Chasing the Dream: Book Review + PODCAST

When I was younger I probably partied too much, but I've greatly tempered my behaviour. I go out and socialise, because the alternative is to stay home and get bogged down in nothingness. - Ryk Neethling

It took me 4 days to read Chasing the Dream, the authorised biography of South Africa's swimming sensation, Ryk Neethling. More accurately, 4 nights after work, reading until one or two in the morning. Reading the book made me want to go and swim in the gym (but not until I'd finished the whole book).

Clinton van der Berg does a credible job in his first outing as book writer, maintaining invisibility throughout, and giving the platform entirely to Ryk, whose voice comes through with powerful authenticity.

You may be surprised to hear that Ryk was a shy little boy once upon a time, with some of his reservedness caused by a speech impediment. You may also be interested to know which coach pushed Ryk the hardest, and made him the toughest. Here's a clue - not a US-based coach. Disturbing - the enmity between Dirk Lange and Ryk [His dislike of me was relentless], who had very personal, very angry differences. This reminds one of Jack White's struggles and frustrations with rugby's sport administrators. It's great that Ryk courageously admits these problems - and does so in a way that doesn't seem defeatist or spiteful.

Even so, don't expect a sanitised, self aggrandising story. Ryk calls a spade a spade, and an asshole an asshole.

Ryk draws us into his inner circle of relationships, giving us the inside track on Amanda Beard, Ian Thorpe (see above), Michael Phelps (an entire chapter devoted to him) and sensitively portrays his conflicting feelings between chasing his dream and being there for his ailing sister Elsje. There are also fascinating moments of self-examination, from his own failures (Ryk retired in 2000 before making the switch to short distances), to those of his Broederbond father. Ryk manages to maintain dignity in this honest account of a boy from Bloemfontein, who dreamed big, and went far away to chase those dreams.

For some the many references to meets and times may be confusing, and there are one or two rough patches where the storyline seems to skip forward and then hiccups back slightly. These are the only troublesome bubbles caught up (as you're likely to be) in the smooth pacing of the story. The authentic voice maintains a steady momentum through the froth, which ought to get you through his life story in record time.

The last chapters on the Beijing Olympics are as riveting as the chapters of young Rykie. Will Ryk attempt a fifth Olympics? Buy this book and find out!

Rating: 8/10

Listen to Ryk's 10 Commandments
Order Chasing the Dream here.

Cry Me A River: The 20 Most Heartbreaking Songs Of All Time!

Sometimes the song you associate with the person (and it may not even be a love song) becomes the eulogy for the doomed relationship. Shania Twain makes me want to cry

clipped from new.music.yahoo.com 1 George Jones: "He Stopped Loving Her Today," single (Epic, 1981) "He said I'll love you 'til I die..." Curly Putnam and Bobby Braddock wrote the shamelessly weepy lyric and melody; producer Billy Sherrill coated the track in sumptuous Nashville surround-sound; and then the greatest country singer of all gave the performance of a lifetime--a vocal imbued with deep, knee-quaking compassion for the poor schmuck who never got over the love of his life... until now, when he's "all dressed up to go away". I don't care how hard-bitten you may be, I defy you not to get a lump in the throat from this 20-year-old classic of cornball liebestod. It's utterly transcendental--the most heartbreaking record ever made. 5 The Righteous Brothers: "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," single (Philles, 1964) 6 Sinead O'Connor: "Nothing Compares 2 U," single (Chrysalis, 1990)

On the surface [PHOTOGRAPHY]

Why I Quit Swimming As #1 in 1984

I started swimming at a very young age. I was swimming with a coach, and training, at the age of 4 (whilst still at nursery school). Swimming suited me perfectly, since as a child I was shy, and quiet in public. I was a bundle of excitably mental and physical energy at home, but I found it very awkward to be around other people (and in a sense, I'm still that way).

I remember for the first months in kindergarten they couldn't get me to play with the kids. I would pitch up and draw for hours. I loved the huge sheets of paper they had, and that we could paint with water colors, or fingerpaint, or play with clay. It took a lot of cajolling to get me to loosen up, and when I did, I went nuts. I even performed in a play at the end of the year, where I had to stand up and shout: "HERE COMES THE KING, LET'S RUN AND HIDE." We used to build forts with planks in the trees. It was a lot of fun. Even so, I found a lot of comfort and thrill in the water, and as I say, in drawing. I loved to draw Disney characters, and what we were seeing on TV and movies (Heidi, Pinnochio, Peter Pan The Rescuers etc.)

