Beyond Bullshit

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Edward de Bono, father of lateral thinking

NO! He didn't invent 'lateral thinking' he just came up with a catchy name for a process that has been going on since men could think. (And living off it ever since). He also came up with 'po' a word 'beyond yes and no'. Yeah right. That really caught on didn't it?
Many of his critics dismiss his books and seminars as "psychobabble" or claim De Bono simply states the obvious. But the 73-year-old shrugs this off. "When people say this I ask, 'Do you understand these concepts?', and usually the answer is no. If you can see things differently, you can make a big difference. Furthermore, the practical research and results are there. You can't deny it." Arguing with him over this would be pointless since De Bono does not believe in arguments. "They are the most crude way of getting a solution,"

...Many prominent artists from the music world, such as the Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys, have said their work has benefited from De Bono's thinking.
Well, say no more squire. Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys? Boy oh boy. Send me my six thinking hats ( 73/8 ) by return of post, my cheque is enclosed.



 

Eye eye

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I've fallen behind with my Interwebbytechstuff page updates. There's new stuff cropping up all over and I really must knuckle down and list some of it. I'll get cracking tomorrow.

In the meantime check out Jeteye. This is a glorified bookmarking service that lets you 'drag and drop any content from anywhere on the web' to form collections called 'Jetpacks'. There are similar services out there such as Squidoo, Backpack, Trailfire and others but Jeteye does seem to be the simplest and quickest way to create a collection of varied content and make it publicly available either by email or at a unique url.

Although it has been around for a while it's still not a slick as it could be. I use the Firefox Jeteye extension which makes adding content to a new jetpack fairly easy, but it can still be a bit hit and miss. When it works well it's a great little tool. The best way to explain what it does is to check out a 'Jetpack'.

Take a look at  this simple Jetpack I put together a couple of days ago. It consists of the three posts from Tom Paine at The Last Ditch on 'What is the point of blogging?'  All nicely collected in a single page which can be bookmarked or emailed. The links and images are all kept intact  and the whole thing is formatted in a very readable style.

If, like me, you are an inveterate 'clipper and snipper' of interesting bits and pieces, Jeteye could be just the thing to help you scrapbook them into themes or categories. 

I have to say though that the new service I'm really looking forward to trying is Plum, which should come on stream in a few weeks. It looks very slick and it has been extensively beta tested so it should hit the ground running. I think it's the one to watch.
You can pre-signup now.






And so it goes on and on...

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Diana inquest coroner steps down
Baroness Butler-Sloss is to step down in June as coroner for the inquests into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, it has been announced. Lady Butler-Sloss said she lacked the experience required to deal with an inquest with a jury. Lord Justice Scott Baker will take over as coroner for the inquests, which were expected to take place in October.
When will this bloody saga end? A foolish, spoilt, royal slapper dies in a car crash with her jet-set 'boyfriend' and still, ten years later,  we can't get the bloody story off the front pages. Sheesh!
I'm beginning to think we would all have been better off if she'd survived.


Face down

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Chicken Yoghurt - D’you wanna be in my gang?
Are our egos so damaged in the swirling mass of eschatological turds that is modern life that we fluff them with online lists of ‘friends’? Christ, at least with MySpace you run the risk of stumbling over a decent tune or two. Facebook, however and unless I’m missing something pretty fundamental, is culturally devoid of such rare treats. It merely serves the same purpose as a pen and paper and the nagging suspicion that you’re not as popular as you think or would like to be. Dammit, you’re going to make a list to prove it ain’t so. It’s a pissing contest against yourself. Grow up.
I'm too old to get all this stuff anyway. I don't want any more friends, thank you very much, not that some stranger who decides they 'like' you and want to be on your list constitutes a friend. Ring them at three in the morning and tell them you've run out of petrol on the A3 and see what they say. If you do want to extend your social circle and become Mr. Popular however,  I suggest you buy an 'enry of Charlie and turn up at the next available social gathering with your bag and some McDonald's straws. You'll be fighting them off.




