Those terrible toons

Perhaps, despite howling 'free speech rights' and all that stuff, the Danish newspaper that published these now infamous cartoons could have chosen a better period in which to have championed the right to say what you want. Poor timing. Now, alas, ordinary Dutch people are likely to pay the price and extremist actions may well be directed against citizens of this country. It's a shame sometimes that hindsight cannot be avoided through better use of foresight.

I do know two Muslims and both are nice and rather gentle people, or at least they come over as being such. I've not really discussed their religious beliefs, but neither of them appears to be really devout and unlike certain Christians I have known, they have not attempted to convert me to the cause. All in all, they are, as are the majority, normal people who just want to get on with their lives. These normal people may also suffer as a result of these toons and all the resulting furore. Certain types will paint all Muslims with the same brush and normal people will probably bear the brunt of any retaliatory action which takes place.

The result of all this may well be that previously non extremists could become more extreme in their views - and I'm not just referring to Muslims. How to get out of this silly spiral? Well, the possible first step might be for all sides to acknowledge, and this has been happening, that all the terrorism is really down to a small but violent minority. However, the media has been stoking fires rather effectively, and tends to give many the impression, I suspect, that the Muslim next door is a potential suicide bomber. This is not good and risks the creation of vicious circles. Releasing cartoons which would have done nothing but irritate the extremist elements (and have one or two rubbing their perverse little hands with glee) was a daft thing to do and normal Danes and Muslims may pay an unnecessary price as a result.

Let's hope this mess resolves itself before things get out of control.

Tram trouble

I was nearly flattened by one of the many hurried drivers here as I got off a tram . This happened last night while I was on the way to a friend's house to help her sort out a spyware problem with her PC - ( she got messages in English, which she does not know, thus making the whole experience yet more traumatic, especially as she had some important work to finish too) but I digress.

Trams are wonderful ecological forms of transport, however, at certain points their rails are located towards the middle of the roads; this means that cars can 'undertake' them, and many do. This is a wee bit dangerous in itself, but getting stuck behind a tram can be frustrating, I know. However, this undertaking stuff gets very dangerous when it occurs while the tram is stopped and is thus letting people off and on. There is a great risk of descending passengers being splatted by an over-enthusiastic driver. Of course, children do use the trams here, and children always tend to be in a rush, like the drivers, only children are not as robust as cars and thus tend to get more badly dented. However, the drivers who charge about do not consider such eventualities as, of course, it will never happen to them, or will it.

Moral: If you happen to be enjoying Milan by tram, watch out as you get off, look right, or something that was never supposed to have happened to you might.

Ariel Sharon

When my other half heard about Sharon's first stroke, she commented that maybe he had been poisoned. Bearing in mind the radical changes he has introduced, it is more than likely that he has created one or two enemies along the way. It is thus feasible that someone or other may have attempted to silence or punish him - hence the stroke. Then again, Sharon is not the lightest individual ever to have graced this earth and thus, this, combined with the strain of being so radical may well have proved too much. Net result, alas, a stroke, soon to be followed by an even stronger one. When one takes into account circumstances, the possibility that these strokes were down to natural causes does not seem too remote.

Last night, though, we heard that Sharon required emergency surgery to his digestive system, and some 20cms of his intestines had had to be removed. This kind of damage sounds as though it could have been caused by poison, although a) I'm no doctor and b) I'm pretty sure that those who were behind such a plot would have used a poison that could not have been easily identified as such.

Still, one's initial reaction to Sharon's latest round of problems is to raise at least some doubts as to whether all his recent problems have resulted from purely natural causes.

Time, may tell, or we shall never know. The latter is more probable.