A brave busker versus the Evil Dunedin Council of Doom (EDCOD, P.O. Box 666, Dunedin Central). Ha ha.

I learned the pipes as a teenager, and love pipe music. But I am also a business owner. In this case I think my sympathies are with the local shopkeepers.

There’s a time and a place for (almost) everything. A retail centre during shopping hours is not the time and place for a piper.

Given the well documented use of the internet by sexual predators, I don’t know whether to be alarmed that so many registered sex offenders were users of just one of many social networking sites, or delighted that they have been identified and removed.

A little of both I think.

Interesting that before MySpace commissioned a private firm to create one, there was no national US database of registered sex offenders.

‘MySpace said on Tuesday the technology had enabled it to identify 90,000 users as registered sex offenders – people who have been found guilty of sex crimes and ordered to register with law enforcement officials – and had removed and blocked them from the site.

“We can confirm that MySpace has removed these individuals from our site and is providing data about these offenders to any law enforcement agency including the Attorney-General’s in Connecticut,” MySpace’s chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.’

Good.

This is a good thing, not just for Obama’s administration, but for the credibility of the US overseas. Daschle may be talented, but his appointment would not have passed the ‘smell test’.

Tax issues with Killefer, who was to ‘be a chief performance officer’, allegations of corruption in the form of favourable treatment for political donors by Bill Richardson, who was to be Commerce Secretary, and other tax issues for Timothy Geithner, whose role would have included oversight of  the Internal Revenue Service…

There were suggestions from the press that the McCain campaign had fellen down in its vetting processes because Sarah Palin’s daughter was pregnant. I could never make any sense of this. It always seemed like unseemly gloating. How did that very human and normal family situation that didn’t involve anything she herself had done, diminish Sarah Palin’s capacity to function as vice-president?

But favours for mates, taxes unpaid, and goodness knows what hasn’t made it into the media? Unless backhanders to political donors and cheating on your taxes are not considered anything unusual in some circles, it is hard to understand how these things were not picked up before the nominations were made public.

Poor Britney. She has made some very foolish choices.

But it seems to me she is basically a decent person, who like most decent people, assumes everyone else will do the right thing. She does not seem to have had much luck in choosing her friends and advisors, many of whom seem to have seen her and their association with her as an  opportunity to enrich themselves at her expense. Especially that human sewer Ghalib.

I am not making any comment on the rights or wrongs of any particular legal matter. I just wish they’d leave the poor girl alone.

If it is true that Michael Phelps was smoking dope at a party, then he is a very silly boy. The four year ban for drug taking means that he would not be able to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. 

On the other hand, I have looked pretty closely at that picture, and cannot see any signs of smoke. Add to this that he has had over 1500 drug tests and never failed one, and maybe there is room for some doubt here. A urine test should be able to confim either way. If it was me, and I was innocent, I would be rushing to the nearest testing centre.

But even if he was just mucking around with an empty bong, it is still a dumb thing to do.

I came across this self-righteous article yesterday. Apparently the mother of the octuplets born in California last week, had once filed for bankruptcy, and already has six children. According to the report this ‘casts an unflattering light’ on her.

The article goes on to report the mother’s mother as saying that her daughter had multiple embryos implanted last year and declined to abort any of them. Well, obviously she’s a ratbag.

There’s an unspoken assumption in the article that more children are a bad thing, that children are a burden, that people who have large numbers of them must necessarily be irresponsible.

In fact the woman had no way of knowing how many of the implanted embryos would take, and that she declined to abort any of them casts a more, rather than less, flattering light on her in my view. The rights and wrongs of IVF as a whole I leave for another time.

There’s not enough information in the article to judge whether the woman is irresponsible or not, and anyway, what’s so special about us that we should feel entitled to make such a judgement?

But that wasn’t what caught my eye in the article. Instead it was the claim by Dr. Charles Sophy, medical director of Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services that ‘it costs roughly $2.5 million to raise a child to adulthood.’ And according to the doc, that’s only enough for basic stuff, no extras like swimming lessons.

I have worked in ministry and other low paid jobs most of my life so far. I expect my lifetime working income to total about $1.6 million. According to Dr Sophy that’s enough to raise about two-thirds of a child, with nothing left over for a stamp collection.

Oh well.