Googoosh is one of Iran's most popular singers. Born in 1951, she started her career as a singer in the late 60's and appeared on TV and live until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. She currently lives in Iran
Here is a video clip of one of her most famous songs "Man Amade am" which means "I am coming" (I think). The video quality is pretty bad but you can see why she was (and still is) so popular
Did I mention I am a huge Monty Python fan? Monty Python is the name of a troupe of 6 guys who performed a weekly show on the BBC in the late 60's and early 70's. Many of today's comedians profess to derive their inspiration from MP including Trey and Matt, the creators of South Park (link to their tribute) and Shoaib Mansoor (not a comedian though) who created the iconic Fifty Fifty for Pakistan TV in the 80's
Following is a song played at the end from their 1979 film "Life of Brian" which is on many people's and polls' fave of all time lists. This is the end of the film and the protagonist, Brian Cohen (not the singer) is being crucifed, albeit softly by the Romans (link opens in new window/tab)
'Some things in life are bad,' 'They can really make you mad,' 'Other things just make you swear and curse,' 'When you're chewing on life's gristle,' 'Don't grumble, give a whistle,' 'And this'll help things turn out for the best, and...'
Katherine McPhee is the 24 year old finalist of American Idol's Season 5 (ending May 2006) (links to idol and wikipedia pages)
On May 2, she sang what is now my fave performance from the show, "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" which was originally sung by some singer called KT Tunstall
Youtube and Google Video are very religious about DRM so they won't let people upload the video. I found it on a new site here. There is also an audio mp3 recording here - let me know if any of these links are broken.
Recently, the BBC decided to interview Gyu Kewney (link to his blog), a technology magazine editor to talk on a court case where Apple computers is the defendant
Unfortunately for the news channel, they ended up interviewing the wrong guy, Guy Goma, an IT guy belonging to the Congo. Newspapers mistakenly reported him as being a taxi driver who had driven up Kewney and was waiting for the fare
Mr Goma is a little confused at the start but when his name and profile is announced, his surprise is priceless - link to video
Karen Bowerman: Guy Kewney is editor of the technology website Newswireless.
Mr Goma: (face of horror) KB: Hello, good morning to you.
Mr Goma: Good morning.
KB: Were you surprised by this verdict today.
Mr Goma: I am very surprised to see... this verdict to come on me because I was not expecting that. When I came they told me something else and I am coming. So a big surprise anyway.
Kewney writes about the incident in his blog - only he shows his racist side in it - repeated references to Goma as being black and him being "pink" - Kewney writes that he lost his 2 minutes of fame by not appearing on the BBC's show but by writing in racist tones about the incident, he has damaged his own reputation irreparably - he has been throughly berated on the comment area of his blog
Goma, meanwhile, has turned into something of an internet celebrity, (like William Hung or Mahir Cagri) with people from USA to Russia to Japan linking to him. I wonder when we will see a website dedicated to him coming up? guygoma.com has already been registered on the 16th of May, '06 - the interview was conducted around the 9th - already we can see "remixes" of the interview doing the rounds, you can keep account of most of them by searching for the right tags at youtube
The BBC decided to interview both Guys again and ask them about the interview which has made unexpected celebrities from both
George Orwell, the political & cultural commentator and accomplished novelist lived from 1903 to 1950. He wrote a very interesting article on how the language is used to mollify or glorify mundane or undesirable news.
"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
This is very relevent today too with the different language used by the mainstream media specially when they are reporting news w.r.t Israel vs Palestine or Iraq
George Orwell wrote many novels including the excellent 1984 and Animal Farm
Someone has come up with this idea of linking buildings (and other physical locations) around the world with wikipedia articles describing them, with the help of an ISBN like machine readable tags
They have a pretty readable explanation at the site - it goes like this
1. 2. You are in Austria and you want to visit the Presidential Palace
Someone pastes the machine readable tag near the building, you read it off the page using your cell phone and voila, you get the URL on your cell phone's browser....
This is one of those stories that newspapers keep printing just for the sake of filling up their pages - here they discuss some "moral dilemmas" which some so-called philosophers with too much time on their hands came up with
The best part of the article is the reader's comments - go through the article and then the comments - this is the first example I have seen a conventional story has been made readable through some witty comments link
Googoosh is one of Iran's most popular singers. Born in 1951, she started her career as a singer in the late 60's and appeared on TV and live until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. She currently lives in Iran
