Accidentally Like A Martyr

Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian who sparked off the turmoil in North Africa after setting himself alight, never got to see the aftermath of his action.

By all accounts, it appears to have been the final act of frustration at the futility of his own personal situation, rather than a statement of any great political intent but it's no less a tragedy for that. What happened afterwards however, would surely have been inconceivable to him.

And likewise, as revolution subsequently spreads through Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, I wonder if the policewoman who slapped him has ever given it another thought, or if she's ever come to rue her action.

What price to afford someone their dignity?

They Don't Write Like That Anymore

I recently saw an obituary, in an English music magazine strangely enough, and only belatedly so, because of how long it takes for these magazines to reach our shores.

It was for Australian journalist, Murray Sayle (1-1-26 to 18-09-2010), and it prompted me to look further. In doing so, I found an obituary (among several) in one of our local papers and had to marvel at what a story his life made.

As a journalist, he covered half-a-dozen wars, located Francis Chichester on his solo yacht trip and on the same trip, went on to track down Che Guevara and be the first to report that he had left Cuba to take the revolution to South America. He also managed to interview infamous British spy, Philby, in Moscow, the only journalist to do so after Philby's defection. His career at The Times ended when he resigned on principle over the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry, his viewpoint being eventually vindicated a few months before his death. After leaving The Times, he spent 30 years living and working in Japan. Somewhere in there, he also climbed Mt Everest. All in all, it sounds like he was a pretty remarkable individual.

I wonder what he made of today's journalism with so many stories revolving around celebrity and research amounting to little more than running searches on Twitter.

ICC Nothing At All

The opening ceremony to the ICC World Cup was held last night in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Perfect! It's over and I managed to miss all the dancing. Now let's sit down and watch some sport. Oh, there's nothing on! That's right, no cricket. At all.

I've already discussed the uselessness of opening ceremonies but you've got to hand it to the ICC to take them to a new level of pointlessness.

Only cricket would start a tournament with a rest day...

Well, What Do You Know?

Every year the BBC publishes a list of "100 things we didn't know last year". It's always an entertaining read and it's interesting to see how many of them you actually knew. Sad to say, that while several of them are not particularly surprising, this year I can only claim to know 5 of them!

Of the 95 I didn't know, the most startling facts were that:

• Hamburger-related injuries are on the rise in Taiwan
• The two most common pronunciations of Van Gogh are wrong.

Although some might argue that finding out that Donald Trump's hair was real was very unexpected...

For the full list, see the BBC site.

Mirror Mirror

I love how, when you've finished getting your hair cut, the hairdresser holds a mirror up to show you the back of your head. The problem with this is that at any given time, I have no idea what the back of my head looks like, so I'm pretty clueless as to whether what I'm being shown is actually an improvement.

I'm pretty sure that when I say "That's great!" as I invariably do, it's either because I never cease to be amazed by the simplicity of the two-mirror trick, or, much worse, it could be because I'm just very excited to be seeing the back of my head again...