I've got your picture / I've got your picture

I went the gym yesterday. Nothing unusual in that (and since I've mentioned the gym twice in two days I should emphasis that a) I'm quite proud of that; and b) I don't think it's working).

There were 5 Japanese businessmen coming in at the same time. And nothing unusual in that.

After changing into their expensive gym gear (I always feel self-conscious in my AK79 T-Shirt) they all lined up in a row on adjacent treadmills, each with their own cable TV.

Each was tuned to Cinemax and each businessman put on headphones to catch the film about to begin.

Five minutes later they, without a word to each other, all took of their headsets and went downstairs to the weights.

The film was The Battle Of Midway.

Technorati Tags: Fitness

Welcome to a new kind of tension / All across the alien nation

I quite like Bob Lefsetz, he nails it sometimes although his personal taste (Pat Benetar, The Eagles etc) is a bit bloated midwest for me at times.

But I had to smile at this classic Americanism from today's post on Hong Kong:

The signs are all in English. Our driver was fluent, he learned from watching American TV.

I guess 100 years of British colonial administration, generations of English at schools and the fact that it's an official language didn't have the same impact as a few seasons of Friends.

walking / walking a straight line

And from the pages of the NZ Herald.....

The show, which transforms ordinary people into their favourite pop star, was last week won by a woman impersonating Brit-pop legend, Debbie Harry.

Apart from the fact that she is two decades out genre wise and the width of the Atlantic Ocean away from Brit-Pop (the NY punkette was from New Jersey and had little to do with Oasis or Blur etc), its good to see that  Michelle Coursey is maintaining the paper's reputation for journalistic accuracy.

Technorati Tags: Debbie Harry,NZ Herald

don't you / forget about me

Wanker

Irish rocker Bono is having sleepless nights over the crisis in Burma and is praying the campaign against its military rulers will triumph.

Technorati Tags: U2, Bono, Wankers

now you feel like the whole world is picking on you / but deep down inside you know its true

Oh dear, Homeland Security has slipped from the paradoxically stupid to the paranoidly absurd in the US of A…

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters.

The harmless "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance -- inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nanotechnology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada…..

I’m speechless. Once again.....these people are allowed guns...