Category: Politics

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David Hicks, Australian larrikin

Whatever you think about the political issues, Australian David Hicks, currently a long-term guest of the US government at the exclusive Guantanamo Bay health resort, does seem to have a sense of humour.

As reported in Crikey today (though not included on the free-to-view website), Hicks has been stirring the pot in a typically Australian fashion.

Hicks obviously speaks some of the language of the people with whom he’s lived, trained and fired weapons, but many of his comrades had little or no English when they arrived at Guantanamo. So they begged Hicks for knowledge of suitably dark and vicious curses they could hurl at their infidel American jailers, something that would really annoy the Servants of Satan?

The guards were subsequently met with an enraged chorus from the “worst of the worst”: “Gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’“

I wonder what the guards made of that!

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Disturbing the Store

My vote for “Prank of the Month” (well, last month) goes to the New York-based Improv Everywhere crew for flooding a Best Buy department store with around 80 people dressed almost like their staff.

The full report on this prank shows how the store management couldn’t cope — they didn’t like it, and people get nervous when confronted with something “different”.

It’s also interesting reading the comments on Bruce Schneier’s write-up of this event, where so many commenters fail to see the difference between a “threat to the store” and a “threat to the perceived authority of the store managers”.

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The Long Tail of Small Business

Whenever we see “business” depicted on the news, we see images of office buildings, factories, coal mines… And yet of the 3 million active registered businesses in Australia, fully 72 percent don’t have any employees.

The median business is actually a single man or woman — likely to be a sole trader because sole traders are the most common form of businesses (39%), followed by proprietary limited companies (26%).

Continue reading “The Long Tail of Small Business”