I was also following in my brother's footsteps, though not quite. He was able to swim all the strokes perfectly, whereas I had a useless breastroke (it still sucks) and my freestyle was VERY free. My father referred to it as the windmeul [windmill].

My brother though inadvertantly painted a large target on his back. A lot of his friends swam with him and kept him company, whereas very few of my kindergarten buddies were interested, and those who were didn't swim particularly fast. When I tried to hang with my brother's friends, they laughed at me. And so that's how I started to work and focus on my swimming. It wasn't long before I was swimming just as fast as my brother and his pals, and that meant I was the quickest in my age group. One year in primary school we broke a freestyle relay record by 13 seconds. I won a few medals at Aquabears and Sasolburg and I broke a backstroke record at one point, but I was no Ryk Neethling, and I wasn't referring to the performances of American swimmers as he was, I was looking to my brother and people from our club (Otters and Seals, people like Barry Visser, and Allan Louis, and his two brothers).

I went to every Interhigh gala - not a huge feat - but I started with Free State Colors at the age of 7, and got it in Butterfly two years later. Two years after that I was a very serious 11 year old, and I knew who I was competing against. Luke Wollenschlaeger was a giant, and worse, he was a year younger than me. Next to him I was a pipsqueak. There was also Almero Strauss - a quiet, strong, white haired boy from Jim Fauche, and Mark Collie, who would go to Currie Cup. I wanted Free State colors again, and I needed to beat all these boys to get it. So I quit soccer (I was playing first team and Free State soccer at the time) to focus on swimming. I trained six days a week, often twice a day. Sometimes we even trained on Sundays. Some days I cried in my goggles. Other times my arms were too tired to lift to brush my hair. I swam so much when I looked at light bulbs I saw rainbows.

I'm not going to recount the race (I have before on this blog) other than to say Luke and I powered ahead of Almero and touched at the same time, 30.something. They gave me first.

The sacrifices that went into the race, and the 50/50 gamble of who won in the end didn't quite make sense to me. It didn't make the sacrifice worth it. I could also see that my body wasn't quite cut out for swimming (my coach said I was about to grow, but I've always been a bit too short for the sport, although I still have a big chest and long arms). The other thing was that at the same time that I waqs training like hell in swimming, and doing okay, I wasn't training at all in athletics (other than soccer practise) and then I would sneak a 2nd or 3rd in 100 metre sprints, and in the long jump. For many years I was the fastest swimmer and runner in my class, and I was one of the youngest boys in my class. So there was definitely a temptation to try athletics and other sports besides.

At the end of that year Penny Prideaux quit and went to Cape Town. That was a big blow. There was nothing wrong with Simon Gray, except that he came from Welkom and seemed to bring some of my arch enemies (like Mark Collie) from there into the squad...and he started off with quite technical training so I couldn't hear him (we had to write down heart rates etc and I had doctor's instructions to protect my ears so could never make out what he was saying). My first few workouts were miserable.

I had ear problems my whole life just like I had problems with my teeth. I suffered from ear ache, and several times from holes in my ear drums (where the chlorine had literally eaten through). This lead to me breathing on one side, something I still do today. Doctors today comment on the narrowness of my ear tubes; something I believe was an adaptation to those many hours spent in the water as a boy.

In the pool I had a nose clip and stuff in my ears, outside I had external braces. I was a mess outwardly, although inwardly I was the same boy with a strong fighting spirit. The addition of Grey High school, with all the older boys become pubescent assholes, was difficult for me to handle. My brother left as well, and my coach.
And then I left the sport completely for a few weeks.

It wasn't really a spontaneous decision. While I was training for my win, I resolved to take a breather (whether I won or not). And 'then see'. When I won the coach for Grey High secondary approached me, and told me how important I was going to be for the High School. He also wanted me to train in Grey's swimming pool, which I knew wasn't going to work.

Grey shipped in some of the best swimmers from other schools, which made it harder just to qualify for interhigh (you had to come 1st or 2nd). Now I was swimming against 5/6 of the best swimmers in the Free State. So I was often coming third, and often asked to swim the 100 Butterfly to let the other swimmers off the hook.

