their 20s) are multi-millionares ofcourse...

Apparently, Jawed was also part of the original Paypal team and made $$$$ when eBay bought them. Has a penchant for making the right choices, this kid..huh? :)

And speaking of Ebay, apparently, airline terror suspects used eBay for operation's funding

2. Amit Varma asks You Tube or Utube? Never ask, Whats in a name?

3. People everywhere are wondering what is Youtube's future or lackthereof (latter from before Google bought it!). And here is fun-look at what the future holds for Youtube ...

Also read: Gauging Google's Future: Part 3

4. Google YouTube: Holding content owners hostage?

Google YouTube kingdom: Benevolent or despotic?

Google: Should we cheer it or fear it?

5. Google continues to innovate..
Google Docs & Spreadsheets was launched earlier this week..

Google: $225 billion ecommerce play

Google Earth aid for Maha farmers

Google Code Search is now live - a source code search engine!!

They also have a new beta version of Google Groups

And check out the directory of Google Gadgets for your webpage

Google tech talks are now availableGoogle Launches Classroom Project

Talented people in short supply: Google
There may be more than a billion people in India, but even an Internet superstar like Google Inc has trouble recruiting talented locals in its South Asian operations, a board member said here.

More on Google here...

And finally... my wife always says, given how much I use their products and rave about them, that I should have been working for Google. Well.. apparently,we all work for Google- because apparently “Every time you run a Google search, you make its brain more powerful"

6. And what about the others?

As Google whips out its fat wallet to buy the video site YouTube, it is making Yahoo look even more out of step with the fast-changing Internet advertising market.

Yahoo vs. Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube

Neat applet from Yahoo! - A Digital Time Capsule
Info about this: After 30 days, time capsule content will be saved onto a digital archive and sealed, to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. on the company's 25th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of this content will be presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives in Washington, DC to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.

7. Should make for interesting reading...
All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0

8. Why Microsoft’s future OS could be open source

9. And speaking of MS, never know where you'll run into the omnipresent Blue Screen of Death...

10. And with all these links about technology...have to link to this news story about global communication via a message in a bottle.. :)

Girl's message in a bottle reaches from Norway to NZ in 47 days..

More power to their tribe - 1

Dr. Chavan taught me Physical Chemistry for a semester in 2nd year of engineering at UDCT (now UICT).... he was involved, as I remember it, in some education efforts for the under-previleged in the shanties of Mumbai and left UDCT to persue this full-time in 1989... I had all but forgotten about him until I got an email on an alum newgroup I recently joined...

Madhav Chavan, is co-founder Director of Pratham ( www.pratham.org ), an organization that has been working for universalization of elementary education in India since 1994. Read more about his views on how technology can transform society...

He has also blogged here

More power to his tribe!

News Roundup

Bush swaggered a few years ago - 'Bring it on'... and so here we are - at the helm of a future fraught with the possibility of a dangerous nuclear war with North Korea! For now, the war of words continues...

Iraq, Iran and the Folly of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy

The two faces of Rumsfeld
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change

After 9-11 ..Gore Vidal 5 years later
America's warrior nation - The legacy of 9/11

Jon Stewart

Daily Show host Jon Stewart dispelled rumors of a Presidential run as "a real sign of how sad people are" with the state of affairs in the country. Nothing says 'I am ashamed of you my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08.

Lets ban thinking - 1

The Harrisonburg High School was forced to take down its display of banned books coommemorating banned books week because the school superintendent thought such a display would encourage students to read the books just because they were banned!

In the Caney Creek school district, Alton Verm, the father of a sophomore was not too happy about having his daughter read "Fahrenheit 451." Looking through the book, he found several parts of its content objectionable. "...Discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain. He said the book's material goes against their religions beliefs. "It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451.

Like the Nameless Cynic wrote at the thread...

For those of you not up on your Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 is about a world where nobody reads books, and the role of firemen is not to put fires out, but to burn literature. The title refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire. I think that one of the "dirty words" that Alton Vern objected to was "irony."

- Above examples via this thread at plastic.com