Fun Stuff

The Guardian's Andrew Sparrow flags a very strange excerpt from the Financial Times's account of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's "finest moment" -- his 2008 bank rescue plan:

Tom Fletcher, Mr Brown's private secretary, recalls Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, telling the prime minister at the height of the crisis: "You know, Gordon, I should not like you. You are Scottish, we have nothing in common and you are an economist. But somehow, Gordon, I love you." Mr Sarkozy hastily added: "But not in a sexual way."

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

The Fund’s managing director was addressing students on the campus of Bilgi University when a student took aim with a white trainer, chanting “get out of the university, thief IMF.”

Television footage showed security guards shielding Mr Strauss-Kahn and hustling the bearded student, who wore a white t-shirt and sleeveless jacket, out of the room.

Mr Strauss-Kahn later shrugged off the protest. “It is important for us to have an open debate. I was glad to meet students and hear their views. This is what the IMF needs to do, even if not everyone agrees with us. One thing I learned, Turkish students are polite. They waited until the end to complain,” he told reporters.

With this incident, Strauss-Kahn joins the motley crew of shoe-attack survivors that now includes George W. Bush, Wen Jiabao, Indian Home minister P. Chidambaram, and (possibly) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The shoe-chucking innovator Muntazar al-Zaidi was released from jail in Iraq this month. 

So, readers, who do we think will be next? 

BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

Dubai's VIPs swarmed its new metro system for the grand opening, taking advantage of the unique date. To steal a line from Blake, it's good to be a Sheikh in Dubai:

When a giant clock reached 09:09:09 on 9/9/09, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE, swiped a personalised plastic card at a ticket barrier and took his place as the first passenger on a network that will, when finished, have cost an estimated Dh28 billion (US$7.6bn).

The first two trains were filled by VIPs but eventually, lucky members of the general public were allowed to take part in the festivities. 

A little later, a third train left the Nakheel Harbour and Tower station with 400 members of the public, the winners of “golden tickets”, picked from about 10,000 people who entered an online competition.
One of them, MV Martin, said: “I can’t believe I am going to be part of history.”

With all the layoffs in Dubai and abandoned luxury cars everywhere, the Metro could provide a cheaper transport option. Or maybe abandoned cars are still available for bargain prices? 

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

South African tech company Unlimited IT was so frustrated with the slow Internet speeds provided by Telkom, one of South Africa's biggest internet providers, that it hired a pigeon named Winston. As the Times of South Africa reports, Winston carried a 4gb memory card from one branch of Unlimited IT to another, far faster than Telkom's transfer speed:  

The 11-month-old pigeon flew 80km from a call centre in Howick, outside Pietermaritzburg, to a head office in Hillcrest, Durban, to prove a bird is faster at transferring data than Telkom’s ADSL lines.

Winston made his delivery in 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds, beating Telkom’s estimated download time of up to two days. By the time the memory card, carrying company data, had been collected from Winston and downloaded by midday, the ADSL download had managed 100MB of data.

The Christian Science Monitor's Scott Balduf, based in Johannesburg, explains why the story is more significant than just good publicity for Ultimate and Winston:

Africans pay some of the highest prices for some of the least reliable Internet service in the world. And if a country like South Africa – relatively prosperous and developed – can't solve this problem, then it's going to need a lot more pigeons.

Telkom has since responded to the South Africa Press Association and denied responsibility for Ultimate's Internet connection woes.

flickr/dubliniete

In the Financial Times on Wednesday, Chris Cook argues that British immigration laws are giving an unfair edge to soccer clubs with more money.

Clubs with deep pockets hire the small number of local and foreign gifted players available, while poorer clubs must make do with the remaining, potentially much weaker, local journeymen.

Not only that, he says, but the protectionist measures of allowing non-European workers only if the fit certain high-skill benchmarks also inflate wages for less-skilled Europeans, raising ticket prices.

Cook contends tougher competition would boost the English national team:

The impact of more foreign players on the elite band of players who might conceivably play for the national team is that they need to play better to keep their places in their club teams. So, they improve. The English team has markedly improved since foreign footballers started pouring into the country’s top league.

Would some British and European soccer players be pushed out of work if rules were liberalized? Probably, but a more competitive league would be worth it Cook says.

Consumers of an increasing range of products will soon feel the pain in their wallets already endured by so many fans on a Saturday afternoon, who routinely complain that they pay ever-greater sums to watch a football league dominated by just four clubs. What English football needs is fewer English footballers. 

Not knowing that much about the economics of the Premiere Leage, here's a question: If teams in the lower half of the standings became much more competitive, would it increase their revenues? Higher ticket sales? More advertising?  

Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images 

Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is a lifestyle guru, a macrobiotics enthusiast, an author of cookery books, a retired actress, a divorcee, and a fearless clothes horse for garments of her own creation, including a skirt made from Hawaiian coffee sacks. But there is more, much more. She has travelled to the planet Venus. And she was once abducted by aliens.

The 62-year-old also knew Tom Cruise in a former incarnation – when he was Japanese – and is now looking forward to making a Hollywood movie with him. "I believe he'd get it if I said to him, 'Long time no see', when we meet," she said in a recent interview. But it is her claim in a book entitled "Very Strange Things I've Encountered" that she was abducted by aliens while she slept one night 20 years ago, that has suddenly drawn attention following last Sunday's poll.

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she explains in the tome she published last year. "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."

While her husband at the time dismissed her experience as a dream, she says that Yukio "has a different way of thinking." Maybe there's more to this PM than we thought...

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Fun stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo are pretty hard to come by, but the third launch of the Congolese Space Program is pretty cool, even if "Troposphere 5" didn't get very far. I feel kind of bad for the rat astronaut on board, though. (Video in French.)

(Hat tip: Kings of War)

The Moscow Times reports that Russia has issued new guidlelines to law enforcement officials about how to define extremism:

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Pooh share a dubious honor: Anyone who depicts either of them with a swastika can be punished under the law.

The Justice Ministry published the latest — and biggest — update to its list of extremist materials on its web site this week, and many of the 414 new entries are so vague or controversial that analysts say they threaten to discredit the list all together.

The list is important because police officers and other law enforcement officials use it in street checks, apartment searches and criminal cases.

Among the new entries, extremist material is identified as “a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a swastika,” “a self-made template for a future newspaper, comic or other print materials,” and “a flag with a cross.”

 And just when you thought that was all:

A closer look at the list brings other surprises. For example, item No. 402 is the LiveJournal blog Reinform.livejournal.com.

The blog has not been suspended by LiveJournal’s abuse team and is being updated almost daily. Its owner wrote on its front page that he had opened the blog after seeing prosecutors mistakenly name the then-nonexistent blog as extremist.

With 414 items already on the list, it goes well beyond swastikas and I'm starting to get worried. Is Passport's entirely serious interest in shirtless Putin pictures extremist or patriotic? 

MJ Kim/Getty Images