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  • BIZTEK                       

By Syed M.Aslam
 Sep 10 - 16, 2001

*** "HERE, I AM, a balding middle aged failure. I feel a fraud when I act. I've had everything. None of them means anything ... I'm going to live to be 100, and then I plan to clone myself with all of my talent but none of my neuroses."

(Soon to be released unauthorized biography quoting Hollywood's all time giant Marlon Brando about disillusionment with his own greatness)

*** "MOST OF THE TIME I try to impart the golden rule to people: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

(Municipal Judge in small town of Ohio, USA, John Nicholson, punishing a young man convicted of playing loud hard rock music while driving around by listening four hours of polka music)

*** "IT WAS SHOCKING to see how punitive this society is . . . We obviously need prisons and jails, but we're overusing them."

(Ex Washington DC police officer Caroline Nicholl criticizing American law enforcement by starting a campaign against "zero tolerance cops")

*** "EVIDENCE EXISTS now that America set off the AIDS virus when it launched its bacterial defence programmes in the early 1980s."

(Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi accusing the US of creating AIDS virus and asking it to take the responsibility for the treatment of the victims)

*** "ON SATURDAY, I was a surgeon in South Africa. On Monday I was world renowned ... I was as popular in those days as (former President Nelson) Mandela is today."

(Christiaan Barnard, the world's first doctor to perform human-to-human heart transplant on December 3, 1967, talking about his celebrity status in a interview prior to his death recently)

*** "THE IRREFUTABLE TRUTH is that tens of millions of Africans were captured, sold like a commodity and sent beyond the Atlantic to work in slavery."

(Cuban leader Fidel Castro demanding reparations from the rich industrialized world as an "unavoidable moral duty" for the slavery to pay back "what is due to mankind" at the UN World Conference Against Racism)

*** " ... led ... Irish wit George Bernard Shaw to argue that "fish" could reasonably be spelt "ghoti' - taking the "gh" from "cough", the "o" from "women" and the "ti" from "nation'."

(Argument supporting report by Professor Philip Seymour, a linguistics expert at Scotlandís Dundee University, which says that bizarre syllables and letter combinations make "English spelling fiendish")

*** "THE SANCTIONS are the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb."

(Unnamed UN official in Baghdad commenting on devastative effects of the US-lead UN's economic sanctions on Iraq)

*** "THEY WERE NOT ABLE to impose their point of view ... so they quit."

(Representative of Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Suleiman Al Herfi, commenting on the pulling out of the United States and Israel from the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa)

*** "ADVISING PEOPLE to eat chocolate regularly for their heart's sake is a reckless message that people should ignore ... enjoy a little chocolate in moderation."

(British Heart Foundation dismissing the claims made by scientists sponsored by a confectionery maker that chocolate is good for the heart)

*** "I THOUGHT I had done something wrong, but I was confused when they handed me this certificate telling me I had won a million dollars."

(Patrick Collier, a 35-year-old homeless labourer in California, recalling how he was randomly picked by the officials of fast food chain McDonald's as part of restaurant's efforts to restore consumer confidence in its sweepstakes promotions)

*** "WE'VE SEEN what happens with the uninhibited acquisition of knowledge ... We are now manipulating the human genome."

(US writer Hugh Nissenson commenting on his new novel "The Song of Earth" about first genetically programmed artist. The book, he says, is a "warning to be careful" about "an implicit doom hanging over attempts to create creativity" regarding human cloning)

*** "IF YOU don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it, they say it."

(Us black leader Jesse Jackson criticizing UK for refusing to apologize for its part in the transatlantic slave trade at the UN summit on racism)