If The Truth Fits

Whenever I see a piece of spam pop up on in my e-mail client, its a slight annoyance, but I just accept that its ‘one of those things’ and that we can’t stop it being sent to my inbox, but hopefully a filter will be able to stop me from having to read it. I guess that there are people that are more pro-active than me, because instead of just trying to stop themselves from reading the spam, they’re trying to stop those billions and billions of junk e-mails even being sent to your inbox.

According to this article from the Associated Press, a company called McColo Corp. was shutdown last week after it turned out that they were the half of almost half of the world’s spam e-mails. Spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail sent around the world, so if these guys were responsible for half of all spam, that means that there is about 45% fewer e-mails being sent around the world right now. I know that sounds really impressive, but the article goes on to say that you can never really kill the spam monster, within a few days or weeks there will be just as many e-mails circulating around the world telling you about some great v1agra offers that you should really be interested in.

I don’t think I’ve actually opened or read a spam e-mail for at least a couple of years. I use Gmail and it seems to catch just about everything and put it into the spam folder, which I’ll give a quick browse to check that it hasn’t been overzealous and picked up something I actually want to read, then I might have a swift chuckle at the titles of the spam mails, and click delete all. I’d always presumed that everyone else did the same, but apparently not. 1 in 12,500,000 spam e-mails actually result in someone signing up to that porn site, buying those cheap medications from Canada, or, of course, trying to pick up some little blue pills on the cheap in the hope of stirring things up in the bedroom. Those figures come from the results of a study by computer scientists at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego, who decided that the only way that they could get accurate data about spam was to actually spam people, and in a 26 day period they sent 350 messages, yielding them just 28 sales, a record that even poor ol’ Gil Gunderson from the Simpsons wouldn’t be proud of, but apparently that’s enough of a hit-rate for big-time spammers to rake in a couple of million dollars a year, and whilst they can bring in that kind of cash I’m sure that they won’t be stopping any time soon.

Oh, and if you thought that you had it bad when it came to annoying spam clogging up your inbox, think about poor Colin Wells, who has around 44,000 spam messages going through his server every day. He used to spend up to two hours a day tapping away at the delete key, but seems to have got things under control now with some effective filters, so if there’s one lesson that you can learn from this article, its that whilst spammers never quit, neither do the good guys, and you can almost always take back control of your inbox.

When something as momentous as a black man becoming President, apparently knocking down many racial barriers in the US, and causing a lot of people in the world to stop hating America, it feels quite hard for me to start writing about something else. Talking about what Lindsay Lohan is doing now, or which star of The Hills hates another star of The Hills just doesn’t seem to hold as much historic weight as my last few posts. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that I can’t cover something groundbreaking every day… or can I?

The Dow Jones made its third-biggest ever points gain today, which I guess would be big news, but there seems to have been a story like that every day over the past few months. I guess I’m getting a bit cynical of this whole economic apocalypse, but it seems to be up and down every day to the point where the only point at which I’d be surprised was if a financial correspondent on TV opened a report by saying “nothin’ much doing on Wall Street today, no ones jumped out the window yet, and no ones having a shower with vintage Dom Perignon champagne… sigh… and now here’s Steve with the weather.”

Someone might, and I’d like to stress the might, and stress it again, might have cured HIV.

Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells — appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.

Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.

I can understand how Obamania has taken over the news somewhat over the past week, but how on earth has this story slipped under the radar? I hadn’t even heard about this until I went hunting for news on Google, and I’ve had the news on TV for about 3 hours today (I think that in that time they managed to discuss about five or six stories, but that’s another matter altogether). Added to my earlier caution, the doctors involved have warned that the patient had a rare strain of HIV, and that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be a routine treatment for HIV. Still, despite those caveats, that’s still a pretty amazing story.

Right, now I have found a story that truly deserves to follow-on from the momentous occasion that was the 2008 American election. Jennifer Aniston has finally broken her silence over the Brangelina affair in an interview with Vogue magazine, branding what Angelina did (breaking up Brad & Jen’s marriage) and “very uncool“. In turn, Brad Pitt has told Jen to ’shut it’. The whole affair appears to have made the internet explode. Isn’t it great to hear that even impossibly good looking people have problems to?

When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.

It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).

