Oh yeah!

It has gone below freezing at last! A real winter may be ahead of us
(as opposed to the usual low lying cloud and drizzle!) I sure hope it stays like this it's freezing but exhilirating. The sky is actually blue! (Living here you can sometimes forget that)

For the Dutch there is an added bonus to all this though.

Just a few days below nul is enough to set their hearts fluttering with the chance that the Elf Steden Tocht might happen this year.

The what?

Well, for the uninitiated - no this is not some obsucure pagan ritual where the locals trapse to the woods to play with the magic pixies and hidden people, but a once in a blue moon ice skating race. Wow! An ice skating race!

Details at:

http://www.elfstedentocht.nl/en/english.htm

Last time it occured a brussel sprout farmer won it.

Yes, it is that exciting!

(Actually it is - last time (5 years ago!) I sat rivetted to the TV screen for something like 10 hours mesmerised by the thing - this country does strange things tae yae!)

I'm off for some brussel sprouts......

Spurred on by Gillo the wonder horse I have spam and stuff for all.

In my aimless but fruitful wanderings I have stumbled across a great offer..... "rid house of pesky krill" ....how often do you have that liitle annoyance?...Its a joke BTW;-)

But if your interests are more sporting I have located a race event that doesn't exploit horses.

For a bit of restful music after all this healthy exercise how about the New Potatoes...the little remembered 80's band;-) they are joined by a corarado beetle....and lordy.......the improvements....or even a kitten doing Public Enemy....

My odyssey is at an end.................

I want one of these.

‘Good Food – Good Life’ – Chinese people are just about to benefit from Nestle’s unique experience of anticipating consumers’ needs. Nestle’s aim is to flood the Chinese market with processed GE products because they anticipate that Chinese people are not happy with the fantastic array of natural foods which are used to produce mouthwatering dishes in dozens of regional cuisines.

…but Nestle didn’t anticipate this .....

An anonymous person downloaded the "red company list" from the GE Food section of Greenpeace HK website and circulated it through the internet in China under the title of "Red Warning”.

Several media followed up by calling our GE campaigner to get extra info about Nestle and the list, which was obviously supplied willingly. Shanghai Bund Pictorial Magazine published a feature long article on Nestle and GE food on 3rd December.

Sina.com, one of the largest websites in China, posted the story on their new "GE food" section and hosted a web poll on the issue to which over 5000 people responded in 2 days with only around one percent supporting Nestle. Hundreds of people also posted opinions on the bulletin board - bulletin boards are incredibly popular in Mainland China. As a result, Nestle was forced to issue a statement on Sina.com.

Two important newspapers picked up the story. According to Beijing Morning Post, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) has been receiving many calls from the public since the story broke last week inquiring whether Nestle's products contain GE ingredients. Officials from MOA said that if Nestle is using GE ingredients but did not apply for labelling, it would have "to face punishment" (!)

So, it all started with an anonymous e-mail circulating Greenpeace info and the story snowballed in a ping-pong between old and new media.

Other media to pick up on the story are Guangzhou Evening Post with a half page report on the front page of their Business News section. Also, Beijing Morning Post, one of the most important newspapers in Beijing, ran the story front page. The largest official paper in China and therefore the most influential, People’s Daily, also ran the story, here it is in its English edition.

...and here's the Greenpeace pr

Not only does Nestle want to contaminate China’s fantastic natural food resources, it also has an ulterior motive to overturn China’s tea drinking culture so they can turn a profit on coffee.

Sina.com.cn has created an amazing feature on GE food and Nestle China. It was induced by an anonymous snowball email about the GE food black-and-white list, which was released by Greenpeace China early this year.

It is really surprising for all of us, since Greenpeace has never appeared in mainland Chinese media in such a way. The story is not yet finished, so watch out...

(Sorry that the web site is written in simplified Chinese.)

Just a few days ago was the 18th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. 8000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory. Another 20,000 have died since of related injuries.

But the owner of Union Carbide and the abandoned factory site that is still polluting the community seems to get a bit nervous when confronted with the facts.

A cool parody website attempting to give people an honest look at Dow and the reasons why the company has not cleaned up Bhopal seems to have been shut down (http:www.dow-chemical.com). The site was so slick it took me a few minutes to realise it was a hoax, guess it was a little to close to the truth for comfort.

The site explained why Dow (and Union Carbide) have always refused to take responsibility for the disaster, and have never seen fit to offer any more than $500 compensation per victim.

The Yes Men say that the server, Verio, received a DMCA notice and the entire Thing.net network was shut down including activist, artist, and other websites and bulletin boards late Wednesday night.

You can find out more from the Yes Men at http://www.theyesmen.org/dow-chemical/.

Or read a Indian journalist's first hand account of the Bhopal disaster.

Just discovered Google still has some pages of the spoof cached.

And I'm typing away in a tiny internet cafe? Why I ask myself am I not at the beach on this sultry afternoon? Especially as I'm flying back to a, no doubt, cold and rainy Holland tomorrow? Well the beach is not far away here in Bombay and popular with the locals of an afternoon but, well Bombay beaches are not really conducive to a cooling dip.

