Prince Charles, Harrison Ford and Dalai Lama save rainforests on YouTube

From The Times

May 6, 2009

Valentine Low

It was a day of firsts yesterday for the Prince of Wales. He released his first YouTube video, an unremarkable event for most people but a momentous occasion for a Prince who still prefers the fountain pen to the e-mail. And, for the first and possibly last time in his life, he played second fiddle to a frog.

The video, which is aimed at boosting awareness of the plight of the rainforests, is a compendium of as many celebrities as it is possible to cram into one 90-second clip. As well as the Prince himself, and the Princes William and Harry, there are cameo appearances by Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Pele and the Dalai Lama.

But the star of the show is the frog. Fat, green, belchy and blessed with comic timing, the frog manages to steal the scene in every appearance it makes. Which, given that it is the product of computer-generated imagery, should probably not come as a surprise.

The video, which also features the comedian Robin Williams and singer Joss Stone, was released last night on a number of websites, including MySpace, in what Paddy Harverson, the Prince’s spokesman, described as a “unprecedented” move.

Mr Harverson did not really have to point that out. One does not need to be a royal expert to know that Prince Charles has not made many videos before in which he offers his views on deforestation and climate change while a frog sits on the sofa next to him.

The symbolism is not exactly subtle; frogs are among the best recognised inhabitants of the rainforests, and there is a rich seam of literary tradition linking princes and frogs. In this version, however, the frog remains unkissed.

The video is an imaginative move for a figure whose fogeyish tendencies often make him appear the enemy of anything modern. Not only has he made the video, he has released it with software that allows viewers to make their own version, complete with frog, Prince and self — “mash-ups,” as the Prince’s team referred to them, a trifle self-consciously.

“The Prince is not necessarily someone who is a regular user of the internet,” Mr Harverson said. “But he understands the power of the internet.”

The frog was created by Framestore, the Oscar-winning creators of the bear Iorek Byrnison in The Golden Compass, while the website was created by Blue State Digital, the internet consultancy behind the web component of Barack Obama’s election campaign.

In a webcast put out last night, the Prince said that the internet provided the opportunity for “global determination for change on a vitally important issue”.

Urging people to demonstrate their support by signing up to the website www.rainforestSOS.org, he added: “Our aim, with your help, is to build an online community to call, from the bottom up, for urgent action to protect the rainforests, without which we will most certainly lose the battle against catastrophic climate change.”

To make the video the Prince called in favours from people who are either friends of his or of his sons — a group that includes Robin Williams, Joss Stone and the Dalai Lama — or well-known conservationists, such as Harrison Ford. Or, as he describes himself on the film, “actor, conservationist ... friend of frogs”.

The video is the latest step in the Prince’s long-running campaign — now his primary passion, according to Clarence House — to draw attention to the destruction of the world’s rainforests and the effect it is having on climate change. Last month the Prince’s Rainforests Project released a report calling for emergency funding for rainforest nations so that they can bring a halt to deforestation.

The UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen may come up with a long-term solution, he says, but before then action is needed to solve the short-term crisis.

The film can be watched by logging on to YouTube, MySpace or www.rainforestSOS.org. Alternatively viewers can text SOS and their e-mail address to 60777.

Ho lang vs Phai kia

..... finds it very khang-khor tho lui from lang kaki siou-paht eh..
Anh-chua mui pun to-beh siau ho-seh ho-seh, tiang kha-teng lang khau-peh! Thau-heen eh. Lui eh su see chin-nia khang-khor, lang see kio 'sensitive'.

umm si tey chit-tau liao, kui na pai liao pun, ka ki pun eh-hiao seong-la, tou-beh kha bing-paik, tiok boh? Men tan wa mui-mui-mui, kha ba-lu kong chut. Mia see peng you, ta-pi leh, cho sa-lah pun bo kong so-li eh? Cho wa see beh khang-khor nia... Wa see chin niah khau-peh chit-khuan eh su..

Lang see chin cheh khuan.. Khua la, kha-tua eh su ah-pai, lang eh khuan see khua eh-tiok eh, seh ka-si tua-su, ka-leow pun tam-pok tam-pok penn tua liao!

Wa pun tong-kim oak chit-leh mee-kia: wa pun mai kong so-li na-si bo cho sa-lah la. Yes, i know, why want to kong so-li na-si bo sa-lah right? Diffuse tension, not always, am always not really confrontational by nature, but now i feel being honest is a better way forward. No point hiding behind a veil of apology, makes ownself shouldering the blame for bollocks. No point at all. Though sometimes the fler involved then already has a pre-set notion of what actually went wrong, so no matter how many times you or the other party apologises and tries put forward the truth, it's to no avail, really. But the decision has been made nevertheless. You can't undo things that happen in the past, So heck. Learn-ing is the only way forward. Never slice up anything when you are not asked to.

There you go. Bit of a dilemma before the easter break! 5++ more weeks of "compulsary selective time utilisation".

