I was driving behind this truck/motor-home when it hit the railway over-bridge today.
Time: 10:55 A.M. Location: Richardson Terrace, Opawa, Christchurch, New Zealand.
(The photo is cellphone quality, yet authentic and exclusive.)
Ups! This bridge is too low or this lorry is too tall.
Nobody got hurt.
Fourteen months ago, another incident happened just meters away:
Part 5. This is about money, isn’t it?
Yes, it is when it gets about the wizard thing. When Faruno turns into a wizard.
How do we make money on Planet Go-to-Bed?
I actually have a good idea: kill a cow with a sword made of lava and obsidian and diamond? (That was cool.)
Do you know that long time ago even on Planet Earth people were killing cows to make their wishes come true?
Dad, people don’t do that. But people on Planet Go-to-Bed think that. Did you put a full-stop? I’ve got a better idea! If they feed the cow or an elephant to a rhyno, they may get another person from the Planet Earth.
This is called sacrifice. OK, let’s get back to Faruno becoming a magician (Dad, this is another word for wizard). OK, we want to make more money, but we don’t know how. If we copy this story many times with the printer and sell them to a librarian for money, we get rich.
[at this point the author goes back to his computer game]
I think we have to carry on with this story another night.
Dad, I want to do some more of the story now ’cause the page is not big enough. I can attack from wherever I want, I have two bad guys, but I move when they attack me.
I can’t think of how Faruno can make money.
But there’s no money on Planet Go-to-Bed.
They have to kill a cow with a sword. To kill a cow means making money because that planet is a magic place.
OK, can we go to bed now before we make money? I’ll go to brush my teeth and the computer should be off when I return. We’ll finish the money story another night, when we figure out how. Good night, Faruno Albalgandon Vextraliensis!
Dad, I want you to read a real story for me, not to be making a fake one. You pick any story but it has to be one I like.
Night 4
When Faruno got re-born, the Government of the Planet Go-to-Bed gave him the captaincy of a very fine space ship. He was one of the oldest captains ever to be given a brand new rocket at the age of two days.
His plan was to go to Planet Earth to get some cows. The new rocket was running on petrol so Captain Faruno had to go to Earth first to get some petrol, because his planet had no petrol at all.
But how could he? He had no petrol to go! How can he go to Earth without any petrol? Maybe he can ask another ship to bring him petrol first. But how? Do you think he can send am email or a text message to another rocket? No! Why not? I think a message may take a couple of days because he may be so far away. We need to find something faster than a message or even than light. A ‘comic’? No, I mean a comet? Comets are not fast enough, they are even slower than light. Is there anything faster than light?
Dad, we are going to make this into a real book. Can we send this story to the printer and make a real book?
Can you think of the Moon and of the Sun? If I close my eyes, I can. It takes a couple of seconds to think of the Sun. It takes ten fingers worth one second each to think of the planet Go-to-Bed. Faruno needs about… it’s a bit tricky but if he’s smarter than us.., Faruno can think of petrol from our planet in about five seconds. No, I’m smarter, I can think about that in about one second! His space ship can travel only with the power of all the people on his planet, if they all think together the same thing.
Captain Faruno Albalgandon Vextraliensis got all the beings on his planet to think together and this is what happened: They all thought so hard, old people thought of walking sticks, creatures with many legs thought of even more walking sticks, young people thought of their wishes and suddenly…
Dad, if you had one wish, what would you wish for? I don’t have only an answer. I do, I wished only once in my entire life, I would wish to have wishes all my entire life. Would you wish the same?
…and suddenly from the sky it started to snow slowly and gently with walking sticks but also with cows and elephants and even with wishing wells. And petrol! (But petrol is dirty.) Everybody was so happy, they were all over the moon. Their planet has no moon, though. Only Faruno was not happy at all. He didn’t need to travel in his brand new space ship any more. They all had all they wanted and he was not needed.
I’ve fallen from bed on purpose. Every time we have to do a story, do we only do it until the page is finished?
Faruno decided that being a captain is not a good idea and he wanted now to become a wizard instead.
Is the page finished now? Yes, it is. Instead of doing a story I actually wanted to play some games.
(to be continued)
As expected by many (and predicted by Mockoblog two weeks ago), Hosni Mubarak abdicated. Protesters are celebrating what they consider to be a victory over a regime which for too many of them coincides to all they can remember – a lifetime.
Scenes of jubilation in Cairo, Alexandria and other major Egyptian cities and throughout the Arab World have the unrestrained joy and the party-like atmosphere resembling a football victory. But who exactly won exactly what? The protesters definitely believe they won the battle against Mubarak, yet they have no idea what’s going to happen next or, indeed, if they won or the regime chose to dispose of the 82 year old president like a trapped lizard which breaks its own tail in order to survive.
The situation in Egypt is still very volatile and nothing really has improved in terms of filling in the political gap. There seems to be no clear direction, no solid leadership in the street opposition, no positive unity (after the negative message of ‘down with the regime’), no credible alternative to the military power.
The matrix of the Egyptian society after decades of iron fist government is polarized. Most Western commentators fear the dichotomy between Islam and Coptic Christianity, yet the main divide will be between the poor masses and the collaborators of the Mubarak regime. And this is a very intricate social pattern, scaled down to the very single family. There is no corruption without corrupt people and no torture without victims. It is likely that the class that used to have the power will struggle to hold onto it while the pro-democratic protesters will have to protest again. As long as the military holds the power, there will be some balance in the status quo but this is unlikely to last. As the opposition will get better organized, so will the Mubarak’s ‘old boys’ – it will be just much easier for them, as they still hold the connections, the resources and the knowledge.
After a series of slight mistakes and embarrassing miscalculations, the White House finally got it right when Mr. Obama said that this was ‘not the end of Egypt’s transition’ but ‘the beginning.’ The beginning of what? This is neither a walk in the park for Egypt’s impoverished majority, nor the cup of tea for other authoritarian Arab regimes, nor much good news for Israel and its allies. A single spark could ignite the Middle East and the situation in Egypt, be it just economic, not even social, political and religious, is a bonfire. Civil War is still in the cards and it may even be of a kind yet unknown to humanity, a pan-national Arab civil war which, if not managed in the region, could easily turn into World War III, perhaps the precursor of the New World Order.
