Surely those that are running Myanmar have to be bought before the ICC to face charges of crimes against humanity. The pictures of bloated corpses of children in pools of water, alongside video clips of young women urging people to vote for the new "constitution" is obscene.

Here is something against which every man and woman must rage, irrespective of race, colour, religion or creed, I cannot believe that it does not offend and diminish each and every one of us.

Armenia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, El Salvador, Cambodia, Dafur, Rwanda, Burma, how many more of the innocent must die before the world leaders understand that enough is enough. The guilt of those who choose to stand idly by -- again, and again, and again -- must surely soon overwhelm. Who will have the courage to face down China and India, to act decisively and with purpose to bring these bastards to justice.

India and China could collectively to snuff out the Myanmar leadership tomorrow if they so chose.  The people of world would hail their respective leaders as men of courage and compassion, but their fellow leaders would howl with indignation and tremble in fear. Tibet would disappear from Peking's nightmares at least until the games were done. India could justify its claim to being one of the worlds great democracies.

I too stand guilty, my father may well have taken up arms if he had seen such atrocities ...

Mandala Clocks, tales for another day perhaps

Author : Margarete Buber-Neumann

Autobiographical account by a German woman who was a prisoner in a Soviet labour camp and in a Nazi concentration camp..

First published in 1949, a new edition has recently been published by Pimlico.

I'd seen references to this book over the years but never got around to finding a copy  to read.  When I spotted in a bookshop window a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself "Ah I've been wanting to read that", so I bought it.

This it a remarkable story, told by a remarkable woman. 

The author was born in Potsdam the capital of Prussia.  She married the son of Martin Buber the Jewish philosopher by whom she had two daughters, they divorced and she became the partner of Heinz Neumann a prominent member of the German Communist Party.  Margarete & Heinz fled to Russia when the Nazi's came to power in 1933.  They became victims of one of Stalin's purges, Heinz was executed and Margarete was sent to a labour camp in Kazakhstan. Under the pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany Margarete was extradited back to Germany, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women until shortly before it was liberated by the Soviet Army.

I find it astonishing that Buber-Neumann was able to write this book so soon after her ordeal ended, and it is perhaps because she was able to do so that makes her book so compelling.  It is a book whose every page bought tears to my eyes, they are there now.

The book was written in German, and translated into English soon after it was published in Germany.  One of things I noticed was that there were "errors" in the translation.  I got the impression that the translator did an initial scan translating pretty much word for word, then another to correct the grammar and get the right tense etc.  Occasionally it seems that he missed this second scan and the text was published as per the first scan - are translated works edited, after they've been translated.

The differences in the manner in which the two totalitarian states treated there prisoners is stark. Nazi concentration camps were segregated in every which way - classes  of prisoner (Jews, Deviants, Political, Jehovah's Witnesses etc) as well as sex and age.  In the Soviet gulags everyone was thrown together in an environment of bizarre freedom. One is left with the feeling that the Nazi system was based on a perverse morality, whereas the Soviet system was based on a equally perverse immorality.

In conclusion if you're prepared to have your emotions stirred and conscience pricked this is a must read.

Episode 1 - @,s are off, luv- we've run out, can't get no more for love nor money.

There are just two things in my live with which I have never been really satisfied - keyboards and travel bags

Returning from a recent visit with some friends 35K inland the from the mid north coast, I was looking forward to playing with my new ADSL/2+ link.  I'd been disappointed that I'd not been able to start using it before I went north.  Before going away I'd configured the router and made the necessary changes to my PC's configuration and whilst away I'd received notification that the link was in service. 

So, when I arrived home I powered up the PC and the router and started to unpack my bag, on turning around there was a Windows dialogue box on the screen ----- wanting to know what it should do with the update it had just downloaded - yes it worked first time, and hasn't stopped since.  And it's seriously quick (IMO) - peaking in excess of 20Mbps.

However my glee soon turned to gloom.  I composed an email to someone, when I hit Send, Live Mail told me the mail address was invalid, I'd left out the @; moved the caret and pressed shift/2 -- nothing, fired up Notepad pressed shift key and held down the 2 -- nothing, tried it in a DOS box -- nothing,  Damn my much loved Microsoft Office keyboard's had run out of @'s. 

Realising that living without @'s would be difficult, I grabbed an old Packard Bell (PB) keyboard that I found on the street, and plugged it into the PS2 keyboard socket, but I didn't disconnect my @less keyboard.  Windoze can support two keyboards, so I slipped the PB keyboard into a shelf where I could get at shift/2 and carried on using the Microsoft keyboard, occasionally reaching down to get an @.

After a while I discovered that not only had the @ gone AWOL, but so too had the %, ), [ and ", soon after the A and the K disappeared too!!  OK I give up, I disconnected the Microsoft keyboard and started using the the old PB job exclusively. 

Next day I took the keyboard apart and gave it a thorough wash & brush up, took a long time getting the keys off and putting them back again.  Alas even though it shone like the sun, the @ bucket and the % bucket and all the other buckets remained empty. I searched the Web to discover that you can't replenish the stock of letters, numbers etc in your keyboard, once you've used them all, that's it - time to get a new keyboard. 

Imagine if GM or MB made cars that way, so that when they ran out of petrol you'd have to buy a new one, the greenies would go off their trees.  Keyboard manufacturer's are in a different league, they can get away with blue murder - I wonder how much they contributed to the Labor party last year.

Now, as I said my Microsoft Office keyboard is much loved, primarily because of the metal buttons it has to the left of the QWERTY section of the keyboard.  These buttons provide cut, copy and paste plus back and forward plus a rocker button for task switching plus a chunky rubberised scroll wheel.  I knew that the keyboard was not a current model and I anticipated difficulty in finding a suitable replacement.  I once made the mistake of buying a clone of the MS Office keyboard, it lasted less than 6 months, but it only cost me $16.  I made that mistake before I found the real MS Office keyboard, the one that just exhausted its cache of @'s.

Stay tuned for episode 2 of the urbane.tiger's quest for the perfect keyboard