Thursday, November 30, 2006

Ahmad Maher

is out on the town, according to the back page society coverage in the Daily Gleaner. Maher, last seen being carried out of a mosque somewhere that we don't talk about (much) under a hail of shoes, was attending a vampire wedding at the Semiramis Intercon.

Meanwhile, quote of the day honors are handily wrapped up by Nicholas Negroponte, the guy pushing that $150 laptop business. Complaining about how the focus seems to be on the computer and not the aims of the project, he said: "It's as if people spent all of their attention focussing on Columbus's boat and not on what he was doing."

Columbus set out, on the basis of a wholly fatuous idea of how the globe was constructed, to open up a trade route to a country he didn't understand let alone know how to get to. Unsurprisingly, he got lost. Along the way he mutiliated passengers to keep them in line. He opened the door to genocidical exploitation. But then his sponsors made a whole lot of money (in the medium term) so he became a hero.

Is he sure that he wants people paying less attention to the machine and more to where it's going?