A few days ago I nipped down for an sunset stroll on the beach and lets just say I'm glad I kept my shoes on. Never did I imagine sand could be multi-coloured! Lots of people were paddling but I never got near enough to the noxious looking sea to risk getting even one toe wet. Not that means there is nothing to do, like the rest of India, most of life is in full public view on Juhu beach in the evening - obligatory spicy snack and juice stalls, kiddies rides, ice cream sellers, fortune telling robots, kite sellers, beggars and of course lot of polaroid toting men happy to capture you with the rainbow sand under your toes. All to the backdrop of thousands of inpromptu cricket games concluding due to bad light at sunset!

Maybe next time they will have sorted a better solution for the cities waste than pouring it straight into the sea but, as Bombay is one of the world's largest cities and still growing, I'm not too hopeful.

This is probably the most sensitive issue in recent period involving so many riparian countries along one river - Mekong river. (In Yunnan province of China, it is called Lancang. When it comes to the border of Burma and Laos, it is then called Mekong. )

Transboundary water issues have never been addressed in such a way: A lot of local, regional and international groups are now working together to save the rapids and shoals to be blasted. Undoubtedly, this is not merely a conservation issue, but also a trade issue, while China and ASEAN strongly argue for an increasing and 'freer' trade across the whole region.

At this stage, at least what we can do is to:
Urge the Thai government to stop the work immediately.

Southeast Asia Rivers Network
Rivers Watch East and SE Asia
International Rivers Network
Probe International - Mekong campaign

Returning to Sydney to live after being in Europe for almost four years certainly has made me aware of my immediate environment. When I first arrived three weeks ago there were water restrictions due to the worsening drought. Then just a couple of days ago when I was driving home with my boyfriend a sheet of torrential rain suddenly descended on us. We could not see anything and had to pull off the highway as lightning streaked across the sky and the road rumbled beneath us. On the way home the water on the roads had swelled over the gutters and inevitably the car conked out.
Now only a week later bush fires are ravaging Sydney. The bush reserve in the suburb (Gladesville) next to where I am living caught on fire today and strong winds are now pushing flames close to the houses that back onto it. This afternoon as the sun took on the shape of a fuzzy, glowing orange ball and grey smoke billowed across the sky an eerie orange light descended on everything. I walked to the reserve to join other onlookers as the bright orange flames licked across the valley. All around residents stood on their roof tops hosing down their gutters and surrounding trees - anything to stop a nasty flying fire spark from catching alight. I stood and waited wondering if there was anything I could do. Everyone seemed amazingly calm considering a major bush fire was at the edge of their backyards. Later I watched the carnage on TV as areas around Sydney caught alight. Apparently the fires are even worse than last year. Images began to flash across my screen of houses being burnt to the ground - totally tragic stories.
I think after living away from Australia for a while made me forget the environmental hazards that seem to surround people living here daily or possibly they are getting worse. These last few weeks have certainly been a first hand experience for me of extreme weather...from drought, to torrential rain, then bushfires and inevitably back to drought.

I took this rather hazy image below of the fire burning behind houses just down the road from where I live.

View image

Sinterklaas is the dutch version of Santa Claus or, better, something similar. The date when Sinterklaas comes is three weeks before today (Dec 5th), which is his birthday and the day when he gives most of the presents, but the differences with the more popular Santa don't end here. To show them I'll explain why I think Sinterklaas is a definitely more lucky than Santa Claus.

To start let's see where these two bearded folks come from: Santa, as we know, comes from the cold, snowy North. And Sinterklaas? This dude comes from... Spain! Can you imagine? And, fyi, they are dressed the same with the difference that Santa has to wear all those clothes even at his place, while Sinterklaas just put his gear on top of his speedos as soon as he's in sight of Holland on his boat.

Boat? You bet it! While Santa struggles with raindeers and no fly zones, our Sint takes his cruise-yacht to reach the dutch shores, joined by the "Zwarte Piets" (Black Peters), young folks dressed as the Pope's swiss guards. What's their role? They do most of the job, go through the chimney (that's why they are black, no discrimination here), buy the presents, deliver candies, entertain kids. Practically Sint just put the signature on top of this, he's the boss.

But to make the atmosphere a bit warmer an animal has been introduced in Sint's mythology: a horse! A spanish horse exactly. I've been told he's not seasick and he actually enjoy the cruise while drinking his Martinis to get ready for all the carrots children will offer in their shoes in exchange for a present.

The revenge of Santa Claus, however, is that he gets to travel all around the world while Sint is stuck here in rainy holland for three weeks,

In any case, if you're a kid and you live in The Netherland, you're a lucky boy.

Bombs found at Ikea stores in Holland. I wonder what's the reason of this, how am I going to buy my FRAMÅT?

"

Check out these amazing Hubcap creatures. I know they're artworks, and created for the sheer difficult beauty of creating them, but in the current context of the massive oil spill off Spain and Portugal, I see them attracting irony like magnets.

Hubcap fish are just the thing, really, to restock the waters around Galicia. We could recreate an artistic metaphor of a vibrant ecosystem from the SUVs and BMWs of the economic system that destroyed it.

Too bad that when the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat hubcaps.

--b

Had to take a week off, too many meetings and too much diy stuff to do. Now finished to sort my mail and hopefully do some work. In case you haven't done it yet, go and buy "Stupid white men" and see "Bowling for Columbine" both by Michael Moore.

btw: welcome to this world Agnese! Maybe when you'll be older, there won't be a Bush as the head of a leading country (not that in Italy the situation is better).