“[Bush] has always done well for the affluent … anyone that does well for the affluent should be named for the effluent.”

— a plumber signing a petition to get a San Francisco sewage treatment plant named after George W. Bush

Fugato.net wishes its tireless, deluged readers a happy new year with thanks for everything, online and off, in the years gone by.

Vífill Atlason (16) made the news last weekend for prank-calling a supposedly top-secret number at the White House, pretending to be the Icelandic president, and booking a phone appointment with President Bush.

Ha ha, but the US news outlets missed the good part: the followup. Two TV stations ran interviews with Vífill. He showed up for one, and had a very-different-looking friend do the other, pretending to be him.

The duped station made it funnier still by threatening to sue both Vífill and the other TV station (which seems also to have been pranked, in that Vífill had promised to appear only on that station that day. Technically, of course, he kept his promise.) The reporter tendered his resignation, which his boss did not accept.

The same station has a show called Tekinn (“Taken” or “Duped”), running pranks on people with hidden cameras.

Vífill may in all seriousness be denied entrance to the US in the future for this (and possibly shackled and denied food and drink for 14 hours), the Dept. of Homeland Security being the celebrated Orwellian juggernaut of common sense and discretion that it is.

But he’ll have no trouble getting into Icelandic showbiz. (Except perhaps on Stöð 2.)

Laekjargata 4
200 Kopavogur
Norway

Pretty good work by the postal system! And as for Reuters, the dependable, accurate information source, well …

I’m often asked the question, “Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments — there are a lot of places out there, and use the word billions, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I’m asked, “Yeah, but what do you really think?” I say, “I just told you what I really think.” “Yeah, but what’s your gut feeling?” But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

— Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, in The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 1987

„Process applications faster and store more data with 256MB internal ROM …“

Note to self: do not buy scientific instruments from websites that smack of the previous millennium.

Many people lose sleep over the idea that (great) wealth is increasingly unevenly distributed, that fewer people have amassed a larger share of the pie than ever before. This conviction seems to arise from observing the very richest and wrinkling one’s nose and scoffing and being indignant.

(Is anyone ever dignant?)

The New York Times today published a summary of the 30 richest Americans of all time, measuring their riches in today’s dollars using the relative share of GDP.

Two of them are alive today, Bill Gates (ranking fifth) and Warren Buffett. Sam Walton founder of WalMart died in 1992, all the others were dead by 1950.

The four richest were born in 1750, 1763, 1794, and 1839.

There’s more to it, of course, but in any case this hardly supports the notion that wealth is more unevenly distributed extreme wealth is accrued by fewer people now than it used to be.

Incidentally, these moguls have one notable thing in common: they all have a Y chromosome. It seems worth investigating the role of this genetic trait in the accumulation of wealth.

Oud master Naseer Shamma (نصير شمة) here plays part of his composition al’Amiriyah, which tells the story of the bombing of public shelter nr. 25 in the Amiriyah district of Baghdad in 1991. Hundreds of civilians were killed (in the range 200-300 according to Human Rights Watch).

In the beginning there is a melancholy quiet, but then the havoc starts, with audible sirens, falling bombs and chaos. All in eleven strings.

Oud is العود in Arabic (al-ʿūd, literally “the wood”), a word believed to come from Persian, rud. The same word probably found its way into European languages as the name of the lute, when pious Europeans had a certain errand to run in the Near East and encountered this fine instrument.

Happy summer solstice, readers near and far (excluding the southern hemisphere). It is today at 18:06 UTC; that’s when the North Pole points closest to the sun.

Here in Reykjavík, sunset tonight is at 00:03. Yeah, three minutes after midnight.

Our time zone designation needs revising at some point.