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I'm sick and tired of all the nonsense thats going on around me. I need change, drastic change.

Off-Beat Escapades of 2005

Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters the year just ending brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly news items.

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  - In Denmark, a 43-year-old man was sentenced to two months in prison for passing himself off as a bona fide prisoner and thereby spending a night voluntarily behind bars. Per Thorbjoern Lonka said he carried out the prank in order to prove that rich people could easily pay someone else to serve their prison terms. The prison guards who locked him up failed to ask for his identity papers.
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  - A canny youth serving a sentence for assault in a Scottish jail escaped by virtue of the fact that his identical twin was also incarcerated there, but was due for release. When the brother's name was called, his twin presented himself, and was duly let out. The authorities then had little choice but to free the brother as well.
  
• - A court in the Swiss city of Zurich ruled that owners of very short cars could pay only half a parking fine, provided that two of them could really fit into one space. A couple who owned two tiny city runabouts had done just that, but needless to say the parking attendant had stuck a fine on both their vehicles.
  
• - Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor -- and promptly unmasked a driver whose meter ran at over six times the normal rate. "Disguised the way I was, I was certainly expecting to be charged a higher price, but not to such an outrageous extent," he said.
  
• - Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing baggy falling-down trousers, which are currently all the rage. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason" said the congressman who sought the measure.
  
• - Forty-six students in Thailand were banned from the military for life after they tried to cheat their way through the army entrance exam via mobile phones concealed in their shoes.
  
• - A woman in the US city of Norwalk, Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the local authorities for exposing her to colleagues' perfumes and colognes in her job as a municipal clerk. She cited a serious allergy.
  
• - A couple in California pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from a major hamburger restaurant chain after claiming to have found a human fingertip in a bowl of chili. The court found that the fingertip was placed there on purpose, and had been purchased for 100 dollars from a construction worker who lost it in an industrial accident.
  
• - The local council in the northern English resort town of Blackpool enacted an employment rights charter for the donkeys that carry tourists along the beach. The animals won regulated working hours and a day off each week.
  
• - A German woman who was mistakenly recorded as being dead by her local pensions office was asked to provide documentary proof that she was, in fact, alive.
  
• - When World Trade Organisation negotiators rolled into Hong Kong for a major summit, digital piracy figured prominently on their busy agenda. Strange to relate, many of the bustling outlets that usually sell music CDs, DVDs and software in the city decided to shut down for the duration of the talks.
  
• - In a inversion of the familiar Third World call centre set-up, a British man was fined for advertising his "sex chat" phone line as offering "Filipina girls," when the women in question were in fact working from central England. He was unmasked when clients found the alleged "Filipinas" had strangely familiar accents.
  
• - A Swiss woman sees colours and experiences tastes when she hears music, scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland reported. The rare phenomenon, known as synaesthesia, was confirmed in a 27-year-old professional musician, who saw violet on hearing an F sharp and red on a middle C.
  
• - Researchers at National University in La Jolla, California, threw a dinner party and then analysed the leftovers to see if their guests left significant DNA samples on them. Complete profiles were recovered from 43 percent of the sample, and partial ones from 33 percent. Such work could be useful in catching burglars, who often like tucking into the food found in their victims' kitchens.
  
• - African elephants have at least one thing in common with parrots: they imitate sounds they hear around them, said scientists in the United States and Norway. A captive female jumbo in Kenya was found to imitate the noise of trucks on a nearby road, while a male kept with Asian elephants at a zoo in Switzerland mimicked their chirping noises.
  
• - Enterprising students at Brown University in the United States invented an alarm clock that monitors its user's brainwaves and works out the best time to wake him or her up. The only drawback: the sleeper must wear a headband equipped with electrodes.
  
• - Alexis Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims, France, claimed a world record for working out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic. The feat, checked by a notary, took him 48 minutes and 51 seconds.
  
• - Also in the maths department, Akira Haraguchi, a 59-year-old psychiatric counselor in Japan, recited from memory the value of "pi," a constant which consists of an infinite string of digits, to 83,431 decimal places. It took him 13 hours to beat the previous record, also set by a Japanese, of a mere 54,000 digits.
  
• - The guardians of animal nomenclature had mixed feelings over a proposal to name three newly-discovered species of slime-mould beetle after US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A pair of insect experts reserved the names Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi for their latest creepy-crawlies.
  
• - An odd-looking rodent spotted on sale for meat in a Laotian food market turned out to be not only a new species but also the first member of a new family of mammals to be identified in more than three decades. An alert member of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society noticed the creature, which was baptised a stone-dwelling puzzle-mouse -- or, more simply, "rock rat".
  
• - Cane toads, reptiles imported into Australia in the erroneous belief that they would eliminate pests from sugar-cane fields, are attracted by disco-style flashing lights, said researchers in the Northern Territory who are desperate to find a way of eliminating the fast-spreading creatures. "The old toads are definitely a disco animal," said a member of a group called Frogwatch.
  
• - The fashion for television detective series which focus on forensic science may be unwittingly providing tips to real-world criminals, a study by British researchers said. Some forensic scientists were even becoming unwilling to cooperate with the media for precisely that reason.
  