There are a lot of reasons. Even though I never regained the high level I had as a pikkie, I swam regularly in high school, and probably even more in university (but on my own, focussing on 1500m). I did attempt a comeback, and in matric I tried again, but family stress was worse than ever. In the end, I lost focus. For me, I achieved what I thought was enough for the time - #1 in the Free State. SA colors seemed very vague and hard to pursue (not hard to do as much as hard to figure out what to do and how), and I saw a lot of crazy swimmers in my time (I must have seemed off my rocker at times too), and didn't really see the sport as worth investing in. Especially since I didn't even have clarity on who would coach me, or how. And that was never really resolved.

So I do have a few regrets. I would have liked a better high school stint, but I did try and swimming served me beautifully as a triathlete, and I won races and managed podium finishes after school. My swimming background serves me still ;-)

Running for Your Life - Physical training, good diet and longevity are all tied together - PLUS PODCAST

A day is either a day that you went running, or didn't go running

Why running? Running is the most accessible exercise and arguably the cheapest. It can be done almost anywhere, with the minimum of infrastructure. People who complain that they are susceptible to injury should start off taking long walks.

Listen: http://visual.ohmynews.com/ohmytv/podcast/file_down.asp?bf_url=/down/audio/1/aeogae_331213_1[1].mp3

clipped from english.ohmynews.com One of the most powerful and underestimated effects of exercise in general, and running in particular, is its capacity to provide stress relief and flush out depression. Depression is associated with physical inactivity by numerous authors. Running is a cheap and effective treatment, but requires at least a spark of motivation or a glimmer of will from the depressed person. Once established, this capillary of power can be enlarged (by training with more discipline and regularity) into a major energizing channel. If depression is associated with physical inactivity, the opposite is therefore that being fit makes us happy. Being healthy makes us happy. Being thin and looking good helps us to enjoy ourselves. - Running for Your Life by Nicholas van der Leek (Read by Claire George)

'Synecdoche, New York' - The Best review on the Web

He's mining all the sadness in the world. As for happiness, he's suspicious. It's a sham product sold by a huckster (Hope Davis, as his therapist and bestselling self-help author). He's marveling at the struggle and the longing, multiplied by the billions, in the face of futility. He's having an existential freakout on an epic scale. - By CARINA CHOCANO

clipped from www.calendarlive.com Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden's mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once "an exciting, mysterious future" recedes into the past, "that this is everyone's experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was." This sounds hopeless -- too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden's vision. There's beauty everywhere -- in the transporting score by Jon Brion, in Hoffman and Morton's performances, in Adele's paintings (actually the miniaturized paintings of an artist named Alex Kanevsky), in the fact that we struggle in the face of futility, that as Caden tells his actors, we simultaneously fear and don't believe in death. That the house is on fire from the day you buy it. That the house is never not on fire. Read a complete review of Jim Carrey's 'Yes Man'. Read a complete review of 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'.

A-HA - Hunting High And Low [VIDEO]

Mike & The Mechanics - A Beggar On A Beach Of Gold [VIDEO]

Some of my favorite 80's songs...

'Til Tuesday - New Music - More Music Videos

Wal-Mart stampede - 1 dies

NVDL: This is ridiculous. Is shopping now a matter of life and death?

clipped from news.yahoo.com NEW YORK – Police were reviewing video from surveillance cameras in an attempt to identify who trampled to death a Wal-Mart worker after a crowd of post-Thanksgiving shoppers burst through the doors at a suburban store and knocked him down. Criminal charges were possible, but identifying individual shoppers in Friday's video may prove difficult, said Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, a Nassau County police spokesman. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers stepped over him and became irate when officials said the store was closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

Saudi king wants oil at $75 per barrel

Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi said that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will "do what needs to be done" to shore up falling oil prices when the cartel meets Dec. 17 in Algeria.

NVDL: 'Do what needs to be done'. Wonder what that is...

clipped from news.yahoo.com CAIRO, Egypt – Saudi Arabia's king says the price of oil should be $75 a barrel, much higher than it is now, but his oil minister indicated Saturday that no measures will likely be taken until OPEC meets again next month. "We believe the fair price for oil is $75 a barrel," he said, without saying how the price could be raised. Meanwhile, global crude inventories are growing, as evidenced by a U.S. government report showing a surprisingly large 7 million barrel build in stocks last week in the world's largest energy consumer.

n the House of Stone and Light Music Video - Martin Page

One of my favorite songs of all time...

