[casino royale] daniel craig to do just three films as james bond

Daniel Craig has not had a smooth ride. He’s been criticized and there’s even a website or two against his choice as Bond.

As a keen fan, naturally I have many pics both of him and of Eva Green and I can say, without reservation, that Craig’s no sissy and that this movie might just take fans by surprise.

Mi6 reports:

The Daily Mirror (UK) are reporting that James Bond star Daniel Craig plans to spend his pay packet from the new 007 blockbuster buying paintings. The actor, who was criticised for wearing a life jacket when he was unveiled as Bond, is reportedly pocketing £1.5 million for Casino Royale.

Art-lover Craig, 38, confessed he couldn't wait to snap up some rare pictures when he cashes in on Bond's global fame. He said: "I'd love to get into buying art, though I haven't started making money yet."

But the craggy-faced blonde actor has not proved a popular choice as 007 in the latest £60 million film due out in November. Angry fans set up a website which asked: "Is the new Bond a sissy?" Craig has revealed how he conquered a fear of heights during filming but was forced to use stunt doubles. Despite his new-found worldwide fame, Craig also hinted he will walk away from 007 after another two movies.

Thanks to `Grunther` for the alert.

[canada] love women – hate the feministi

Direct report from Ottawa:

Several pro-Conservative Internet blogs have signed onto a campaign to eliminate Status of Women Canada, a Trudeau-era federal agency that promotes women's equality and advancement.

The campaign was kickstarted by REAL Women of Canada, one of Canada's most vocal organizations of social conservatives. It has long urged the federal government to axe Status of Women — but this time its message is being widely discussed and supported among some in the Conservative Internet community.

“Like typical radical feminists, they have decided that they speak for all women, and they only consult those groups and women that agree with their agenda,” says an entry on the Big Blue Wave blog from Suzanne, who does not give her last name.

“So it's a bunch of radical feminist bureaucrats consulting radical feminists to hear what they want to hear to promote more radical feminism on my dime.”

[iceland] vast increase in social security number applications

From the land where the headline IS the story, comes this top story today [and there is absolutely no irony here]:

Staff of the National Registry of Iceland have recently been inundated with new applications for Icelandic social security numbers, the so-called ‘kennitala’.

The waiting period for a ‘kennitala’, which traditionally has been one day, is currently up to five weeks. This has among other things created difficulties in the registration and monitoring of foreign workers in Iceland. This is reported by RÚV online.

According to a National Registry spokeswoman, the number of applications has increased exponentially over the last few years, or since the Kárahnjúkavirkjun dam project got underway in east Iceland. Some 100 new applications are submitted every day, many of which lack the requisite information and therefore take longer to process.

Also on the rise is the number of individuals who wish to do business in Iceland or who want to open Icelandic bank accounts, and who require a ‘kennitala’ for that purpose.

[environment] china dumps toxic waste in russian river

Over here, we don’t have a very high opinion of the Chinese authorities. This is one of the reasons why:

Chinese officials insisted Thursday that toxic waste dumped into a tributary of the Songhua River posed no threat to Khabarovsk and other Russian cities downstream, Interfax reported.

The Songhua River flows across the border and becomes the Amur River in Russia. The Amur supplies water to Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000. The Xinhua news agency reported that a chemical company in the city of Jilin had illegally dumped xylidine into the Mangniu River on Monday. Xylidine can damage the liver, lungs and kidneys.

The slick was brought under control Wednesday after 1,000 emergency workers built dams on the river and used activated carbon to absorb the pollutants. In November 2005, a similar spill forced the Chinese city of Harbin to temporarily shut down running water to 3.8 million people.

[cosmos] pluto no longer a planet - official

Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet in Prague on Thursday, when astronomers from around the world redefined it as a "dwarf planet," leaving just eight classical planets in the solar system. Pluto is no stranger to controversy. In fact, it's been dogged by disputes ever since its discovery in 1930.

Many astronomers contend the ninth rock from the sun never deserved to be a full planet in the first place.

Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh of Arizona's Lowell Observatory, Pluto was classified as a planet because scientists initially believed it was the same size as Earth. It was the only known object in the Kuiper Belt and in 1978, it was found to have a moon - Charon. But in the 1990s, more powerful telescopes revealed numerous bodies similar to Pluto in the neighborhood.

Scientists agree that to be called a planet, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star. It also must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape and have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto's reaction to its downgrading has not been recorded.

