4 THINGS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW YOUR MOBILE PHONE COULD DO

It then lists four emergencies, which, it claims, can be solved with a mobile phone and a little knowledge.

FIRST: The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

Well, first of all, don’t try it out. You will be connected to an emergency number and you will be wasting the time of valuable professional help. But do remember it. It will work in most countries of the world.

SECOND: Have you locked your keys in the car?

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone.

Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

I tried this and it works fine. I just unlocked my car and locked it again with a mobile phone.

THIRD: Hidden Battery Power

Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370# Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

This is absolute nonsense. The code *3370# is concerned with the sound quality of the phone. There is no way around a flat battery.

FOURTH: How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?

Your mobile network will be able to do this as long as you can give them the 15 digit serial number of the handset.

The email I received also had this snippet of nonsense attached:

If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse. For example, if your pin number is 1234, then you would put in 4321. The ATM system recognizes that your PIN number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine. The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to the location. This information was recently broadcast on CTV by Crime Stoppers however it is seldom used because people just don’t know about it. Please pass this along to everyone.

Actually, please don’t pass this info along to anyone. If you enter your pin number in reverse the machine will register it is the wrong PIN. It will not notify the police. You have to telephone an emergency number to do that.

The state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday, alleging that the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.”

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The Guardian reports on the Palinistas and their chameleon. Headed by a striking photograph of the vice presidential candidate behind an ugly-looking automatic weapon, Ian Cobain reports from Anchorage, Alaska, where Sarah Palin seems to be scaring the hell out of everybody.:

The churches are places where many of the faithful see signs that judgement day cannot be far away and where the infallibility of the Bible is rarely, if ever, questioned. The gun stores are places where you can pick up the new Ruger 10/22 carbine, the one that comes in bright pink with a 10-round magazine – “perfect for your wife or daughter”.

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Forty two of the UK’s most celebrated writers each published a short story, essay or poem on the 13th October attacking the government’s determination to proceed with legislation to hold terrorist suspects without charge for 42 days.

Philip Pullman, the author of the trilogy His Dark Materials, said: ‘We don’t know how lucky we are to live in a nation where police officers have all of six weeks to discover why they’ve locked us up. Ask them after 41 days why a prisoner is still behind bars and they can honestly and innocently say, “No idea, mate.” But give them that extra day, and they’ll crack it.’

The plan was defeated in the House of Lords and the UK government announced that it would be dropped.

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In the latest government move to create a surveillance society, everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under UK government plans to massively extend the powers of state surveillance.

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Ash and Carry. Way to Go. Dan Neil in the LA Times Mag looks at the business of death:

There are other ways to decrease the deceased. A Tulsa, Okla., firm called Compacted Dignity offers a “tasteful and attractive alternative” to cremation. The company uses a 400-ton hydraulic press–formerly a stamping machine at a mining company–to squeeze the remains into a block small enough to put on your mantle. The company calls its process “the clear choice for body compression, reduction and liquifactious-deminution [sic].” Who am I to argue?

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George Orwell please come home. Caroline Gammell at Telegraph UK, reports on a mother who was prevented from taking her son to school because of criminal- record checks:

Amanda Hodgson, 36, a law-abiding mother-of-three, learned of her “criminal past” when applying for a post as a welfare assistant at her local primary school.
She was told she had a criminal record stretching back 18 years, including three convictions for assaulting police officers, and the only way to clear her name was to get her fingerprints checked against every unsolved crime in the country.

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Jasko Caus at Jasmin’s Heart has an interesting series of articles on James Joyce:

An early inspiration for Dubliners was the work of Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Joyce, a polyglot, learnt Norwegian in order to read Ibsen. What he received from Ibsen was a very important, if not essential instruction for his writing: …”A measure of dramatic life” that Ibsen talks about is actually Joyce’s radiance. So is the case when he takes seemingly quite ordinary details and situations of Dublin life and makes them radiant.

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It had taken years for the hedges to grow as thick as they had, but it had only been in the last few years that Balzic felt he could loaf in peace without hearing later on from God knew who about how he stood around with his hands in his pockets when he should have been out rounding up the beasties and nasties and things that went bump.
The neighbours, Balzic snorted thoughtfully. He had to ask himsdelf what their names were. He couldn’t think of it. Yurkowski, Yurhoska, something like that. Good solid squares, scared shitless of niggers, dope heads, commies, rabid dogs, girls who went without brassieres, and people who made love with the lights on. His mother told him that about them. They were always complaining to his mother, and every once in a while, when she couldn’t think up something new to put them off, she came to him and complained about them. The last time, a couple of months ago, he’d told his mother. ‘Ma, if I lock up everybody they’re scared of, who’s left? I’d have to lock up the world’ To which his mother had replied impishly, ‘You big man, you no can do that?’
He turned away from the window and was startled to see his mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She was in her flannel gown, barefoot, her swollen ankles showing under the hem, her fingers over her mouth. She looked like she’d been standing there for some moments.
‘Hey, kiddo, you still up. You sick?’ Her voice was husky with sleep.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘What’re you doing up?’
‘I ask you first.’
‘I said I’m okay. Just didn’t feel like sleeping. What about you?’
‘Aah, same thing. Ankles hurt like crazy. Back, too. I think I sleep on floor from now on. You want light?’
‘Yeah. Go ahead, turn it on.’
She flipped the switch by her shoulder and the overhead flourescent hummed and then slowly filled the room with its bluish light. His mother sat at the kitchen table and rubbed one ankle with the other.