Synechdoche, New York - It's unfiltered Kaufman at it's best (and worst)

Charlie Kaufman has been involved in the likes of hyper-original and seminal masterpieces (Adaptation, Being John Makovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

All of these movies feature miserable losers and mismatched lovers, but it is the intelligence and sensitivity, and the sheer creative freshness, that shines through. Kaufman is Woody Allen on speed: less nerdy, sharper and, well...better.

First, the title. Synechdoche. You say it like this: si-NEK-duh-kee. It's a metaphor of a sort, where a part is referred to as a whole, or the whole refers to a part. For example:

The White House said... (refering to a few government insiders).
The blonde in the red dress...
Nice wheels...
Cuba scored a home run...

Kaufman renders New York in the story, and his 13 million inhabitants refer to the world (or Kaufman's at least). Kaufman sees each person as the lead role in their lives, no one is an extra. But be warned - Kaufman's movie, unfiltered, becomes very emotionally draining.

Synechdoche. It's the perfect title for Kaufman's story, because it is a self-reflecting story, shooting off in a myriad of increasingly fragmented (but somehow cohesive), often ambiguous directions. One device Kaufman uses here that he has not employed before is leaping through entire lifetimes of his characters, forwards, backwards, forwards. Not a few days, weeks or months, but from childhood to adulthood, adulthood to the very last days of their lives.

For the bulk of this film, many viewers will probably keep up. I believe it was Kaufman's intention to overwhelm the audience, so that eventually they get lost in the size and complicated scope of the film, just as the deteriorating Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) eventually gets consumed by the girth of his theatre project. The question is: did Kaufman get overwhelmed by telling this mammoth story, or did we?

There are some fascinating asides in Synechdoche, among them the silly ambiguities Cotard has to deal with [''No' I'm not dying, or 'No' you can't tell me?']. The casting, as in all kaufman's flicks, is outstanding.
The 4 year old daughter of the theatre director, Olive (Sadie Goldstein)is delightful. Cotard's rebellious (and apparently bisexual) wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who flees with Cotard's daughter to Germany.
We get some relief from all the misery through Hazel (Samantha Morton), except that her house remains of fire for the duration of the story.

Despite the happy quirks, the tragicomedy and the emotional authenticity Kaufman embues (in his directorial debut), Synechdoche becomes increasingly deep, dark and profoundly miserable. Much of Kaufman's misery is darkly funny, all of it is fantastically complicated.

Kaufman at turns demonstrates the creeping sickness in society. That everything we eat is sick, making us sick. He veers off this topic into the sickness of our thoughts - the mental malaise that is each person's melodrum of madness. There was also the disturbia lurking in the background - the violence and anarchy that is growing behind the walls. This is Kaufman's dystopian view of where the world beyond our immediate experience is manifesting.

Kaufman wants to show everything - the whimsy, the irony, the dreariness, the loneliness, the love, the loss, the dystopia, the joy of living. He wants to mix it up and mess it up in the way life is messed up. Life is filled with hope and despair, disordered, something beautiful, often gross, sometimes grossly funny. It's confusion with a few stepping stones that make sense through the whirling humdrum of it all. But overall, it's an unholy miserable mess which Kaufman renders with some elegance.

There is some sex and a lot of death, and Kaufman broods on the death part. There are plenty of funerals in this film. Even an extra gets his own funeral. The message is that specifics are not important, even if the specifics of our own circumstances are what we claim to define us. In the scheme of things, specifics don't matter. Nothing matters. Everything resembles everything else, and spills into everything else.

Whether the unbearability aspect was intentional, I'm not sure. But there is a point where the film starts to fall apart. It unravels, becomes less relevant. I considered walking out of the film, just because I was becoming less comfortable watching it. I don't know if it was his intention to show this as a metaphor for life that sometimes seems so fleeting, other times it drags on unbearably, as life must in old age and infirmity.

Don't bother trying to understand it, or try to make sense of it. Just appreciate that each character is the leading role in their movie, and that none of the movies they're living matter. Nothing matters (have I already said that - this film does that a lot), and everything matters - and in that dichotomy lies an answer to the meaning we give our lives, and we impart to others.

In the apparent random chaos of life we will ask ourselves, from time to time, what all of this means. That is perhaps the only important question, even if the answer eludes us. This is the Synechdoche Kaufman wrestles with, and wrestles it to the floor.

