The Colonel

Leader of a coup d'etat removing a royal family from power and placing them under indefinite house arrest. Sent revolutionary hit squads abroad to kill dissidents of his country who had fled the country, they managed to find and kill 9. Invaded a neighboring country. Was a major financier of the "Black September Movement" which perpetrated the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics and also bombed a Berlin discotheque in 1986 killing several and wounding hundreds. Paid "Carlos the Jackal" to kidnap a number of Saudi and Iranian oil ministers to release them for ransom. Supplied weapons to the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. Organized several of his diplomats to leave the UK under diplomatic immunity after they had accidentally shot a police officer dead in front of their embassy who was there to protect the embassy from demonstrators. He actively supported the PLO in their war against Israel with money and weapons. And finally two of his intelligence service officers planted a bomb on Pan Am flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270. After more than a decade of sanctions he finally agreed to hand over the men and accept the responsibility for the bombing in exchange for the lifting of the UN sanctions.

Who are we talking about here? Yes, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. I knew this man was dangerous, but the list mentioned above was really shocking to me. Why is that man even still in power? Sovereign state or not, this is clearly an international criminal and an international financier of terrorism. I really can not understand how he can just get away by apologizing and paying $2.7 billion to the families of the Lockerbie tragedy. What...that's it? Done deal? Closed case? Now let's get to the even juicier part of the story, which is probably a good explanation of why he still is in power. He decided to give the countries who lifted their sanctions exclusive rights to oil fields....yes OIL. AGAIN... The same week Britain decided to start diplomatic relations again, BP and Shell announced they'd each invest around a billion pounds into oil exploration in Libya. How amazing is that? Well ok, the guy's being nice now, let's get on with the drilling!! Woohoo!!

And now there is a big case going on in Libya with several Bulgarian nurses on trial because they allegedly infected nearly 500 children with HIV purposely in a Libyan hospital. According to research from the EU the infections happened before the Bulgarian nurses had even started to work there... The Libyan courts are ignoring that evidence and are saying there are enough testimonies from Libyan employees at the hospital who say otherwise (imagine what would happen to those employees if they had given another story...). So the verdict is the death sentence for all the nurses. Now the Bulgarian government has intervened together with the EU by offering to pay $1 million to each family of the HIV infected kids. That's nearly half a billion dollars in total of (ahem....MY) tax money. Libya seems content with that so the courts changed the sentence to a life sentence... Are you kidding me?? Now Bulgaria wants to get them extradited in order to clear them of charges due to lack of substantial evidence. Libya probably just wants a bit more money, before they can do that. What's so horrible about this, is that a large number of health experts around the world all agree the HIV infections probably occurred due to the bad conditions in the Libyan hospitals and that this is just a good way for the government to divert the attention from that fact.

Somebody please get rid of that dude...

Reality TV - not so real

As you all must have noticed there is an increasing number of reality TV shows on TV. Industry 'experts' have repeatedly predicted the end of reality TV, because people wouldn't be interested in watching ANOTHER show 'The life of [fill in some celebrity's name, usually B-class]'. The interesting thing is these shows remain to attract huge numbers of viewers. My production company has recently finished some work for a large TV network here in Holland; the program was a reality TV show on a famous cook here setting up the largest fish restaurant in the country. The format was a contest in which 8 selected cooks had to compete in order to become the chef cook of the new restaurant working for this celeb cook's group of restaurants. It was a big hit on TV ranking in the top 5 nationwide every episode. But I can understand that, it's very similar to Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen and that's fun to watch as it's also interesting.

