Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Just coming down the wire. I’ll update this post as information becomes available.

MSNBC was first, followed by FoxNews

According to CNN (no article, just breaking news blurb):

U.S. agency urges evacuations along coasts of countries on Indian Ocean due to tsunami fears after 8.2 earthquake. Details soon.

Here’s to a better 2005. Can’t get much worse than 2004.

Spent the night watching Van Helsing and The Full Monty. Van Helsing was rather pathetic. Just about everything you can do wrong in a movie was done in this one. The Full Monty is always a classic. How could you not find that movie funny.

Oh… I miss Dick Clark. It’s not the same without him.

Good Night, and Happy New Years.

About freaking time. It’s depressing it took so long.

Amazing how bias some of the media has been. $350 is the largest donation so far cash wise, but quite a few nations have cleared the effected countries debt’s away. That means the money those countries would have to pay can now be used for rebuilding. That’s substantial funds that don’t get accounted for. That’s millions of dollars of money saved. As the saying goes “a penny saved is a penny earned”. Those debts that have been erased will be very important as these countries try and rebuild their now destroyed tourism industries and get people back to work. This is going to take decades, not days, weeks, months or even years. This is decades worth of damage.

If tiny countries can give over 10 mil, I think the US can easily swing it. Were already funding Bush’s family feud with Saddam.

Kind of ironic how Bush needed hard evidence that the Tsunami actually happened before he could pledge this money (as if the world was pulling a prank). The US had to send personnel in to “evaluate” the situation first. Why didn’t that happen in Iraq? Instead we trusted faulty decade old intelligence. Even knowing that the intelligence was rather worthless, and conflicted with the findings of other nations also monitoring the situation.

I’m curious if the president will ever explain why the decision making process took so much effort for this disaster than it did to go into Iraq. Wasted time is costing lives.

In the wake of this weeks events, I decided to spend several minutes browsing the home pages of the world’s largest companies, just to see how many made an alteration either as a memorial or to raise funds for disaster relief… I easily hit all the big brands here in the US, odds are I tackled most of the top 100 companies in the United States. Here were my findings:

Amazon.com
Apple
Google 1
Google 2
Marriott

Apple cleared the entire homepage. Amazon as usual took advantage of it’s ability to quickly collect payments. Google has a huge audience, and put a link to a page containing help info. Marriott did as well. eBay has setup a few things as well.

I was surprised how many have no indication of such events. During 9/11 several websites completely redid their corporate homepage. This isn’t anywhere near a US trend, as I checked many international companies as well. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, all have no mention or indication.

Just read this interesting article on CNN regarding the Quake from the other day.

“It causes the planet to wobble a little bit, but it’s not going to turn Earth upside down”

Now if that doesn’t just send a chill down your spine… nothing will.

The power of mother nature is just beyond comprehension. Every time we think we have an idea of what earth can do, it decides to teach us a lesson.

In other news… it now appears the asteroid won’t hit us.