Komodo Update

The Komodo dragon turns out to be one of the most venomous reptiles on Earth.

As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

The Tuna of Wrath

A schoolgirl, who apparently has never had a proper job, decides to put Sinclair Lewis to shame and heads off to a tuna cannery in Indonesia where she discovers that it's, like, really hard work, man, and it's, you know, hot in there and it smells and everything and they even make you clip your nails. What's with that, yah?

And working in a rice paddy? That's, like, just no fun at all. All that standing in water and bending over? Yuk!

Naturally, this is all justified by some extremely public and easy hand-wringing about the low wages the workers are paid (the workers get £3 a day, which is pretty close to, if not above the country's per capita income), though no context as to what the alternative for them is or what impact this work has on their prosperity one way or the other . That's, surprise, too much like hard work.

As a man who spent most of his youth swinging a pick in the desert sun when he wasn't freezing on deck in the North Sea for sub-minimum wages and has spent enough time in the Third World to know the difference between exploitation and a hand up, all I can say is, Poor diddums and let's hope your fashion studies aren't too arduous.

One Of Those Days

Okay, we're ashore, we're safe, the sharks didn't get us and... Oh, crap.

Elementary

New York Times headline:

The Giant Rat of Sumatra, Alive and Well

Doctor Watson was unavailable for comment.

Reality Check

The Jihadists are just a load of cranks egged on by desperation and the evils of Western foreign policy and they have no real ambitions of their own.

Right. And I'm the Queen of the May.

Update: When I came across this video I thought it was a slightly hysterical anti-Jihadist compilation video of the sort I take with a large grain of salt.

Then I discovered that it's an advert for the Khilafah Conference International 2007 in Indonesia.

These people are not joking. It's like switching on one of the first televisions and discovering a live feed from the Nuremberg rally.