It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.

Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.

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Yes, I know that most people would have reported this story yesterday when it actually became a reality, but I thought that it would be a pretty good idea to wait a day to let it all sink in, and to make sure that Barack Obama was in fact the President elect, and that this wasn’t all some cruel hoax and that George Bush was going to have a live address to the nation in which he decides that his Presidency is going to turn the corner right around 2011 and that it’ll probably be for the best if he just stayed in his current job. To be fair to GWB, with the job market the way it is at the moment (especially as a man over 60), its probably going to be easier for him to change the constitution to allow him a third term than to try and get another job that isn’t being a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, Barack Obama is really going to be the President of America, as long as he spends the next few months surrounded by bullet proof glass (come on, not everyone in the US has made enough ’social progress’ quite yet). The official party line here at Pop Vulture was that we weren’t backing one candidate over the other, but I think it was pretty obvious whose side we were on, which is why I had goosebumps at around 11pm (EST) on Tuesday night. I mentioned in my last post that I was staying up here in France to watch the election, and I made it all the way to the end (or the beginning, if you’d prefer), and I think that the tiredness of staying up until 6:30am heightened my emotions to a level that Americans were feeling. When Obama came out an made that speech in Grant Park, and my God what a speech it was, I’m willing to admit that at moments I was welling up, and I’m well known for my heart of stone, so Barack Obama has done something pretty there, in terms of emotion for me, he’s reached the heights of the OC series finale (yes, I went there).

A lot of people on the news that are rather older than me have been saying for the past couple of days that they never thought they would see a black man as a President in their lifetime. Most of them have probably got 20-30 more years ‘experience’ than I do, but I didn’t think that I’d see it in my lifetime either. I just kept thinking that something was going to go wrong, millions of people going into voting booths and with a pen hovering over the Obama/Biden box, they thought “sure, there’s no actual evidence that Barack Obama is a muslim/terrorist/elitist/socialist/communist… but… I dunno” and lowering their pen to McCain/Palin, or deciding to just throw their vote away altogether and vote for Bob Barr.

I think that 10 years ago, no matter how well qualified or deserving of the office, a black person could not have been President, I realised that technically they could, but I don’t think America was ready for it. Even a couple of years ago I think it would have been a much tougher task, which is why I think that the Onion (yes, the website dedicated to news that isn’t true) hit the nail on the head with their article ‘Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress‘. Still, way to go, America.

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As I type this blog post, the results are starting to come in for the 2008 US election. I’m going to be staying up until this thing is decided, and as Wolf Blitzer just said “its early in the night” on CNN I get the feeling that I could be in for a fairly long night. It would be silly for me to try and call states and inform you about the polls, but the team over at Mashable (a blog about social media and websites) have put together a great list of sites that can guide you through what is a pretty confusing process. They’re calling it the Ultimate Election Day 2008 Toolkit and whilst I haven’t exactly been hunting around for other Election Day Toolkits, if you’re intending to follow the election online it will probably be a very good place for you to go for links.

Whether Obama or McCain is the winner, one thing that has really inspired me about the past couple of days is the level of activism and interest displayed by the American people in this election, resulting in what will probably be one of the highest levels of voter turnout in US history. I know that Obama has energised a lot of voters that wouldn’t have necessarily been too interested, and the McCain has managed to awaken a lot of Republicans, but I still found it very impressive. It almost seems that amongst young people its actually ‘cool’ to be interested in politics and that there’s a bit of a stigma if you don’t vote, which is pretty amazing amongst a voting bloc typically known for stubbornly sticking to apathy.

In Britain I remember things being extremely different in the past couple of elections that I’ve been involved with (I’ve only been able to vote in 1 general election, and a couple of local ones). Voter disinterest and apathy is rife amongst all races, classes, and backgrounds, something which I find pretty depressing. I don’t really know why, maybe people have lost faith in the process, maybe they’ve lost faith in politicians of all ideologies (why bother voting when you don’t believe in any of them?). Or perhaps, and this is a theory that’s fairly ‘out there’, they’re actually all pretty happy, and figure that whoever is in charge things will be pretty much the same. Still, as someone who studied politics at university for 3 years and has had a keen interest for many years more than that, I’ve always believed that voting is important and that if you don’t vote, then you haven’t made your voice heard and you don’t deserve the right to complain about the peopke who represent you. I’m not saying that people who don’t vote shouldn’t have the same human rights as voters, but I feel that there’s something disingenuous about people bitching about their government when they couldn’t even be bothered to send in a postal vote or head down to the polling station.

