Wires Crossed #38 – May 27

Giggs Gets Twouted

Giggs Gets Twouted
Manchester United superstar Ryan Giggs was outed in British Parliament by MP John Hemming this week as the person who had asked for a super injunction to stop news leaking of an alleged affair with British reality TV personality Imogen Thomas. Most media took the angle that too many people in the public eye are getting super injunctions from the courts, we reckon it’s more interesting as to Hemming’s reasons for using parliamentary privilege to out the player – “With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all,” the MP said. Once again social networking has made its own news as a source of media information. And so social networking starts creeping ever further into our lives…

Women A Lot Calmer Than Men
GPS specialist TomTom got together a team of psychologists to measure the stress levels of drivers caught in traffic jams. They did so because they are spruiking their latest device (which we won’t go into here), but the results have been interesting but not surprising. According to tests whereby chemicals were measured in saliva, men are almost nine times more stressed than women when stuck in a traffic jam. The authors were ‘surprised’ by the result, but as a person who has suffered from the odd bout of road rage, I totally understand how males get a little bit more het up than women. And how I would react to driving like this? Hate to think.

Drug Problems Could Cost Google US$500 million
We all know that Google makes buckets of money for its shareholders via Google ads, but now the US Department of Justice is getting a little annoyed with the tech giant. The US has certain rules pertaining to selling drugs (pharmaceuticals, not illegal) online, and they are strict about overseas companies trying to fob off drugs to US consumers via the internet. Google were told in 2003 that serving ads for these companies just was not cricket. However, they still appear to be doing so, even though Google claim they are going to sue some of these pharmacies. Cynics say it could be a case of too little, too late.

Misogyny Alive And Well in SA
A Saudi Arabian woman has defied Saudi Arabian law by starting a Facebook page dedicated to getting the Kingdom to renounce its archaic law that does not allow women to drive. Manal al-Sherif says she wants to learn how to drive for many reasons, including in cases of emergencies. Unfortunately for al-Sherif she lives in a country that adheres to the strict, conservative Wahhabi version of Islam, and the country even has a tier of law enforcements called the religious police. We’re betting the chances of her Facebook campaign catching on at grass roots level in the Kingdom are not high.

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