Slow feeds and telegenic bloggers (not)

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Work on new servers at Blinklist and a slowed down Feeddigest are both conspiring to drag down loading times here this evening.  I can't add new links until the new BL servers are onstream so I'll go and read a book or maybe I'll watch some bloggers at 18 Doughty Street...

Mmmm, I've just logged on to 18DS and it's not a pretty sight. Why do bloggers ever agree to appear in front of the camera? No good can possibly come of it.

Last night I watched a re-run of an 18DS blog programme which  featured a 'prominent blogger' .  He sometimes likes to come over as aggressive and macho and even I found myself on the receiving end of some vaguely threatening remarks from him once in a blog comment thread, but there he was sitting on the sofa at 18 Doughty Street, a short, puny, overactive, overgrown schoolboy with a bad haircut. Ha! All I'd have to do to shut him up is sit on him. Complete collapse of credibility.

So, to all you bloggers out there I say this - if you look like a twat/wimp/tosser/geek/sad-loser, take my advice - stay off the telly!

The camera is unforgiving.



Oh, and it's also incredibly boring. A selection of class A drugs would improve the debates no end. But I've given up drugs so that's that.

 




Viva la France!

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France opts for left-right battle

Well fancy that!

France, teetering on the edge of collapse and about to be engulfed by throat-slitting Islamists according to some 'pundits', ends up having an old fashioned left/right fight. Bogeyman Le Pen gets sidelined and, at 78 years of age, I suspect the next time we hear about him in the British press will be when he kicks the bucket.

And while smug political commentators delighted in telling us what a parlous state French politics was in, 84%, yes 84%, of the electorate voted, a figure we haven't seen in the UK  since the 1950 General Election fought between Atlee and Churchill. I can't help feeling much of the coverage on the French election has been a kind of displacement activity by political commentators to get their minds off the complete bag o'shite that constitutes British politics in 2007.

Viva la France!


A Mother's Journey

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2007 Pulitzer Prizes -FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY  Renée C. Byer

Absolutely heatbreaking story featured by the Sacramento Bee (reg. req. but worth the effort to read and view this story in full). Via A Welsh View, who has more direct links to images, and Robert Scoble  who dares us not to cry...I lost.
Reporter Cynthia Hubert and photographer Renée C. Byer met Cyndie French in May 2005, about six months after her son Derek Madsen was diagnosed with cancer. French invited the journalists to observe all aspects of the boy's care and to document its impact on him and his family. For the next year, Hubert and Byer spent countless hours with Derek and his friends and relatives at home, on family outings and during doctor visits, blood transfusions, surgeries and other treatments. All of the scenes in this story were witnessed by Hubert and Byer.


Cyndie holds Derek on May 8. He is on medication that hinders his speech and keeps him awake at night. Except for a few minutes while hospice nurses are with him, Cyndie spends nearly every moment of the day at his side.."I was exhausted beyond belief but I had to do this. He would call my name and always expects me to be there," Cyndie said.




Derek was diagnosed on Thanksgiving Day 2004 with neuroblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of childhood cancer. He died, peacefully, on May 11, 2006. 

DEREK MADSEN
November 16th 1994 - May 11th 2006

Visit Dereks-Wish.com


'A highly evolved species of weirdo'

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James Wolcott on right wing blogger Lawrence Auster:
Hitherto I had been innocent of Auster's prolific, sententious output, his self-inflated stature as a windy oracle bearing witness to the long swan dive of the West: "I don't keep saying that Britain is dead because I want to make British people and others despair of themselves and the future; I say it because (a) it is something I'm seeing; and (b) if the British are dead, the only hope for them is that they realize that they are dead and turn again toward life." I rather doubt that the mood and plight of the British people are so frail and contingent upon the approval of obscure bloggers like Auster that his words have the power to plunge them into deeper despair or awaken them from their waxy deathsleep. His blog, what little of it I could stand, has the sonority of someone whose loquacity has so dulled his other faculties that he has ascended into a higher realm of dimwit.
I love Wolcott!