Rafidah: No more hugs for Shahrizat

Read on further to the end of this Star article, then you'll come by a quirky quote by the once-upon-a-time Iron-fist lady of Malaysia,

"I got so upset when friends told me that when they kirim salam on my behalf, they are asked, “salam isi atau salam kosong” (meaning, do the greetings come with something or nothing). It’s so sad that it should lead to that. If it’s about campaign expenses, that’s different. But to put money in an envelope, that is money politics, it is wrong".


Very nicely phrased! Got me laughing in stitches~

Lust and pride: the vices dividing the sexes

India Knight: The Sunday Times

February 22, 2009

Men and women sin in very different ways, according to Monsignor Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI and the papal household. There is “no sexual equality when it comes to sin”, Giertych wrote last week in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

His views were formed by his own experience of the confessional and were supported by an analysis of confessional data carried out by 95-year-old Roberto Busa, an impressively tech-savvy Jesuit priest who has also carried out a computerised study of the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

The seven deadly sins are: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride (as opposed to chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility). Last year, however, the Vatican suggested these might be supplemented with some new sins particularly relevant to the modern age – namely genetic modification, human experimentation, polluting the environment, social injustice, causing poverty, financial gluttony and the taking or selling of drugs (I’m not really seeing how smoking a doobie offends the Lord in a way comparable to deliberately causing poverty, but anyway . . . ).

According to Busa and Giertych’s Vatican-endorsed findings, if you’re a man, then your number one sin is lust, followed by gluttony – and then sloth, since by that point you’re probably too sated, in both senses, to move.

If you’re a woman, the prime sin is pride, followed by envy and then anger, which, I must say, doesn’t paint a very attractive picture. No wonder men sit around eating a lot and watching porn.

Dorothy L Sayers once cleverly observed that the sins ought to be subdivided into the disreputable-but-warm-hearted (lust, anger, gluttony) and the respectable-but-cold-hearted (envy, sloth, avarice, pride) – cold-hearted because they are sins of the spirit rather than the flesh and respectable because they can masquerade as virtues.

I expect the list ranking our sins would have looked very different 30 or 40 years ago. Would lust have topped the men’s list when advertising still tended to feature fully-clothed “housewives” trying to put together simple and nutritious meals and access to porn involved an embarrassing, furtive trip to the newsagent? In 2009 it’s hardly surprising that lust should occupy the number one slot in the male mind: sex seems to saturate every aspect of their lives.

If a man had been asked 40 years ago in the confessional to list every single time the old sap had risen during the course of a day, he might have mentioned two or three instances. Today, to catalogue every twinge properly, he’d probably be in there for hours. Still, at least men do tend to confess to lust, which means they presumably feel bad about getting the horn at random things, such as advertisements for chocolate.

I am interested in the fact that avarice comes second to bottom in the list of sins that women confess to and bottom in the list of men’s. Like lust, avarice is practically a universal: everyone walks around wanting stuff they don’t have and not properly appreciating what they do have. Unlike lust, this isn’t generally felt to be a bad or particularly reprehensible thing, unless it applies to bankers and bonuses.

The cracked.com website last week published a widely circulated article entitled “Five things you think will make you happy (but won’t)”, the five things being, in reverse order: fame (the website links teenagers’ hunger for fame to being starved of attention by absent or “emotionally distant” parents); wealth (“Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country. The average Nigerian makes $300 a year”); beauty (too much “counterfeit flattery” just because you’re hot, same self-esteem problems as the plain); genius (which makes you lonely and possibly mentally ill); and power (which turns you “into an asshole” and possibly a sociopath).

The thoughts of this funny and irreverent website on the subject of human delusion echo the Vatican’s confessional findings almost to the letter, which you must admit is rather interesting. As Giertych said: “Diverse cultural contexts generate diverse habits – but human nature remains the same.”

In a gripping essay published a couple of weeks ago (available online), Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, ponders on the significance of the fact that, for the first time in history, westerners have access to practically all the food and sex they want.

She describes the “chasm in attitude” that separates us from our ancestors when it comes to these two fundamentals, which “have historically been subject in all civilisations to rules both formal and informal” in order to avoid things such as sexual aggression, disease, “what used to be called home-wrecking” and so on.

Those rules are gone. You don’t have to fear getting pregnant; you don’t have to expose yourself to disease; there is little stigma attached to multiple partners; and mechanised farming, pesticides and genetically modified foods have ensured that almost everyone in the West can eat until they’re stuffed. To paraphrase and simplify wildly: Eberstadt concludes that food is the new sex – the place where taboos, obsessions, rules, quirks and fetishes now go to roost.

Anyone who has eyes in their head, or who’s had awkward dinner guests with wheat “issues”, can see that this is true. And the male side of the Vatican’s sin list rather suggests that men are, as per Eberstadt, completely beached by their own appetites.

In fact, the list provides a useful insight into the fundamental differences between the sexes today: men eat and shag and then worry about it; women preen and resent, with a little envy and crossness chucked in, and don’t especially like themselves for it either. The “vice divide” identified by the Vatican echoes the societal changes of the past few decades in an unexpectedly modern way – and what initially seems like an entertaining little titbit provides a perfect snapshot of male and female unease.

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True or not true?