On Friday, I was privileged to meet a woman who I have admired for a very long time. Her name is Dr Jane Goodall and according to Wikipedia, she is :

a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues.

She was at the Cineworld here in Würzburg, promoting the short movie about her life. It was very fascinating and what was really amusing was the fact that she apparently gets mistaken for his dead colleague, Dian Fossey, all the time. Fossey was brought to the public attention by Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of her in the 1988 movie “Gorillas In The Mist“.

During the movie presentation, I was sitting next to Dr Goodall’s son, Grub.  He looked rather uncomfortable when he appeared on the screen.  As he said afterwards to the audience, he didn’t inherit his mother’s genes when it comes to public talking.   The poor guy looked positively stressed out all evening.

Quite an experience.

Well I am going to start putting most of my finds here on this site, rather on Facebook. Then if Facebook ever goes down (like it has been doing today) then at least I have it all here on my own domain where I can control it.

So here are some things I have found recently which made its way onto Facebook first :

Did you know that the above video was “flagged” by YouTube users as “inappropriate content”? Yup, Mario is a porn star.

And finally Jane Austen – the alternative version. Fight Club!!

For those of you who don’t know, Monika and I are here in Berlin for a movie premiere tomorrow night. The movie is “Salt” and Angelina Jolie will be here in person. There will also be quite a few other German VIP’s too. Monika’s boss gave the invite to us as a wedding present and she threw in this very nice 5 star hotel as well.

I have to tell you now that I have never been in a place like this before. ALL your needs are catered to. If you sneeze, they hold the tissue for you. When I complained about the feather pillows (I’m allergic), they sent “someone from Housekeeping” right away to fix things. They even have an “evening service” who come into your room every evening and close the curtains, put the TV guide and TV remote control next to your bed and put a pair of slippers on the floor next to the bed. The only downside is that the porn movies cost 14 Euros. ;-)

We went out this afternoon to the zoo here in Berlin. I love zoos but all zoos pretty much have the same animals. Here is me feeding the goats.

I will write about tomorrow’s premiere when we get back on Thursday. The clock is ticking on this internet access and I hate being rushed when I am writing.

But what I want to know is how that passenger managed to start their mobile phone to film this, and not crash the plane in the process….whenever I am on a flight, I always get told to turn all electronics off for safety reasons!

At any rate, as far as I am concerned, it will be better than a murder charge and a bloody baseball bat.  And it keeps my therapist happy that I am getting in touch with my feelings.

So here goes.

I’m sure you’ve had them too.   A person sends you a contact request.   Or a friends request.   But when you go to check them out, there is nothing there.

Absolutely freaking nothing.   No picture, sometimes no name (just a stupid handle like SEOexpert3478 – is that supposed to impress me?), no information on who they are, what they do and more importantly, what they want with me.  They must be confusing me with Mystic Meg and her fecking crystal ball.

Whether it’s IM, Skype or Facebook, it never varies.   I get mystery men and women expecting me to be best friends with them without knowing who they are or what they want.

But if they think I am being unreasonable, if things were turned the other way around and I was being the dark mysterious stranger, would they approve my requests?    Or to give a real world example, would you let someone into your home without knowing their identity and what they wanted from you?

You want me to be friends with you or chat with you, you’re going to need to provide more than a dark shadowy default picture and actually come up with something that is going to perk my interest.

And no, calling yourself SEOexpert3478 won’t do it.