[Quote:]

Vanavond het suffe Groot Dictee der Nederlandse Taal doen? Met de familie op de bank ingewikkelde zinnetjes met onbegrijpelijke woorden opschrijven en er dan de volgende dag achter komen dat je dubbel zo veel fouten hebt gemaakt als de rest van je vrienden? Lekker niet doen!

Wij hebben speciaal voor jou het Klein Dictee der Nederlandsche Straattaal geschreven. En daar kan die man van Jiskefet die het grote dictee heeft geschreven echt niet tegenop. Onze winter tori is vet lauw, je weet toch!

Niemand minder dan de echte Philip Freriks, die man van het nosjournaal, die ook het grote dictee voorleest, leest ook ons dictee voor. En dat ging hem eigenlijk verrassend goed af. With a litte help from his friends natuurlijk. De FUNX-programmamakers Yahia en Melvin hebben Philip even duidelijk uitgelegd hoe die straattaal gedropt moet worden.

Dus pak pen en papier en klik hier voor Het Dictee. En vergeet niet mee te schrijven!

via

The New Swiss banknotes may very well end up with the HIV virus..

[Quote:]

Oh television. I don’t like what you do to me and I don’t know what you are. I see you as a guest in my house but what a bad guest . . . Always shouting, trying to sell me things and carrying on like a crackhead. “Buy this toaster. Buy this car! Buy this soda. You’re a loser if you don’t BUY BUY BUY!!”

And I’m not much of a host. I sit in front of you, shouting right back, calling you names, saying I want to throw you through the window.

So you show me some corpses. Every night at six then again at eleven. Is that a threat?

I have to be honest with you, Television. You scare me. A lot.

But I love those flickering lights. I’d watch those even if nothing was on. And now I can.

The people at UP TO YOU have finally done something to stop your pollution of my head. I can now have my cake and it too. “The Groovetube is simply a translucent plastic box that suction cups to the screen of your television. It has a grid of dividers inside it that diffuses the colors from your television producing an amazing, colorful abstraction of anything you watch.”

I look forward to many long hours of watching you now. If this doesn’t bring the romance back, I really don’t know what will.

[Quote:]

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.

Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.” Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is — and is not.

In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.

“It’s a major finding in a very sensitive area,” said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. “Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep.”

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

Music shop boss Steve Kowalski has been told he will have to pay to play if his customers want to try out his instruments before they buy.
And that, he says, is a fiddle.
The Performing Rights Society claims he needs a licence if he, or any of his punters, want to “have a go” on anything from a harmonica to a harpsichord or castanets to clarinets.

And officers have told him that if he doesn’t stump up cash to the tune of £114 he will have to face the music.

[..]

Steve, who took over the 78-year-old established business a year ago, received a call out of the blue from PRS who asked if he or his customers tried out musical instruments.

He said: “I thought, what a daft question, of course we do.”

When he said they did, they told him that if anyone played a riff – an identifiable piece of music – he was in breach of copyright and was breaking the law.

This is officially the dumbest thing on Intellectual Property I’ve heard this year, but there’s still a good 12 days to go, so you never know.

Write your own George W. Bush speech.

(oddly enough I was unable to recreate this one).

Don’t worry about this cover, I’m pretty sure magazines aren’t lying to us.

via

This should be easy:

[1] _________ underwent a brutal and chilling transformation. Behind a facade of legality, the [2] _________ dismantled the established protections of law. … [T]hey used their police state and the mass media to dissolve traditional allegiances. Replacing most forms of organized social life with new, [3] _________ -themed activities, they left citizens with no place to share heretical thoughts. The result was a nightmare version of a normal modern society, with popular entertainment manipulating public enthusiasms and hatreds, and the government intruding into intimate matters of the mind and body while demanding an end to the coddling of the weak.

It is surprisingly hard to say just what [4] _________ was, other than a vague if radical ideology. [5] _________, a leader bored by administrative detail, left the way open for endless squabbles among his fanatical and often corrupt subordinates.

OK, I’ll make it really easy: From a review in the Sunday Times.

From President Bush’s speech this evening:

Three days ago, in large numbers, Iraqis went to the polls to choose their own leaders – a landmark day in the history of liberty. In coming weeks, the ballots will be counted … a new government formed … and a people who suffered in tyranny for so long will become full members of the free world.

[..]

Second, we are helping the Iraqi government establish the institutions of a unified and lasting democracy, in which all of Iraq’s peoples are included and represented.

From the Guardian today:

Suspected polling violations on voting day last week far exceeded the number in Iraq’s first election in January, local and international monitors said yesterday.
On the deadline for filing complaints, the number of alleged violations which could swing results in the 275-seat parliament was “well into double figures”, an accredited international election observer, who wished to remain anonymous, said.

[..]

Secular Arab parties have accused the Shia religious bloc, which dominates the current government, of intimidating voters in Baghdad and many southern cities.
At the Sharqia high school in central Baghdad, which was used as a polling station, a senior election official was said to have asked voters if they were going to vote for 555. Unless they said yes, they were not given ballot papers.

A source close to Mr Allawi’s campaign said that in one Baghdad polling station “around 600 men, some with walkie-talkies and purple ink on their fingers showing they had already voted, forced their way in. When the manager tried to stop them asking for ballot papers, they threatened to put him in a car boot and drive him away … He let them in.”

Clearly an “American-style” democracy!

[Quote:]

A European Court has said “tanks but no tanks” to a group of Microsoft supporters seeking to extoll the virtues of Redmond in its ongoing anti-trust case with the European Union.

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg was unmoved by the pleas from the International Intellectual Property Institute, the Institute for Policy Innovation and the Progress & Freedom Foundation. In fact, the court demeaned the groups, saying that “they are in reality mere ‘think tanks’ whose objects include, in particular, the promotion of strong intellectual property rights in the information technology field”. We’ll not have paltry think-tanks in our court, thank you very much.