Archive - 2008

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stephen Colbert, whose U.S. presidential campaign was cut short, came out a winner on Tuesday when he walked away with a Webby award as the Internet's "Person of the Year."

The Webby awards, which honor excellence on the Internet, are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy. Winners will be honored at ceremonies on June 9th and 10th in New York, and, as always, will be limited to just a five-word acceptance speech.

Colbert won the highest honor for "the innovative way he has used the Internet to interact with fans of The Colbert Report."

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Photo courtesy of Reuters

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BERLIN: Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone operator, and Telecom Italia Mobile, the leader in the Italian cellphone market, said they had reached agreements with Apple to sell the multimedia telephone. Vodafone also said it would sell the iPhone in nine other countries: the Czech Republic, Greece, Portugal, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

"It was going to be difficult for Apple to continue on an exclusivity basis," said Carolina Milanesi, the research director for mobile devices at Gartner in London. "Opening up to more operators will widen their addressable market and therefore their overall sales potential."

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SYDNEY: "Vodafone Australia is enormously pleased to be included in the agreement to sell the iPhone to our customers later this year," Vodafone chief executive Russell Hewitt said.

"The iPhone has already proved to be extremely popular with customers in other parts of the world and Vodafone is confident that today's announcement will be well received by all Australians who are keen to get their hands on their own iPhone."

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Photos courtesy of AP and Reuters

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”

Above excerpt from poem by Lord Byron (1788–1824) is the beginning of the movie based on a true story, of a young top student and athlete Christopher McCandless from Emory University, who donated his savings (all $24,000) to charity and abandoned his car, walked by himself, alone, “Into the Wild”, into Alaska. He burned his social security card, all personal IDs, and family photos, leaving no clue for his well-off family to find him. A very sad journey of a young man at 24 to disconnect himself entirely from society from the moment he burnt the remaining cash in his wallet, a “new birth”, in his words… The perceived hypocrisy in his parents’ and family relationships that he hates most has buried, in a little boy’s heart, a secret bomb of pain, not unlocked in time. He did not make one phone call even to his younger sister, nor did love from acquaintances on the road stop him from a journey obviously leading an innocent to apparent danger. Does the young man “love not man the less, but Nature more”?

Released by Paramount Vantage. Running time: 140 minutes. Starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, and William Hurt. (screenshots) -

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*Update*
"Into the Wild" is a 2007 film written and directed by Sean Penn, adapted from Jon Krakauer's 1996 non-fiction book "Into the Wild" (based on Christopher McCandless's travels across N America and his life in the Alaskan wilderness).

Sean Penn's popular quote
"We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage."

"YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar's official media said Tuesday that 10,000 people were killed by a cyclone in just one town, confirming fears of a spiraling death toll from the storm's 12-foot tidal surges and high winds that swept away bamboo homes in low-lying coastal regions... Fishing boats were crushed by the tropical cyclone in the port of Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday. Winds reached 120 miles per hour."

Images courtesy of Associated Press

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Bob Dylan came up with one way to remember Albert Einstein: “Now you would not think to look at him/But he was famous long ago/For playing the electric violin/On Desolation Row.”

This is the pure distillate of celebrity. Dylan’s folk-rock vision of “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood” is one in which the original man has disappeared into a symbolic fog where more or less any meaning may be found. Nowadays, such content-less fame has become common, though there aren’t many out there who match Einstein for resonance. But when he first exploded into public view, there were no precedents. No scientist before or since has so completely transcended the role of expert to become a universal emblem of reason.

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Photographers caught that wit as well as the gravitas. It helped that he was astonishingly willing to play along. No one made him ride that bicycle or stick out his tongue straight into the barrel of an oncoming lens. Whatever weariness he felt at the crush of the public gaze, he was almost always willing to pause for the shot. There is a story that he was once asked—by perhaps the only person on earth who did not recognize him—what he did for a living. He replied that he was a photographer’s model.

He was just as open to sharing his ideas. Einstein took seriously questions about his science, up to the point of writing one of the best introductions to relativity for the lay reader. (Called Relativity, it’s still in print.) He handled the ridiculous questions, too, with humor and enormous stamina. He told his interrogators what he thought of Prohibition (against, though he didn’t drink), the death penalty (against, at least some of the time), and abortion (for, up to a certain point in the pregnancy). No scientist before Einstein had been so willing to stand before his public.

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Images courtesy of NASA

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