We Brits and other people in Europe often sling a lot of mud at Americans for a lot of reasons, but its days like this that make me really believe in people, and it makes me proud to be coming to America next month.

The world is a scary place, this much we know, but on Halloween it actually becomes a lot less scary to me. It’s like someone is having a fancy dress party, and absolutely everyone is invited, people give each other chocolate, candies, and all kinds of other treats just because you turn up at their door. Try doing that on any day other than October 31st and I guarantee that your candy to slammed door ratio with change very drastically. Also, don’t you think that its kind of funny that a night that is meant to be scary and filled with dark rituals has largely been transformed into a clean and sanitized day in which kids have fun, are told that its okay to take candy from strangers “just for today”, and that if you don’t get given any candy its totally cool to chuck eggs at their door and throw toilet paper over the carefully manicured tree in the middle of the lawn. Oh, and for the adults, parties where all the drinks are green and all the women turn up in costumes that come with the prefix of ’slutty’.

Let’s take a look at the history of Halloween, according to that actually quite reliable resource, Wikipedia:

Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain. The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.” Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

Like I said, that is a pretty dark story, oh, and the fun pumpkins that you carve with your kids? Also kinda dark:

Originating in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the “head” of the vegetable to frighten off any superstitions.

As a man of science, I know that superstitions are actually have a very high likelihood of being ’supersilly’, but are we really meant to believe that the Celts thought carving a face in a turnip (a turnip!) and putting a candle in it had the awesome power of being able to frighten off any (any!) superstition?

Now that I think about it, the turnip with a candle in it actually did work, in much the same way that Lisa Simpson’s Tiger-repelling rock does, you carved a face into a turnip, stuck a candle in it, and none of the dead returned to the land of the living to kill you and ruin your crops for the coming year, so its hardly surprising that they continued to employ the TCDS (Turnip + Candle Defence Mechanism) for so long.

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Microsoft matches reward for missing Canadian teen - A 15 year old Canadian boy named Brandon Crisp went missing on October 13th after his parents stopped him from playing on his Xbox 360, someone (it isn’t made clear who) put up a reward of $25,000 (Canadian) for infromation that will hopefully lead to finding Brandon, and Microsoft have offered to match the reward.

I don’t know why so many people hate Microsoft, people are always saying that they’re evil, and yet, I can’t really think of anything evil that they’ve done in the world of computing. Okay, I’ve never used Windows Vista, but how bad can that really be? Some people seem to think that Bill Gates is the devil incarnate, saying that all he wanted was to get money out of them and didn’t care about his products. They seem to forget where Bill comes from, the guy is a geek, I’m sure he would love it if he could push a product out of the door that was 100% perfect, but business and practicality gets in the way. And the money thing? Now that Bill has ’stepped back’ from working at Microsoft and stopped palling around with Jerry Seinfeld he’s dedicating a lot more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, y’know, the foundation he’s using to try and bring about an end to… pretty much all the problems in the world by the looks of it. He’s spending quite a large proportion of his astounding wealth on the Foundation, so I guess that even if you thought he was a money grabber, at least he’s doing some good with it.

Getting back to the story after that extended sidebar, obviously this is a pretty sad story, whenever a kid goes missing you worry, at that age you think you can take on the world but there’s a lot of danger out there and I hope that Brandon gets home safe soon, but at the same time… what kind of kid runs away because his parents stop him from playing on his Xbox? I know that when you’re 15 your mind isn’t all that focused, but I can’t quite follow the logic between these steps: I like playing on my Xbox, Mom and Dad won’t let me play on my Xbox… I’d better run away. Where does this kid expect to go from there with this, but hey, like I said, at that age you aren’t exactly thinking straight, and I’m sure that Brandon thinks he has good reasons.

The Reuters article that I found out about this story worried me somewhat, here’s a quote to help illustrate my point:

It is possible that police will ask or have already asked Microsoft to divulge the list of players with whom Brandon Crisp has played recently.