9/10

Dreaming [PHOTOGRAPHY]

Synecdoche, New York - We Are Your Beautiful Mistake

The movie is a puzzle, a near impossible amalgam of random pieces and crazy characters, spanning lifetimes, bridging insane gaps, twisting and turning in the middle of the metaphor so you’re not sure whether you were on a roller coaster ride or waiting in line for Portishead tickets. Kaufman’s first attempt to direct his own writing is as would be expected: insanely ambitious and challenging, wildly original, and an incredible creative skullfuck. I just wish it were better.

NVDL: Life is precious, life is short. On close examination, life is tragic and miserable. So step lightly through it, and stay lively, and try to enjoy the moments you can without judging them. Life will judge you anyway, so make the most of every confusing, fucked up moment and push away the awaiting madness and chaos and darkness for as long as you can...

clipped from www.pajiba.com Charlie Kaufman is a genius when it comes to crafting a story. He works on levels that some artists aren’t even aware exist. Trying to map one of his films is a little like trying to comb Medusa’s hair. Only he would name his film and base the concept on a synecdoche (pronounced si-nek-duh-kee) which is defined as the following: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of the material for the thing made. Read back over it, because I had to mumble “whatthefuck” a few times before it made sense to me.

The End of Hubris: "They absolutely did think they were smarter than anyone else.”

Like a lethal virus, it seems, hubris never really disappears—it simply finds a new host. - Leslie Bennetts

NVDL: What's that saying again...Less is more?

clipped from www.portfolio.com Now his company lies in ruins, and his name is synonymous with greed, arrogance, and bad judgment. Yet his enemies couldn’t even gloat; the cost of his comeuppance was too great. As he and his counterparts drove major institutions into a death spiral, they took much of the world as we knew it down with them. The entire global culture was instantly transformed. “Excess isn’t just an American phenomenon,” Hilton says. “In the U.K., there was the same envy of the people in the financial sector who were having those £25,000 lunches and dinners. They absolutely did think they were smarter than anyone else.” How things change! “These days, you ask professional money managers what their performance goals for the end of the year are,” one young institutional equity salesman says, “and they say, ‘This year’s goal is employment.’ ”

Mumbai: Stubborn Resistance Persists [PHOTOS + MULTIMEDIA]

At the Taj hotel , several trucks carrying Indian commandos arrived at 1:15 p.m. on Friday. The troopers appeared to be starting an assault on the hotel, where an army official said at least one militant was still holding hostages. Throughout Friday, explosions and small arms fire were heard from the hotel as security forces sought to free hostages. - By KEITH BRADSHER and SOMINI SENGUPTA

clipped from www.nytimes.com MUMBAI, India — As the crisis in Mumbai neared its 48th hour, Indian commandos were battling to overcome stubborn resistance by militants on Friday, seeking to end the bloody assault on India’s financial and entertainment capital that has shaken the nation and raised perilous regional tensions with Pakistan. Throughout Friday, a gun battle raged inside the Jewish center, , which echoed to the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire. There was no immediate word on the fate of hostages assumed to be held there.  Back Story With The Times's Somini Sengupta clipped from graphics8.nytimes.com

Synecdoche, New York - Brian Prisco

It’s a Charlie Kaufman movie, so you get what you’ve come to expect: a mopey artist wrapped up in a wonderfully sad love story which involves a multitude of off-beat supporting characters in a surrealist circumstance, one of whom is an effervescent female major love interest. It’s just unfortunate the sheer brilliance of Kaufman’s mind wasn’t focused by someone else’s lens.

The problem is that what we are receiving is unfiltered Kaufman, and we aren’t equipped to handle that.

Synecdoche is Kaufman’s Ubu Roi, and it’s just too hard to handle.

Caden Cotard is the prototypical depressed artist at the center of all of Kaufman’s work. The biggest issue is he’s too much of a mope. While all of Kaufman’s previous characters had brief moments of whimsy and joy, Cotard is enwrapped in the shit that is his life, and he doesn’t have opportunity to smile or be happy. While Eeyore is my favorite character in all the Hundred Acre Woods, there’s a reason why we rarely get a story that focuses entirely on him. Too much of the somber plodding sadness makes it hard to appreciate the beauty.