[petron again] chicken feathers and human hair

Everything’s linked and syndicated these days. I got this story from Oil and Gas, who got it from Reuters, under Science News [?].

Well, it’s getting stranger by the day.

The Philippine Coast Guard appealed on Thursday for chicken feathers and human hair to help sponge up the country's worst oil spill. Petron, in which the Philippine government and Saudi state oil firm Saudi Aramco each have a 40 percent stake, said a fresh spill was spotted late on Wednesday.

"We are appealing for the supply of indigenous absorbent materials like chicken feathers, human hair and rice straw," Harold Jarder, head of the Coast Guard in Iloilo, a province north of Guimaras, told Reuters. Jarder said San Miguel Corp., Southeast Asia's largest food and beverage conglomerate, promised to donate one tonne of chicken feathers a day from its plants in Iloilo and nearby Bacolod City.

Les Reyes, owner of one of the country's largest hairdressing chains, said his 200 shops had started collecting hair clippings on Tuesday. "This is in response to the call of Greenpeace," Reyes said, adding he had also asked other salons to donate hair to the Coast Guard.

Jarder said chicken feathers and human hair will be placed in sacks tied to bamboo poles and placed along the coastlines of affected villages. Some communities in Guimaras are already using rice straw in sacks to try to contain the spill, which has affected 27 coastal villages and a marine reserve and is spreading in a northeast direction toward the islands of Negros, Cebu and Masbate.

[blogging] 6 reasons to continue

Can’t resist the temptation to reflect.

Tomorrow marks a special occasion for me – one month since I began this blog - and therefore 23:59 today will give me my month’s stats. The Glenfiddich is at the ready [my beloved single malt can’t be bought over here] and now I’ll attempt neither to be embarrassing nor unethical:

1…First up - why blog? To put it another way, into which categories do bloggers fall? Seems to me there are five sorts:

i…those who need a blog because they are either journos, pollies or a combination of both, who have regular column inches or minutes of airtime and their hits are stratospheric. Good luck to them because they work hard at it.

ii…those selling something, e.g. Apple.ru are about to open a forum/blog and many other firms do the same. Then there are the specialist music blogs with info on what’s on and where.

Full text here.

[nuclear] iran's answer to the 'gang of six' proposals

This is a summary of the key points in Bill Samii’s* article on Iran’s 23 page response to the ‘gang of six’:

· Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani gave representatives from China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland (representing US interests) a 23-page written response to an international incentives package at a meeting in Tehran.

· Mohammad Saidi, of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that although suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment was no longer an appropriate precondition, Tehran was willing to hold talks. Iran has also rejected the possibility of suspending uranium enrichment.

· The proposal called on Iran to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities" and "resume implementation of the Additional Protocol" of the NPT.

Full text here.

[life] of images of the lord, flat tyres and burnt toast

Today, everything is going wrong and it’s still morning. I usually pick up my best mate and we go to Ikea for a coffee and a bite to eat and to chew the fat over this and that. A number of things happened.

Firstly, leaving the car park, my front passenger tyre suddenly deflated. No problem. Next, only one part of the jack was there. Next, the bolts were rusted. No problem – find a piece of metal tubing to put over the star spanner.

Spanner broke. OK, no problem. I have another. Finally the bolts give and the wheel is changed. It goes flat. I don’t know why, it just went flat. OK, it’s raining and in this carpark, the dirt has become a quagmire. It’s over the arms, trousers, shirt, everywhere.

So out comes the little pump they supply you with, with the plastic nozzle, which is broken. OK. Hold it on the valve and foot pump at the same time. Eventually we get to Ikea and we always have a discussion paper. Today was Tom Cruise [the last posting].

This article continues here.

[hollywood] how tom cruise lost his career

Hollywood and in particular, Paramount, has had enough. It takes a lot for Hollywood to castigate a wayward star so why, in Cruise’s case?

The thing was that Cruise combined a number of distinct negatives which finally tipped the balance over what were perceived as waning positives.

Shifting away from movies to sport for one moment, the great rugby star David Campese, known as much for his mouth as for his truly breathtaking onfield style, once said:

It’s OK to be a big mouth, as long as you can back it up on the field.

Or in this case - on the movie set. This is what Tom Cruise has failed to appreciate. Fine, espouse Scientology ad nauseam. Fine, speak of eating your wife’s placenta. Fine, hide your baby from the world. Fine, bounce up and down on a couch like a little boy. And even then you can still be taken seriously in Hollywood.

Full text here.