Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Wednesday, October 8, 2003

Life and Death in North Korea

Lots of folks (including PD and Adam) have linked to this wrenching, horrendous tale of everyday life, in which cannibalism grows increasingly common, in North Korea:
[A North Korea refugee named Lee] went on: "When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby, and ate the baby with another woman. That woman's son reported them both to the authorities.
"I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. I witnessed a woman being questioned for cannibalism. She said it tasted good."
Yesterday when Madeleine Albright visited here she mentioned she thought the UN response to the Rwandan holocaust was one of that organization's great failures. If then intervention in Rwanda was, in hindsight, justified on humanitarian grounds, what about this?

Comment (0) #

Scroll Lock

Good article on the origins of those mysterious keys on your keyboard, the oddest of which is surely Scroll Lock.
My recollection is that Scroll Lock was placed on the keyboard specifically for spreadsheet applications, and the idea was that, when on, you could scroll the spreadsheet underneath the cursor, without moving the cursor's physical position: so if your cursor was on cell c5, and scroll lock was on, and you scrolled, say, left, the cursor would be on cell d5, but in the same relative geographical position...whereas if Scroll Lock was off, the cursor would simply change move left one cell.
Sound complicated? In 1-2-3 the Scroll Lock feature was a huge pain to program, and I never met a user who ever actually used it. I'm sure they existed, but this key caused many more support calls than user value, I'll bet. (via slashdot)

Comment (0) #

Thoughts on the Governator

Arnold wins the California governorship, and it's interesting from several perspectives:

Voter turnout was very high, giving lie to the common myth that Republicans only win when voters stay home;

Schwarzenegger is a "new Republican" with a centrist message -- favors abortion rights, gun control, etc. -- hopefully the Republican Party as a whole (and the Democrats) will learn something from this, namely, that radical platforms lead to defeat;

Arnie opposed the Clinton impeachment (if I were a cynic I'd say, "gee, wonder why!"). And, coincidentally enough, they're already talking about recalling him!
Sigh.
UPDATE: Tacitus agrees, and expands.

Comment (2) #