• - Proof that scientists have a sense of humour: the annual Ig Nobel awards, which give spoof prizes to the most offbeat research. This year's crop went to the inventor of an alarm that rings then runs away and hides, thus ensuring that the sleeper has to get up to turn it off... to scientists who researched whether humans swim faster in syrup rather than in water... to British boffins who analysed the electrical activity of a locust's brain cell while the insect watched a "Star Wars" movie... and to a German team that calculated the pressure produced in penguins' anuses when the birds expel their faeces.

PTCL and Etisalat playing a cat and mouse game

In recent news PTCL the Pakistan telecom company which had sold 26% of its shares to Etisalat the UAE Telco, announced yet again that the deal was not off and that the negotiations had been successful, lets see what the terms of the negotiations are.

National Security

A civilian Aircraft piloted by foreign crew landed at the PAF base insted of QA International airport, How dumb can an air traffic controller be to get an aircraft to land at the wrong airport. And how dumb can the Air Force be to not know that such a big aircraft is landing on thier runway, fortunately it was a commercial jet and not an enemy bomber. But according to the news the air force woke up and cordoned the aircraft after landing. This all happened in broad day light 1 hour before the arrival of a secure flight for the prime minister.

Dawn Reports: "A Boeing 737 landed on Friday at the PAF Faisal Base instead of the Quaid-i-Azam International Airport. Sources said that the Dubai-Karachi flight PK-214 of the Pakistan International Airlines, carrying 142 passengers, landed at the PAF base owing to pilot’s error and negligence of the air traffic controller at the Jinnah terminal.The Boeing 737 was one of the five aircraft recently acquired by the PIA on wet lease from a Turkish company mainly for Haj operation. The aircraft carries the monogram of the Turkish company."

A1 Grand Prix

For all my Pakistani readers from the UAE, team Pakistan is taking part is the A1 Grand Prix in dubai events are scheduled from friday to sunday. For more information on the event and the pakistani team visit the official website of A1 Grand Prix.

Making a difference

The problem with Pakistan is that we the people of this country are not bothered with what goes on around us. We seem to be aloaf of the situation and we seem to not care at all what happens around us and what we can do to make a difference. We don't care what our leaders do, infact we don't even care who our leaders are most of us who should care, who are educated, who should know what makes us tick don't even vote. In a country which has seen more military dictatorships then popularly elected governments if elections are not rigged, then votes are bought and sold for the price of a weeks meal. Daniel Berrigan a renouned peace activist once said

"Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the Look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even."

Why is it that even when we witness starvation all around us we don't care, let alone suffer.

We as a nation need to change if we want change in our country, we need to make a difference at the individual level. We need to volunteer where we can, contribute to nation building, educate the people who can't get a decent education, we need to do whatever we can to make a difference.

"The purpose of life is not to be happy - but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all. " Leo Rosten

What Pakistani's need to do

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. ~Thomas Paine

Pakistan Leaders who could not lead

The following paras are taken from an article about the state of affairs of pakistan's leaders published in Media Monitors Network. The article is worth reading.

"How ignorant and corrupt a nation could be if it foresees people like Benazir Bhutto, Zardaris, Sharifs and General Musharaf as promising leaders who looted its honor and wealth and jeopardized its very existence?"

"Old puppets never die", noted an old English juggler. Pakistanis have not created leaders but puppets to perform on stage. A nation floating with military coups, economic dilemmas and political tragedies without any rational sense of its future. There appears to be something fundamentally wrong either with the nation or its genuinely proven corrupt leaders.

Does Musharaf or any military rulers hold a "vision" for change and political reformation for the future of Pakistan? Is General Musharaf capable of doing anything good for the besieged nation?

”Allah does not change the conditions of people, unless first they change themselves (Al-Qura’an). ”Perpetuated ignorance leaves no glimmer of hope for a sustainable change on the political or intellectual horizons. In all likelihood, it will be abrupt change to oust the General from within the body of the military establishments.

Pakistan army to take over Education

"The government will hire Pakistan Army personnel to improve the level of
education in schools and colleges"

These are the words of President of Pakistan, who is not willing to remove his uniform. In Pakistan he is seldom seen in Civilian clothes while abroad he is never is in a Military Uniform. He hold two offices simultaneously the office of the president as well as the office of the Army Chief. The Army in Pakistan is in control of everything and now we seem to be loosing the education department to the military too.

Let's see, the Pakistan Army recruits its officers straight from 12th grade and sends them off to the Pakistani Military academy. This academy is like the American "BOOT Camp", only Americans send their officers to the boot camp after a 4 year education in a regular college. They also have a military academy at westpoint which offers a wide variety of 4 years degrees to its cadets along with military training. The Pakistan academy on the other hand Graduates officers after a two year degree (which they like to compare to the American 4 year undergraduate Degree), Most of these two years are spent in physical aspects and not education. During their career the officers go through several courses starting from basic, to command and staff college, and then the war college, command and staff college confers degree's in war studies also, its an honorary bachelors and the war college confers a master's in war studies. The soldier of the Pakistan army is a warrior in all aspects what can we expect from them in the education sector. Please leave educators to their education and do what you are supposed to do.