Just another dent in the damage…

I’ve just got back from a week long diving trip to the tourist haven of Sharm El Sheikh. I’m not really in to the whole package deal thing, I just wanted to dive. It was incredible! Will try and get some pictures up on Flickr soon but in the meantime here are some fascinating facts about Egypt courtesy of Longwood Holidays.

• The use of cosmetics dates from around 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. Their original use was to protect skin from sunlight, rather than for beauty care;
• In ancient Egypt, slaves are known to have been murdered to accompany their deceased owners to the afterlife;
• If you were to stand before every artifact in Cairo museum for one second, you would be there for 9 months;
• In order to deter flies from landing on him, Pepi II of Egypt always kept several naked slaves nearby whose bodies were smeared with honey;
• Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian she was Greek;
• While the use of antibiotics did not begin in the 20th century, early folk medicine included the use of mouldy foods or soil for infections. In ancient Egypt, for example, infections were treated with mouldy bread;
• More damage has been done to Cleopatra’s Needle, a hieroglyphic-covered granite obelisk, in the 125 years it has stood in pollution-filled, weather-beaten New York City than in thousands of years in dry Egypt;
• The pyramids of Egypt, the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world, are the only one of those wonders to survive to the present day;
• In Cairo a child is born every nine seconds;
• Egyptians made the first sweets in the world: they came from dates picked from trees by trained baboons;
• Some people believe the young Tutankhamen was murdered by his uncle, Ay, who went on to take the throne. But in 2005 the mummy was given an x-ray and they found he had a broken leg, which probably led to his death;
• More than nine million tourists visited Egypt last year – up from 8.7 million the previous year;
• Egypt is probably the world’s oldest civilisation having emerged from the Nile Valley around 3,100 BC;
• Around four million people every day commute into the centre of Cairo;
• The ancient Egyptians believed that mummifying a person’s body after death was essential to ensure a safe passage to the afterlife.

Look out for my next installment on Egypt – Scammers, the Scammed and the Magic Circle.

Monitoring a ceasefire was always going to be a tough job but ex-marine Brian Steidle had no idea he was about to witness such a thing as modern genocide. The Devil came on Horseback is an amazing documentary, not one I say is ‘good’ particularly due to its topic but amazing nonetheless. It tells the story of his experience following the ‘end’ of Sudan’s 20-year civil war armed with nothing but a camera and a pen. After six months he returned to the states to show and tell the world what he saw…

I thought I’d make a bullet-pointed list of why I use Twitter to get some of these things off my mind. Maybe it’ll serve as some kind of disclaimer so I don’t have to keep telling people that it is my personal Twitter feed and the views and opinions I express there are my own, not that of the organisation I work for or the people I work with.

So the main reasons I tweet are:

• to pass comment on news or current affairs – to say something without engaging in a lengthy debate or analysing every last detail of it;
• to communicate with people – I work in a quiet office and don’t particularly like distracting others. I communicate with work colleagues based across the campus to update them on my activities, to ask for help or arrange a lunch date;
• to network with librarians from other organisations – Although I say I don’t use Twitter for work I occasionally seek advice from other professionals or engage in discussions about issues relating to librarianship or Cilip (our professional body);
• to keep in touch with friends who don’t live near by – I don’t particularly have the time to write long emails and I’m not a fan of procrastinating on Facebook so I like to write quick 140 character messages to say ‘hey, I saw this and thought of you’.
• to bookmark web links – I use delicious mainly to store my bookmarks but I like sharing the funnier ones as small distractions from the mundane;
• to follow # tags of the things I’m interested in – such as #iranelection, #mumbai or #wwdc or work related tags such as #uosweb2 or #scaweb2 and conferences or particular JISC projects, honestly it all depends what mood I’m in.

I’m not interested in the latest research about how Twitter ’should’ be used or whether I’m doing it right. Quite simply, Twitter is my brain fart – if it smells too bad, please don’t read it.