“Assassin’s Creed”, being produced by Ubisoft Montreal is another game I’m anxiously waiting for to get for my Xbox 360. You play Altair, “(الطائر, Arabic, “The Flyer”), a member of the Hashshashin sect (the original “assassins”), whose objective is to slay the nine historical figures who are propagating the Crusades”.
The backstory is a real interesting one. The Hashshashin sect existed for real in the Middle Ages and terrorised both Crusade figures and “Muslim rulers whom they saw as impious usurpers”. The word “assassin” is derived from the sect. The Wikipedia entry is a fantastic read.
The trailer above is another “killer app” one like the “Gears of War” ad - it really makes you want to buy the game. The song playing in it is “Lonely Soul” by UNKLE.
Check out the official site for another great trailer. It’s tentatively scheduled to be released in November this year. AWESOME!
Incidentally, the producer for the game Jade Raymond is hot.
I would like to start by saying that I have no problems with the anti-terrorism laws that Australia has in place. However, as we now realise the laws can potentially be used on the wrong person for the wrong reasons which can result in a serious loss of liberty and rights.
So all this started about four weeks ago …
We first heard that Dr. Haneef was arrested at Brisbane Airport with a one-way ticket to India, just a few days after the attacks at Glasgow Airport. He is related to some of the suspects already arrested in the UK. He was arrested on the grounds that a SIM card that he once owned was found on one of the UK suspects in Glasgow.
Suspicious behaviour? Justified arrest? Based on what the public knew at the time, there were no doubts on both.
Then a judge released Dr. Haneef on bail based on the following reasons:
[Magistrate Jacqui] Payne had listed eight reasons for granting bail, including the fact that prosecutors did not allege that Haneef had been directly involved with a terror group.
…
Among her reasons for granting bail, Payne had said Haneef’s SIM card had not been used in relation to the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow last month.
She also cited Haneef’s good employment record, his lack of a criminal history, and the fact that he was employed as a doctor.
Never mind that Dr. Haneef was not a flight risk as he had already surrendered his Indian passport, the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews then decided to immediately withdraw his working visa because in the minister’s point of view, Dr. Haneef has failed the character test to remain in Australia. So essentially, the government is assuming Haneef’s guilt when a court has not decided on it.
A bit heavy-handed? Yup. Haneef would have been sent to a detention camp if he had made bail. Essentially, he’d be going from one jail to another. So what’s the point of making bail then? None, and so Dr. Haneef remained in custody.
And then the big news broke.
THE crucial piece of evidence against the terrorism suspect Mohamed Haneef - that his mobile phone SIM card was found at the scene of a British car bombing - is wrong, the Australian Federal Police have admitted.
The Australian police had said that they only acted based on the information given to them by the British police. The British police said that they supplied the correct information to the Australian police, and that it was the Australian police who had bungled things. But who cares really? Dr. Haneef’s life and reputation had now been trashed.
Along with that, it was discovered that Dr. Haneef had applied for emergency leave to see his wife and baby, that he told friends and colleagues about it. His flight had been planned before the attacks in Glasgow. He wasn’t “fleeing justice” in any sense of it.
By now, there was no other choice for the Director of Public Prosecutions but to drop the charges against Dr. Haneef. His only true “crime”? He is related to lousy cousins who were terrorists. Bloody hell.
So he’s now released but he no longer has his visa. And he had been planning to fly back to India to see his wife and then 6-day old infant daughter when he was arrested. Naturally, he wanted to be on the first flight out. If for no other reason, I wouldn’t stay a minute longer in Australia than I have to after what I had gone through the past four weeks. Would you?
But Minister Andrews was not done …
On Friday the charges were dropped and Dr Haneef freed after intense criticism of the federal police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. But Mr Andrews has refused to give back his working visa and yesterday persisted in pointing to Dr Haneef’s potential guilt by saying his quick departure from Australia early yesterday for Bangalore “actually heightens rather than lessens my suspicion”.
And now the finger pointing can start. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said that they were supplied bad info. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Immigration Minister both said that they acted on the AFP’s advice. Even if we allow that mistakes do happen and what a doozy these are, no apology or compensation is forthcoming to Dr. Haneef.
