The Lonely Path To Isolation.

Conditions: Coldly Warm.


Pickled Profits.

I'll admit to being a tad confused. The week began with stock markets starting to panic and slide downward, and an "artist" who wanted to auction off all his works of "art" amongst great concern from the art dealers that the huge glut of "art" onto the market would drive prices down. But somehow, magically, we end the week with the stock markets soaring upwards and Damien Hirst counting his fresh millions.

Damien Hirst's pickled animals and his other works fetched nearly $200 million at the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction at Sotheby's in London. The two-day sale smashed the record for a sale dedicated to one artist, beating by far the 20 million dollars for 88 works by Pablo Picasso sold in 1993 at Sotheby's.

On Monday, his work entitled The Golden Calf, basically a bull in a tank of formaldehyde with gold horns, fetched almost $20 million.

- efluxmedia.com/

Meanwhile...

The most turbulent week in the financial markets in two decades came to a record-breaking close on Friday as some European stock markets saw their biggest ever one-day gains and Wall Street powered higher for a second consecutive day.

It was a dramatic reversal from the first half of the week, when credit markets virtually seized up and stocks around the globe plunged amid mounting fears for the health of the financial system.

Edmund Shing, European equities strategist at BNP Paribas, said: “This week has been completely insane. I have been in the markets for 14 years and I have never seen anything like it.

- ft.com/

I guess the most pressing question is: where the hell is all this money coming from? People moan and complain about how hard times are right now, and giant corporations are falling left and right, but some idiot decides to dump all his pickled meat at the same time and people fall over themselves shelling out millions to snatch it up? And after another week of doom and gloom, the American government announce some crazy (and cloudy) plan to clean up all the secret worldwide debt, and suddenly everyone's shouting 'buy, buy!'? What the hell's going on? If it's that easy, why the hell didn't the government announce this plan years ago? And where is the debt going, anyway? And should we really be rewarding the financial geniuses for running us into the ground in the first place by flushing the stock market upwards yet again? Doesn't this simply teach these people that they can do what they want and, if they fail, they'll get bailed out? Does that work for every industry?

More: Who are these people?



Prudence Requires It.

So, what happens when you ignore a decades-old nuclear arms treaty you signed with the Russians and start developing new nuclear weapons and missile systems? The inevitable happens, as it always does.

MOSCOW (Thomson Financial) - Russia on Thursday said it test-fired an intercontinental missile designed to avoid detection by missile-defence systems, raising the temperature in a tense stand-off with the West over Georgia.

The Topol RS-12M intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia and flew 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles) to hit a target on Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east, a military spokesman said.

The test was meant 'to develop equipment for potential combat use against ground-based ballistic missiles,' Alexander Vovk, a spokesman for Russia's strategic nuclear forces, said in televised remarks.
[...]

Russia has been upgrading its Topol missiles in response to US plans to develop a missile-defence shield using ground-based interceptors, analysts said.

- forbes.com/

And so here we have it, after all these years, we're back to having Russia and America develop systems designed to take each other out. The global mindset changes from one of wary cooperation to even more wary opposition, and any development we as a group of civilized nations could actually accomplish is gradually smothered toward oblivion yet again.



Stupid Rules.

Cellphones have a lot to answer for, and one of their many problems is that they tend to distract people from more important things. Like driving, for instance. Last week, a train driver in California spent too long with his phone and not enough with his ...stick?, causing an accident that killed 25 people, including him. That's bad enough, but here's the part that really annoys me. See, the company had a rule that didn't allow employees to use phones, a rule that most drivers ignored. So what's the company going to do about it?

Train drivers in California are to be banned from using mobile phones on duty after a crash in Los Angeles last week that killed 25 people. The state's rail regulators said the emergency ruling was a first step to improving railroad safety.

Yes! A ban! Because a ban will do the job, where the rule has failed! The ban comes with a fine, whereas presumably the rule was just so many words on a bit of paper no one looked at anymore. But a fine, that's completely different. Fine's always stop people from doing stupid things.

There is currently no federal law banning train drivers from using mobile phones at work.

Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said the action would "protect the public".

"What we're doing... is just a modest first step in a much larger effort to improve railroad safety."

- bbc.co.uk/

Oh, don't flatter yourself. This isn't modest, it's bullshit pandering to a temporarily-angry public. I'm sure once the dust settles they'll all go back to barely caring what the drivers do as long as they don't ask for a pay rise. And with computers getting faster and cheaper all the times I'm sure even that isn't much of a concern.



Back In The Saddle.

Adding to the woes, North Korea announced it was restarting it's nuclear plant that it's spent the last few months taking apart, as a angry response to America not taking it off the Axis of Evil watch list as a reward for their deactivating the plant in the first place.

In Washington, the United States reacted calmly to the announcement, saying North Korea had not yet made the plant operational.

"They have not got to that point yet. We would urge them not to get to that point," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said when asked about North Korea's statement.

He urged Pyongyang to agree to a mechanism to verify the claims it has made about the extent of its nuclear program.

North Korea, which exploded a nuclear device about two years ago, began to disable Yongbyon in early November as called for in the deal it struck with China, the United States, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

Last month, North Korea said it planned to restart Yongbyon because it was angry at Washington for not taking it off its terrorism blacklist. In early September, it made minor but initial moves to restart the plant, U.S. officials said.

Washington has said it will remove Pyongyang from the list once it allows inspectors to verify claims it made about its nuclear arms production. Once removed, the North can better tap into international finance and expand its meager trade.

- reuters.com/

Well, this is disappointing. Does North Korea expect us to just take their word for it. "Yup, plant's all dismantled, no more nukes, you can trust us." I don't think Bush is that naive. Almost, but not quite.



Film Review: The Mummy 3.

I don't know why I keep falling for it. All the signs point to disappointment. The director has moved on. The lead actress has moved on. There's even a sequence involving a bunch of Yeti's for frack's sake. And yet I still get suckered in. Mummy 3 is not the last final gasp of a franchise that Indiana Jones 4 was. Mummy 3 is the badly resurrected, shadow-of-it's-former-self type of sequel. Transplanting to China, we stumble into a story of Jet Li playing an emperor cursed to be imprisoned in Terracotta until Rick and Evey O'Connell come along and set everything going.

Rob Cohen directs the third film, and it seems his one big theme is: Shakycam gooood. And so we shake. We shake a lot. We shake in Shanghai, we shake in Tibet, we shake on the great wall, and we shake in the tomb. I know I've gone over this before, but I really freaking hate the shaky cam, and it kills what little fun and interest is left in the franchise. Brendan Fraser and new-Evey Maria Bello do their best, but the magic is gone, no matter how hard Cohen shakes the wand.

It's not like the previous films were masterpieces, but I felt they had their own style and high points, both of which are far out of the reach of episode 3. I mean, Yeti's, for pete's sake. Yetis. Despite Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh doing their best (always to be savoured), the third mummy film is an altogether tired and lacklustre attempt to make money off a known brand. Half a snowflake out of Five.




- Peace out.