The other problem is that Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden. It’s impossible to separate Hoffman from this character. He’s the same blustering depressed bastard he’s been playing forever. It’s not that he’s not good; it’s just that I’ve had my Phil. Conversely, Samantha Morton gets a chance to really sparkle as Hazel. She’s even more bubbly and lovably cynical than Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine. Hazel strikes me as the kind of woman Clementine would have grown into if she decided not to stay with Joel after the credits, and ditched the punk rock. She manages to be alluring and shy, seductive without seeming to be aggressive, adorable and smart and basically everything you would want in a girl. If you aren’t head over heels for a Kaufman love interest, there’s a casing of ice over your heart. Morton is brilliant, actually capturing everything I loved about her character in Mister Lonely without being in a terrible movie.

Kaufman really stretched beyond his means. The man’s the master of the meta-film, and he actually managed to pull off a meta-meta film that meta-struates all over the fourth wall. Consider this: The movie is about a director who’s somewhat imaginatively talented who crumbles under reality in the face of a project that’s beyond his scope.

NVDL: This was an interesting movie for me, because I am right now constructing a fictional account of real life (mine), and adding a few layers of satire to make it both more and less palatable.

I think you need to be something of an artist to enjoy and commiserate with Kaufman. He wants to show everything - the whimsy, the irony, the dreariness, the loneliness, the love, the loss, the misery, the joy of living. He wants to mix it up and mess it up in the way life is messed up. Life is filled with hope and despair, disordered, something beautiful, often gross, sometimes grossly funny. It's confusion with a few stepping stones that make sense through the whirling humdrum of it all.

At time in this movie I thought Kaufman was very wisely showing the sickness of society. That everything we eat is sick, making us sick. He veered off this topic into a mental malaise. There was also the disturbia lurking in the background - the violence and anarchy that is growing behind the walls. That was also profoundly accurate of where the human condition is headed. Whether the unbearability aspect was intentional, I'm not sure. But there is a point where the film starts to fall apart. It unravels becomes less relevant. I considered walking out of the film, just because I was becoming less comfortable watching it. I don't know if it was his intention to show this as a metaphor for life that sometimes seems so fleeting, other times it drags on unbearably.

There are plenty of funerals in this film. The message is that specifics are not important, even if the specifics of our own circumstances are what we claim to define us. In the scheme of things, specifics don't matter. Nothing matters. Everything resembles everything else, and spills into everything else. Don't bother trying to understand it, or try to make sense of it. Just appreciate that each character is the leading role in their movie, and that none of the movies they're living matter. Nothing matters, and everything matters - and in that dichotomy lies an answer to the meaning we give our lives, and we impart to others.

Mumbai attacks sparks off flurry of citizen journalism

By 1am in India, anyone in the world could see for themselves the carnage of bombed out taxis, injured victims and police with rifles nervously controlling crowds.

"I have always been a shutterbug. Would love to be a photo journalist someday!" - Vinukumar Ranganathan

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk Did the horrific scenes from Mumbai this week provide a defining moment for citizen-journalism? The response on blogs, Twitter, Flickr and other social media sites to India's worst terrorist attacks has attracted unprecedented attention. For good or for bad, these communities shaped how this story was transmitted to the world. It was a vivid reminder that the internet has made well-placed amateurs and independent journalists more powerful than ever before. In a matter of hours, Ranganathan had become one of the world's most famous citizen journalists to date. By 1am in India, anyone in the world could see for themselves the carnage of bombed out taxis, injured victims and police with rifles nervously controlling crowds.

Pirates hijack chemical tanker off Somalia

NVDL: Energy and resource security is going to become more and more of a problem as the number of have-nots and economic losers escalate.

clipped from edition.cnn.com NAIROBI, Kenya (CNN) -- A chemical tanker with 30 crew has become the latest ship to be hijacked off Somalia, a commercial shipping expert said Friday. The Liberian-flagged Biscaglia is carrying 25 Indians, two Bangladeshis, and three Britons, said Andrew Mwangura, the head of the Kenya Seafarers Association. Around 20,000 oil tankers, freighters and merchant vessels pass along the crucial shipping route each year. So far this year, pirates have attacked almost 100 vessels off the coast of Somalia coast and successfully hijacked nearly 40, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center.

Plunging oil price means cheaper petrol now – and no fuel later as industry investment shrivels

NVDL: Enjoy the cheap fuel fiesta because the future may be one where many of us go without any fuel for days and weeks at a time. Mark these words.

