Archive for: March 12, 2006

In the wake of September 11th, 2001 we were warned. We were warned by al-Qaida about a continuing “storm of airplanes” and other hideous fates that were going to befall us. We were warned about how al-Qaida would keep terrorizing us on American soil and how there was no hope of escape. Years later what has al-Qaida been able to do?

There was a nut case named Timothy Treadwell who fancied himself a modern Grizzly Adams. He was a troubled young man, a drug addict with many troubles in his short life.

He became fascinated with the idea of living among the brown bears of the Alaskan wilderness apparently as some sort of homemade therapy to ease his troubled mind. For several years he trekked to this wild place and talked to the bears filming, himself as he did so. He imagined they knew him and were his “friends”.

For the last few years we’ve been reading that Research in Motion’s popular mobile-email service, BlackBerry, may be shut down because the company “infringed the patents” of a company called NTP. That’s all the newspapers said.

Curious readers would want to know more. Did black-clad RIM operatives break into NTP’s office safe and steal the idea for mobile email? Did RIM spies tap the phones at NTP? Did RIM gumshoes tail NTP’s engineers and eavesdrop on confidential conversations?