There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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All your base are belong to us (Zero Wing)

Google’s search doodles (Xmas, Halloween, the lunar landing etc) are pretty easy to understand but its latest one of a UFO beaming up one of the o’s in Google had a lot of people scratching their heads.


Google UFO
So what does it all mean?

That Google are closet UFO apologists?!!

Well, if they are, then we are in real trouble, because as I pointed out previously, anyone who believes that green men like to trouble us humans just for the hell of it (and without even so much as making the briefest of formal introductions) is probably very delusional indeed.

But after searching the net for a while I find the answer:

Google was paying homage to the 20th anniversary of 1980s Japanese video game, Zero Wing.

Yep, this is real old school stuff and just seeing the screen shot brings tears to my eyes:


Zero Wing

The game play is the standard dodge-and-miss and blast-everything-in-your-way affair that characterized the side-scrolling shoot ‘em ups of that era.

But even though it was just another average arcade game, it will always be known for its classically bad English phrase “Zero Wing is the game All Your Base Are Belong To Us comes from”.

Wonderful stuff. Do you’s nots agrees with I?

Comments

  1. deck11 September 2009 at 08:02

    Wow, that is indeed an obscure reference. I wonder how far up the chain of command the guy who came up with the idea needed to go to get this sort of thing approved.

    ReplyDelete

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