We enjoy the present then, at the cost of future convenience. This is due to the short termism of the market, and is further evidence that the way markets are configured is neither rational nor realistic - but merely sentiments roiling in rhymnes and some (but not sufficient) reason.

Oil prices ought to be $80 or more now. It is absurd that they are hovering around $50 given the stated depletion levels of oil fields, which are emptying quicker than demand is falling. For reference, China is still growing, instead of at 11%, now it's 9%. That's a 2% decline, but they're still growing. Meanwhile Oil prices have plunged over 60%. Crazy!

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk A snip at $48.50. Now that the price of a barrel of benchmark Brent crude continues to fall like a stone in the global recession, a drop of no less than two-thirds since the high point of $147.50 just four months ago, the relief is huge among motorists and hard-pressed consumers. If oil prices remain well below a certain critical level for any significant period of time, large amounts of investment in expected oil production capacity will simply be written off, and the consequence could then be a recovery-stopping supply-side crunch within little more than two years. That critical level is widely reckoned within the oil industry to be $90 a barrel. A current price as low as half that critical level is already forcing many companies to drop oil projects, and the banking crisis is also squeezing project financing for foreign oil companies operating in OPEC and outside.

So It's A Hard Landing, A Crash Landing

California, New York, Texas and Florida — states with a high concentration of mortgages in the securities market, according to Fitch — are particularly vulnerable. Texas and Florida are already seeing increased delinquencies and defaults, as are Michigan, Tennessee and Georgia.

"The system has never been tested for a deep recession." - Ken Rosen

The worst-case scenario goes something like this: With banks unwilling to refinance, a shopping center goes into foreclosure. Nobody can buy the mall because banks won't write mortgages as long as investors won't purchase them.

"Credit markets have seized up," corporate securities lawyer Michael Gambro said. "People are not willing to take risks. They're not buying anything."

clipped from news.yahoo.com Companies have survived plenty of downturns, but economists see this one playing out like never before. In the past, when businesses hit rough patches, owners negotiated with banks or refinanced their loans. But many banks no longer hold the loans they made. Over the past decade, banks have increasingly bundled mortgages and sold them to investors. Pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds bought the seemingly safe securities and are now bracing for losses that could ripple through the financial system. Unlike home mortgages, businesses don't pay their loans over 30 years. Commercial mortgages are usually written for five, seven or 10 years with big payments due at the end. About $20 billion will be due next year, covering everything from office and condo complexes to hotels and malls. The retail outlook is particularly bad.

CSIR - "There's no water crisis"

History will prove Anthony Turton's vision is correct. In a time of growing recession and higher staple food prices, Xenophobia locally and aborad will become more common. Once this process is further underway, if other impacts are added, it is difficult NOT to imagine a full scale suburban revolt as homeonwers seek to look after their families, moving in armed mobs against similar groups.

In this sense service delivery becomes a matter of survival - in future - and cannot be over-emphasised or prioritised.

clipped from www.businessday.co.za CSIR president and CEO Sibusiso Sibisi told a news conference that he deemed Turton’s reference in his presentation to the “uhuru decade” and the link to graphic images of public violence offensive, and he made the call to withdraw the paper from the council’s Science Real and Relevant Conference. When Sibisi was asked if the CSIR shared Water and Forestry Minister Lindiwe Hendricks’s view expressed in Parliament in February that there was no water crisis, he would not reply directly, saying that the parameters of a crisis had to be defined. He made it clear, however, that the CSIR’s view was not contrary to that of the minister. Although Turton offered to amend the presentation, Sibisi said it was rejected as it would have entailed too much “to and fro” in the time available.

Petrol to drop R1.60 next week - just in time for December holidays

If you fill up your car just once, that's a saving of around R75. I'll probably fill mine 6 times in December, since I'm driving to the coast. I'll be 'saving' around R450.

clipped from www.businessday.co.za THE RETAIL price of all grades of petrol will decrease by 161 cents a litre on December 3, the minerals and energy department announced on Friday. This follows the 45 cents drop this month and will be good news on the inflation front. Diesel prices will also decrease, with 0,05% sulphur falling by 81 cents and 0,005% by 80 cents. Petrol in Gauteng now costs 735 cents a litre from 896 cents before, and it is now 711 cents at the coast from 872 cents before. The average rand/US dollar exchange rate for the period October 31 to November 27 was 10,1823 compared to 9,5901 during the previous period.