However, that wasn't what bothered me, actually intrigued is the better word. Why are people so extremely interested in watching other people's lives? And then I'm talking about all aspects of it, even scenes of parts of their lives I wouldn't even find interesting of my biggest idol. Take the TV show Big Brother for example (the producing firm pays over half our bills so I won't be too harsh haha) isn't actually even a real TV show. It's a network of CCTV camera's hanging in a house built out of containers in a studio park with people locked in it for months. I have tried to watch it once, but I hated it. Why do people like to watch that kind of stuff? Those prime time hours could be filled with much more interesting shows. And then it struck me...reality TV shows are far from reality for about 99.9% of the viewers. On the one hand you have the celebrities who live lavish lifestyles that would even make many millionaires feel embarrassed and on the other you have shows about 'normal' people like Big Brother. The celebrities have their own little world and I can understand to a certain extent that's fun to watch now and then. But the most popular reality shows remain the shows like Big Brother and the reason is the brilliant selection of the contestants. Most 'normal' and sane people wouldn't even think of having themselves locked up in a house with a group of strangers just for the slight chance of surviving long enough to win a quarter of a million dollars. That's what makes or breaks these shows. When stories about big fights or racist comments on live TV hit the press, the market share shoots up. I know we all like to catch up on gossip and juicy celeb stories, but this is different. Here we want to watch it live and wait for something to get totally out of hand in there. Because we know it's going to happen, we just don't know when and you want to have seen it first and live. You can deny it all you want, but these shows are actually very similar to the gladiator spectacles in ancient Rome. We are still a blood thirsty bunch, but just with less blood because that's not done anymore. We humans are strange beings sometimes... Would like to hear/read your comments!

A little lump of coal becomes a diamond

Paul Potts, a 36 year old mobile phone salesman struggling to support himself and his wife with the 1,50 pound commission per sold phone, dreams of being a professional opera singer. A mobile phone salesman singing opera? Yes, an opera singer! He signed up for Britain's Got Talent on ITV and ended up winning the entire contest racking up 100,000 pounds, a performance for the Queen and other members of the Royal family and a million pound record deal with Simon Cowell. His album actually has entered the top 20 on Amazon worldwide, and it hasn't even been released yet (pre-release orders). Watch the youtube video of his first performance on BGT to see the reactions of the judges and audience (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA). What an amazing story...

Currently the most polluting country in the world, but with pandas...

China's economy is growing with double digits, China's wealthy are getting wealthier, China is now the most polluting country in the world, China will be the next 'superpower', etc. That's all you read now about China. But then a question hit me, a question which gave China a lot of news coverage years ago before this whole 'boom' took off; how about the pandas??

Even though China has problems such as the overheating economy, the undervalued currency, WTO disagreements and heavy pollution, they have managed to turn around the fate of the giant panda. For many of us probably a symbol of China and of course the logo of WWF. According to the latest research the wild pandas in China are doing much better than we thought! Instead of 1,000 pandas recently thought to be living in the wild, recent estimates from 2006 show there probably are currently as many as 3,000 pandas living in the wild. Two decades ago there were 13 panda reserves in China, in 2006 there were 40. Thanks to a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation, a large portion of the pandas' natural habitat has been placed under protection. However, pandas are still an endangered species according to the WWF and much work needs to be done to get them off that list. But it looks as though their future is definitely a lot brighter than a decade ago. Good news is nice now and then isn't it? :)

Laugh about economics

Sitting in my macro and micro economics classes I never would've thought you could make the basic theories of economics sound amusing in any way. The people who have studied economics/business at university should know exactly what I'm talking about. The ones who took eco at high school only know what I'm talking about if you paid any attention during those classes at all. I stumbled upon 'The world's first and only stand-up comedian', a young economist in the US with a PhD degree. Follow this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4 and have a laugh. And if you really like him you can book him on his website, because that's the only way he can convince his dad this is actually a good profession after having studied for 10 years haha.

Two-Way Street

Why Two-Way Street?

Well, it's actually very simple. I felt like having my own spot on the web where I can post ideas and comments on various topics and a blog seemed a good way to do just that. Don't expect any first-class literary material or stuff like that. I am a two-way street, an extremely busy one... On the one hand I am an information junkie, I love information on, well, basically anything. I read tons of newspapers, magazines, websites, etc every single week and locking me up with Discovery Channel and the History Channel for a week is actually not even near to torture to me. I seriously read about everything, for some reason I love to know things especially about stuff that actually at first doesn't interest me. The result of this hunger for information is that I like to pass that information on very much :) This is the other direction of the two-way street. I love to tell people, actually mainly my friends, about stuff I've read about even though they usually really couldn't care less. Sometimes this results in hilarious situations where I'm talking to a group of friends at the dinner table about some new bird species explorers discovered in the Amazon, only to discover at the end of my story that I'm not even sure if it actually truly interests myself haha. But it's all about passing on the information I pick up. Probably I now sound like some geeky nerd who lives in libraries while on the other hand loves attention talking about absolute crap, but I'm actually completely the opposite (well, maybe not the latter part...). So drop by now and then to catch up on stories that got caught up in my chaotic and busy two-way street and I feel are worth sharing with you ;)