Yet, he’d still consider coming back to Australia if his visa was reinstated. Somehow, in the midst of all the face-saving by the Government now, I doubt that will happen. But damn I have to admire his sense of forgiveness.
Security at the cost of liberty is not security at all. I’m feeling ever more convinced that I will be voting for the opposition, the Labor party this upcoming federal election. Remember, you get the government you deserve.
Appreciating your blog readers and not completely revamping and deleting your blog, and/or disappearing off the Internet completely. Show them courtesy and thanks by at least stating in advance your intentions. Unless of course, you don’t really care about your readers.
My results with having advertising on my blog thus far and has it changed my way of writing - please say “no”.
Press Play or Download MP3 (2:47, 2.6mb) - right-click, save-as
So there’s this cat in an American nursing home that can predict who’s gonna die next. How does he do it? He curls next to the people who will eventually die in the next few hours. And how is that different to when he curls up to someone normally? Well, he doesn’t usually curl up to people see. So when he does curl up to a person, THAT’S IT!
Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.
His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
“He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” said Dr David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one,” said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
So if you are a cat owner, and your cat loves to cuddle up to you all of a sudden when it doesn’t normally, start writing up that will. Oops, too late - you’re already dead.
Oh, and the above picture has nothing to do with the story. Nope, none whatsoever. Unless you have a sick sense of humour like I do. Heh heh heh.
I’m sure you must have heard of 7-Eleven’s tie-in promotion with “The Simpsons” movie whereby they transform several real-life stores into “Kwik-E-Marts”. As part of the promotion, the stores will look like their cartoon counterpart and sell products that exist in the cartoon universe such as Squishees and Buzz Cola.
Although there were initial concerns of potentially offending Indians, and a majority of 7-Eleven franchisees in the US are Indian, a large number of store-owners think it is a great business idea. But then Manish Vij sees a problem with this:
Desi franchise employees, among others, are being asked to don Kwik-E-Mart costumes with Apu nametags, come to work under banners mocking their ethnicity, and bid customers goodbye with the phrase, “Thank you, come again!”
I don’t know how true Manish’s accusations are (his is the only name in several reports of the same story) but I can understand his frustrations and indignation if they are. Rightly or wrongly, the phrase “thank you, come again” is now so deeply “Indian” thanks to The Simpsons that you can’t possibly say it without sounding like or thinking of an Indian person. But then, don’t most service employees say that phrase, in one form or another?
Being an ethnic minority, I’m acutely aware of stereotypes of my race and culture wherever and whenever I see or hear them in the media. But I think when the promotions are done right, in general, most of us have learnt to laugh at the stereotypes.
A few Australian TV examples come to mind:
The feuding Thai restaurant owners in an ad for Yellow Pages.
The Indian guru and his yoga class full of pretentious Anglos in an ad for Lipton Ice Green Tea.
In general, I feel that the Apu stereotype is a positive one: although his character’s Indian qualities are played up for laughs, he owns a business, he’s usually shown to be more intelligent than the other characters who frequent his store and in one episode he aspired to become an American even whilst clinging on to this Indian ways. He is a model immigrant indeed.
There would be some who would not be satisfied with the above so to them I’d say, “The Simpsons” is full of crazy and outlandish stereotypes and nothing and no one is sacred. Even Australians were lampooned mercilessly in one episode, and yet the show is still shown here. So perhaps, a step back to look at the bigger picture is in order.
In ending, there is one oft-repeated cultural mistake in Australian media which I’d like to mentioned though and that is: satay is Malay/Indonesian and not Chinese or Japanese. Stop showing chopsticks, and playing cheesy Eastern-sounding gongs and chimes, and showing Chinese-y and Japanese-y “words”, and women in cheong-sams or kimonos in your advertising. If you wanna do Asian, get the facts right. Mmm-kay?
It’s now been four days of rain in a row - last night was especially bad with the wind and mini-tornado wreaking havoc down in Rockingham. I’ve been sick for seven days but it feels like it’s ending (shut up, don’t jinx it!). I haven’t felt warmth from the sun for don’t know how much longer than that. The days have been dull and grey, and it’s been cold, wet and miserable.
However, I can take solace in the fact that at least Perth is not like parts of the UK at the moment with even heavier rain and flooding (BBC News). Perspective, yeah?
