Christopher Hitchens, one of my heroes, is dying. Everybody is dying, but for Hitchens “the process has suddenly accelerated”.

He’s been diagnosed with a particularly ferocious form of throat cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. Yet he still continues to write, and even found time to do a video interview with The Atlantic:

Hitchens is not shy about his cancer, choosing not to retire in to obscurity to wage his war against the disease but to fight it openly and in plain sight, for all to see.

For this I admire the man even more than I already did. He has always been a public figure, and the fact that he’s not letting a little thing like cancer get in the way of that says volumes about his strength and determination.

I can’t. Hate Tom Cruise, that is. I can’t help it, I love the guy.

Yes I know he’s a Scientologist, that totally bizarro-world nutcase religion with some really whacked-out ideas about space thetans and trillion-year old aliens, the same religion that’s not above using violence and extortion to keep their secrets intact. But hey, at least they don’t rape kids.

It’s not that all of Tom Cruise’s films have been so awesome - some have even been pretty damn bad. Really, really bad. But you have to admit that many of his films have been pretty good. Some films have even been really, really good.

But none of this really matters. Because the main reason I can’t hate Tom Cruise is because he doesn’t take himself very seriously.

This is one of Hollywood’s leading men, a one-man box-office hit-generator who is arguably one of the most famous people alive on the planet, and he goes around and does things like this:

And then, for no other reason than because he wants to, he goes ahead and repeats it on one of TV’s biggest annual events: the MTV Movie Awards.

(Unfortunately there’s no video available outside of the US due to Viacom’s anally retentive copyright-obsessed lawyers denying the rest of the world the glory of Les Grossman via legitimate means, so I suggest you find the video on your favourite file-sharing site.)

A man that is that famous, and yet possesses sufficient quantities of humour and self-mockery to do this sort of thing and enjoy it, deserves praise.

So there you have it. I like Tom Cruise. I really do.

Recently, as part of the Intelligence Squared debates, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry took on an archbishop and a conservative politician in a debate on the question: “Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?”

The whole debate can be viewed on the IQ2 website, but if you can’t spare the full 50 minutes I at least wanted to share Stephen Fry’s passionate speech:

The answer to the debate’s central question is, as you may have gathered, a resounding no.

Control internet search: Check.
Control internet advertising: Check.
Control email: Check.
Control office: Check.
Control desktop: …

Check.

You know, I really want to distrust Google. They’re so pervasive and omniscient, I would really love to see them as the Big Bad Bully of the internet world.

But they keep doing these superb things that make it very hard to conjure even a mild dislike for them. They shower web geeks like me with free tools such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer, Conversion Optimizer, Internet Stats, and so much more…. And all for free!

Today Google launched a website aimed not at technophiliac internet addicts like yours truly, but at every day users. You know, people who don’t know what SEO means, how to change the homepage of their browser, or even know what a browser is:

This is undoubtedly part of their insidious masterplan to rule the world, but if this is how they plan to rule it, I say let them!

I’m not a fan of Apple. They make bloated, overpriced, overdesigned fashion statements. But that’s not what I hate about Apple - Nike makes similar products but I have no particular animosity towards them.

No, I hate Apple because they make closed, proprietary systems and insist on maintaining absolute tyrannical control over what its users are allowed to do with it.

But closed systems are stupid, counter-innovative and evolutionary dead ends, and anyone who supports that kind of thinking deserves to be punched back into the stone age.

Jason Calacanis, a somewhat notorious Internet entrepeneur, apparently shares my loathing:

In case you hadn’t seen this yet, Mythbusters at its best:

Yes, more YouTube fun. It seems these days my attention span is so limited I can’t focus on anything unless it’s packaged in visually attractive bite-sized chunks.

So this nine-minute poem was a struggle, but a very worthy one. This so could’ve happened to me.

(Via Unreasonable Faith)

Don’t you just hate it when you’re having a drink in a bar and a hot chick starts flirting with you, and then another equally hot chick also starts flirting with you, and then suddenly they go all Obi-Wan on you and fight it out with lightsabers?

No, me neither.

(Via RichardDawkins.net)