The twilight Zone

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Transport authorities in Brazil have caught up with a speed-loving Brazilian driver who clocked up nearly $2 million (1.1 million pounds) in fines, local media reported.

Police intercepted the driver of a 12-year-old car in Sao Paulo at the spot he most frequently committed infractions, the O Globo daily said on Thursday.

For seven years he had been speeding and running red lights but was not arrested earlier because he never registered the car in his own name.

The paper said the car, worth around $6,500, would be auctioned if the driver, unnamed, did not pay the $1.8 million in fines in 90 days.
(Reporting by Peter Murphy; Editing by Sandra Maler)

I did once.That was in Holland,and all the dutch were staring at me.I was wondering why

I was wandering in some Chinese city,don't remember the name now,and i saw a nice restaurant offering halal food.You don't expect these pleasant surprises in a communist country,but there it was,and i was very hungry.
Walked in and met the owner,who appeared to be a very nice guy.After a little chat with him in his broken English and my very very broken Chinese,he asked a waitress to set up a table for me outside as the weather was very good.
So i sat alongside a busy pedestrian road,outside the well decorated restaurant and waited for my order which was some Chinese beef soup.I didn't know much about the dish as the menu was in Chinese and i couldn't understand a word,and had to ask the owner's assistance,and he recommended the soup for me.
The soup came in a nice porcelain bowl and with the soup and small pots of half a dozen sauces,there was a shocking surprise for me.
There was no spoon and the only choice in this regard was a beautifully decorated set of chop sticks that came along with the order.
I knew how to have soup with spoon,but this was my first such experience.I thought it was some Chinese tradition and that i should stick to it.
My first attempt was to try and hold the chop stick in the right way,and while doing so,i dropped it a few times.Then i figured out a way of doing this daunting task.I dipped the chop sticks in the soup and then licked the few drops of soup that clung to it .
I kept doing it for a few minutes,and when i raised my head i noticed that there was a small crowd watching me with little smiles on their faces.
Pedestrians had stopped and made a half circle around me,and there were about 15 or 20 of them,watching my free show.
I felt good and bad at the same time.But then i was keen to know,how Chinese people drink soup with chop sticks, and i asked one of the onlookers to sit on the chair in front of me,and asked the waitress to bring another bowl or him.After 10 minutes there was another bowl of beef soup in front of me,and i asked the china man to have it.He looked grateful,or may be he was having pity on me.
I was expecting some miracle technique or yoga or even a move from kung fu.as the task seemed impossible to me.
The china ma simply lifted the bowl and started sipping soup like a cup of hot coffee.When he had finished the soup,he put the bowl back on the table,and used the chop sticks the eat the little chunks of beef that filled almost half the bowl.
It was that easy.But my mind was so busy in figuring out an ingenious way of having the soup with chop sticks that i never thought about the beef chunks in it.
The onlookers slowly disappeared,some with smiles on their faces,and other were killing themselves laughing

And there is something fishy.
"The attack on the hotel is a message to the Pakistani leadership: End all cooperation with the Americans or pay the price,"
Said somebody intellectual in USA.This may be a simple analysis.Or it may be a warning from CIA for Pakistani leadership.
Pakistan has condemned the USA intrusion inside it's territory.Their spy planes regularly patrol inside Pakistan,and recently Pakistani air force has been shadowing all their predator spy planes.
This time the blast was very massive and normally the terrorists don't carry our such large attacks in the country.The pattern is unusual and the resources used are not available to some nut head sitting on top of the hill and thinking of going to heaven by blowing himself up.
A truck load of explosives is not easy to arrange and then transport to such a sensitive target.
Whoever it was,may rot in hell for ever,and same for those who supported them.

Here are some videos of the attack

I work with a security company and last month i was assigned a large food store. It is the kind of assighnment i hate,and for a reason. I caught a young mom stealing butter and chese. I saw her hiding the items under the baby's pram,then waited until she tried to exit without paying. Then i stopped her and asked her to go to the till and pay. Thats when from somewhere her boy friend appeared and started arguing with me. Part of the argument was that since i am a foreighner i shouldnt have been there in the first place. He claimed that due to me filling a job oppertunity,him being a british born local man is jobles. Normally i dont take these comments seriously but the way he said that was very convincing. I did take it serious. By then other staff members had gathered,and i made an offer to him. I asked him to come to the store same time next day and i will ask somebody from my company to come and interview him for my job and if he gets selectd,i will happily resighn so that he gets the job. After my shift i went to the company head office and somehow convinced one of the managers to come over to the store the next day. At the agreed time the next day,the manager came to the store,but the "moaner" didnt turn up,and me "the foreighner" had to continue the job as him "the local" was apperantly not interested in getting a job.

That is if i believe in Darwin's theory.

It is Ramadan and it's tough this time.The fasting is from morning twilight to sunset and thats 16 hours of hunger and thirst.No eating or drinking and still carrying out life as normal.I didn't blog for about 10 days,and thats a record for me,and that was because i was trying to come to terms with this abrupt change in my life.
Now that 11 days have passed and 19 more to go,i am a lot comfortable than before.
There is a positive side to all this suffering.With an empty stomach,lots of clutter goes away from the mind.I feel more spiritual,and better in many ways.
In other news,the large hadron collider started functioning,and no black hole has still swallowed the planet .When i was in school i read in science that there is a proton and a neutron,and the little electron happily revolves around them.Now there are more than 52 particles,and still the search is going on.
I don't believe that the higg's boson will ever be found.There are other equally provable theories,such as the strings theory or the chaos theory.May be the ultimate building block is not a particle,it is the resonating strings.It will never end,there will be new theories and new research to prove or disprove that.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - An elderly woman misunderstood instructions while checking in at Sweden's main airport and was whisked down a baggage chute after she placed herself instead of her luggage on the belt, media reported Wednesday.
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The 78-year-old woman, who was not named, was preparing to fly from Stockholm's Arlanda airport to Germany on Tuesday when she lay down on an unmanned baggage belt in the belief she was following check-in instructions, the Upsala Nya Tidning local daily reported on its website.

She was quickly swept off to the baggage handling centre, where staff members helped get her back on her feet.

The woman suffered no serious injury and caught her flight as planned.

Poke yourself an check if you really exist?
Ah well,just a thought

Hope this time things will be better.
In 1999,i was on a large ocean going oil tanker and we met a storm named "billis" in the south chine sea.It was one of the last century's largest hurricane in terms of the large area it covered.
I remember horizontal rain.The wind was so strong that rain was no longer vertical.Water droplets were traveling at such a speed that where ever they hit on the skin,it felt like they will leave a crater.
The sea was covered in white foam,which was streaking in the direction of the winds.Water was heaving up,and we would see water mounds coming towards us,and jolting our ship when they struck.
Thousands of tons of welded steel was nothing more than an empty beer can in front of nature's forces.
It was scary,but we escaped unharmed.Thanks to a combination of skill,luck and modern technology.