Constantine has been quoted as saying: I hope nobody reads The Blank Page because I screwed up large in that one. Otherwise, I’m proud of the other books I’ve written, even the ones that I haven’t published.
But when a book by KC Constantine comes my way I snap it up, whatever he or anyone else has to say about it. I don’t read many crime fiction novels, but I know what I like and they don’t come much better than from an author of this calibre.
Janet Pisula is found strangled with her brassiere next to her bed, dressed only in her underpants. She has been there for about a week. There is a blank sheet of paper lying on her stomach.
She was painfully shy, apparently, didn’t speak much, and although she has been out of action for seven days or more nobody seems to have missed her.
This is a short novel, only 150 pages, and it’s not the best in the series. But it kept me turning the pages and long after I’d finished, it was dancing around in my mind.

Thanks to The Independent for this news

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American writer and critic Cynthia Ozick has won the $5,000 PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction AND the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov award for “enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship”.
Ozick is known as a “writer’s writer”. Her 2004 novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Booker International prize in 2005.

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No matter what happens in the military there’s always a euphemism for it. But the RAF may have set a semantic record with its description of Prince William’s helicopter landing in a field next to his girlfriend’s house. The mission, it said, “achieved necessary training objectives”.

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The Guardian reports that the actor Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years in prison for wilfull tax evasion.
Snipes was cleared of five charges including fraud and conspiracy, but convicted on lesser charges. During the three years he failed to file a tax return, Snipes earned at least $13.8m (£7m), prosecutors alleged, and would be liable for $2.7m in taxes. Snipes claimed he owed only $228,000.

This body wasn’t pc Brand’s first body. He’d done a few before. Five, in fact. Four traffic accidents and the last one a genuine murder. Domestic. A woman had done for her husband with a hammer and a six inch nail. Given the guy his sleeping pills and then brought the hammer and the six inch nail up in the middle of the night and done the deed. She waited until after breakfast tv to ring in to the station and ask someone to come round and take her statement.

Strange woman. Thin hair and a care-free way with her as though nothing mattered.

But this one today was different again. First off it was outside the district, on the coast. A different administrative area. Somebody had stoved the man’s head in when he was away from home. Maybe they’d driven him away from home in order to do it? Whatever, the body was in someone else’s territory and it should be in its home territory. The Inspector had asked forensic to pick it up but they didn’t have the staff until tomorrow and the ambulance service didn’t want to know and so Brand and his partner and a junior from forensic were given a van and the job of driving out there, picking up the body and bringing it back.

Everything about it made him smile. He wouldn’t have to look at the same streets and the same faces all day. The beat would manage without him. It was a day out, whichever way you looked at it. A good hour and a half to the coast. And the junior from forensic was a nice little number called Emily. He’d never come across her before but she had a great big smile and eyes bluer than than spring.

The thing was already in a body bag, apparently, so they wouldn’t have to touch it. Just load it into the box in the back of the van and bring it home.

What they agreed on, the three of them, was to take a walk along the prom, have a look at the ocean and eat an ice cream. Brand and Emily would have an ice cream and Brand’s partner would have a hot dog instead. Ice cream didn’t suit his teeth. Nothing cold. Brand remembered that from before; the guy was frightened of dentists. He’d put it off until his gums blew up and he couldn’t sleep nights and there was absolutely no alternative.

But when they got to the seaside the heavens opened and there was more water on the prom than in the sea. That’s what Emily said, anyway, and she could have been right, because they couldn’t see the sea. Just a few metres of sand and then a mist like thick wet curtains obscuring everything else from view. Definitely not ice cream weather. Or hot dog weather. Or walking along the prom.

Brand had a chit from his Inspector and he gave it to the Superintendent at the cottage hospital and they got the body in its green body bag from a small room and wheeled it out to the van and Brand signed for it and got back behind the wheel.

Then the sun came out.

Brand leaned forward on the steering wheel and watched the day light up. They looked at each other, he and Emily. He caught his partner’s eyes and not one of them said a word but instead of heading back home they went back to the prom and, sure enough, the curtain had gone and some little kids and their parents and their dogs were playing with a ball on the beech and suddenly it was the kind of weather you didn’t want to be wearing a jacket.

Brand’s was vanilla and strawberry with chocolate sauce. Emily went for a coffee flavoured cornet with a flake stuck in it. And the hot dog was a hot dog with mustard and tomato ketchup and fried onion. Seemed to Brand like it was cooked in yesterday’s oil, but he didn’t care because it wasn’t going into his stomach.

They walked along the prom and when they came to some steps they walked back along the beech. Very nice it was, too. Emily told them a joke about a stupid policeman and they both pretended to laugh. Brand racked his brain to think of a joke about forensics, and he knew one somewhere but it was lost inside him.

All in all they couldnt have walked for more than twenty minutes.

Now they were back where they’d parked the van but the van wasn’t there. There was the space where it had been but the space was empty. Brand looked along the front to see if somebody had maybe moved it further along. But there was no sign of the van. The van had gone.

“Jesus,” said Brand’s partner. Emily was giving off a kind of whistle under her breath.

“What do we do now?” said the partner. “My jacket was in there.”

“Mine too,” brand told them. “And my helmet.”

He knew he’d have to report in to his Inspector, but he didn’t say that to the others. He’d need a while to get his story straight.