Update:It turns out Tom Cruise was actually being sarcastic when he made the statement about eating the placenta, trying to make fun of what people would actually believe he would do. Be that as it may, the fact that so many people actually believed he might go through with the stated intention will likely have some effect on his future PR strategy.

Original entry:In case you missed it (via newsvine)… here’s something to consider when deciding which movies to watch. Of course, we don’t know if the report is true, but I’m not sure how much benefit of the doubt I’m willing to give Mr Cruise these days.

“Hollywood actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise is planning to eat Katie Holmes’ placenta.

It is the latest in a series of strange revelations by the 43-year-old ‘Mission: Impossible’ star about the child he is expecting with fiancee Katie Holmes.

Cruise told GQ magazine: ‘I’m gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I’m gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there.'”

Still having problems with the server – or rather, more precisely, with the interaction between my installation of MT and the server’s Perl installation – so posting is excruciatingly slow and will only work through the regular interface. I would like to regale you, my gentle readers, with some fun impressions from my visit to the Frankfurt international music fair, as well as a nice photo from one of my favorite club’s closing party last night. Alas, visual amusement will have to wait until the above problems are dealt with.

Still, to end this weekend on a slightly positive note, while reading up a little on recent conversations about “citizen media” I found an interesting transcript of a panel discussion over at Corante. The most notable quote is from th Guardian Unlimited’s Simon Waldman, who may have found an analogy for online communities, offline publishers may be able to understand –

Owning a community is like owning a cat. You have to understand that it can leave at any moment. You have to show it a lot of love and affection and forgive it if it shits in your kitchen.

Still, even in case they understand the analogy, they might still be allergic to cats – or simply decide not become catpeople. We’ll see.

Also, mal ehrlich. Wie sich die Hamas-Führung �ber den auf den wahrscheinlichen Kadima-Wahlsieg möglicherweise folgenden fortschreitenden israelischen Unilateralismus in der Frage des Siedlungsrückbaus in der Westbank aufregen kann, ist mir nicht so ganz begreiflich – schlie�lich propagieren sie selbst, zumindest offiziell, mit der Abschaffung des Staates Israel eine eher einseitig orientiere Grenzziehung…

“Ihr Sieg symbolisiert die Fortsetzung der Ungerechtigkeit gegen�ber dem palästinensischen Volk, da sie der unilateralen Politik von Ariel Sharon verpflichtet ist.” (Quelle: Hamas: Kadima “die schlimme Partei in Israel” – derStandard.at

Every once in a while I’m so impressed with news about medical advances that I simply have to blog them. Yesterday, I read about a team of researchers at Ohio state university who had discovered a new way to keep HIV from infecting human cells, and I did not post a link. So now I simply had to tell you, my gentle readers, about this hopeful medical advacnce:

MIT Researchers Restore Vision In Rodents Blinded By Brain Damage

“Rodents blinded by a severed tract in their brains’ visual system had their sight partially restored within weeks, thanks to a tiny biodegradable scaffold invented by MIT bioengineers and neuroscientists.

This technique, which involves giving brain cells an internal matrix on which to regrow, just as ivy grows on a trellis, may one day help patients with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and stroke.

The study, which will appear in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 13-17, is the first that uses nanotechnology to repair and heal the brain and restore function of a damaged brain region.”

It’s not brandnew information, mankind has apparently been able for about a month to artificially create temperatures hotter than the sun. But still, it’s probably worth mentioning… particularly given the last sentence of the quote: Record Set for Hottest Temperature on Earth: 3.6 Billion Degrees in Lab – Yahoo! News –

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.

They don’t know how they did it.

Jared Diamond, author of, among other important works, “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, is one of the few people who seem to see patterns where pretty much no one else does. So when he talks about how to get rich, we should probably take a minute and read what he has to say, even though it’s hardly a tutorial…

Via Robert Basic’s Basic thinking.