As online gaming has exploded in popularity since the start of the decade, academics and parents have raised concerns over the possibility of addiction.

Last year, the American Medical Association said more research was necessary on the potential of addiction to video games. It urged parents to closely monitor their children’s use of games and the Internet.

Web sites such as www.wowdetox.com, a sounding board for those addicted to or trying to quit the popular “World of Warcraft” online game, have sprung up as well.

So, the first part of that, about the police asking Microsoft for information, is quite clearly pure speculation, but it is being reported as a fact. The second part is again based upon speculation rather than fact. Parents concerns are not good evidence, and the suggestion of the American Medical Association doesn’t really mean anything either, they say it needs more study, and that parents should monitor their childrens gaming and internet usage, monitor it for what? When was there a suggestion in the story about Brandon Crisp that he was addicted to playing video games? The guy is 15 years old, I’d be willing to be that in a medical sense a pretty high percentage of kids could be classified as being ‘addicted’ to video games, just because a website about people wanting to play less World of Warcraft has been opened doesn’t mean that Brandon was addicted to playing Call of Duty 4.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Reuters should have gotten a staff member that plays on their Xbox to write that story.

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Photo credit: Hermida

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.

Okay, I know I’ve said more than once on this blog that us here at Pop Vulture don’t want to officially endorse one candidate or another, not that we’d expect it to sway you in any way, if the blog from a clothing company is going to decide which candidate you’re going to vote for, it might actually be a good idea if you stayed home on election day, and perhaps for a lot of other days too. That said, I’d be very proud if some of the things I’ve written over the past couple of months, and some of the stories I’ve linked to, actually did help to form your opinion and guided you through the extremely complex and important process of deciding who to pick. Or, failing that, just pick the person with the best hair, that almost always works.

That whole paragraph was basically a pretty long-winded way of saying Pop Vulture have released a t-shirt (the one in the picture accompanying this post, surprisingly enough) which features Barack Obama. So, yeah, we’re kind of endorsing Obama. The t-shirt could have just as easily been made with a John McCain image, but I’m afraid that Barack has already pretty much sewn up the graphic design vote. In my other job, writing about t-shirts and hoodies on Hide Your Arms, I’ve been sent e-mails about many, many Obama t-shirts, some well designed and some not so well designed, but I haven’t been sent a single e-mail pointing out a t-shirt supporting the Vietnam veteran, and since I place a massive amount of importance on t-shirts (hey, they’re my life), I think that is a pretty telling statistic.

The t-shirt is based upon the very famous series of prints done by Andy Warhol of Marylin Monroe, a style which has been reused countless times since the white-haired artist popularized it. I think its a very good way of portraying Barack Obama, pointing out the way that he has come to have a foot in both the worlds of celebrity and politics. The McCain campaign tried to publicize that as being a bad thing, but to me that smacked of them saying “why the hell would you want to vote for him? Because he’s popular? Because people like him? Are you a moron?” Just because someone is famous does not mean that they’re the same as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, its a link that makes a few leaps of imagination for me to fathom, but I guess that the insinuation that Barack could become distracted by his status of being a ‘cool’ world leader is far more important than whether its actually true or not. Yes, Obama gets endorsed by celebrities all the time (don’t worry McCain, you’ve still got Chuck Norris and Heidi Montag!), but its not like you see him going out to brunch with George Clooney and then swinging by the Pitt-Jolie’s for dinner so that they can all talk about how awesome they are.

Let’s hope that when November comes around Obama doesn’t suffer a similar fate as the subject of Warhol’s orginal prints (I’m talking about a political death, by the way) and also that his fame lasts for rather more than the 15 minutes that is so often talked about when Andy Warhol is brought up.

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I’m very pleased to announce that the above picture is an original illustration by Pop Vulture’s very own Pascal, I think its fair to say that we’ve got more talent in the art department than in the blogging department, and hopefully Pascal will be providing more original illustrations in the future. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m being too modest, we’re both pretty awesome!

From what I understand, last week was one of the worst ever on Wall St, and the case was pretty similar all around the globe. Things were definitely all doom and gloom, I’m pretty sure Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame was recommending that people started to stockpile tinned goods to be used for when the economy went down the tank and we reverted to a b