Of course, there are a lot of us who don’t go to malls, who shop only when we must, who spend our lives doing things that matter, and helping the people we can as well as the communities we live in. Of course, you won’t see us at the mall because we’re too busy donating our time at an animal shelter or adult literacy workshop, making art or studying for a graduate degree.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time traveling around, and what reverberates with me every time I go to a new part of the world is not how different we all, it’s how similar. From salarymen in Osaka to rural farmers in Chilé, from innkeepers on the coast of Maine to shepherds in northern Scotland: we all have far more in common that we have separating us.

What I’m doing with my life
Directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated. Variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence agencies, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet. Formal background in neuroscience, mathematics, physics and philosophy.

What are the odds that even 1% of the women reading that profile believed even 1% of that paragraph?

Sure, I would have discounted the ‘international man of mystery’ stuff to a degree. In practice though it turned out to be true (no way of knowing for sure about the teengirl stalkers, of course). A lot of people who have a problem with this self-description are not seeing exactly what, I guess, the ‘Harry Harrison’ handle was supposed to tell you–that (if this is Assange) he meant much of what he wrote to be read _ironically_, not literally. Trouble is, he chose an author read mostly by male geeks. And now fame has put him way out of reach of ordinary ‘human women’ like us anyway.

Something I need to point out is that just as English-speaking nations have different accents and spelling, they also have differences in their sense of humour. Americans often don’t get Australian humour; and it goes the other way too unless the Australians were brought up on an exclusive diet of American TV (which I wasn’t).

Some of the humour in that profile is obvious, e.g. hello to the stalkers, but I see plenty more there and much of it is sending himself up at the same time as being honest.

And yeah, I would join the Suburban Housewives for Julian Fan Club, the senior citizen’s branch of it. Sigh.

“Harry Harrison” is the name of the SF writer responsible for the Stainless Steel Rat, but you knew that.

Up until the State Department leaks he was a self-important douchebag doing the right thing. Torpedoing American diplomacy made him a self-important douchebag doing the wrong thing who deserves to be nailed to the goddamned wall (and if America was half the evil-power he and his V-mask wearing compatriots think it is, he would be splattered all over it.)

slipperly jim di griz? aka the stainless steel rat? neat handle considering.

That said, last login was Dec 2006. It would take some Radar O’Reilly or H.G Wellian skills to pull a hoax like this off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv35jdsP80

Unless someone hacked OkCupid to changed their login date, it’s a hell of a long shot to make a hoax in 2006 in hope that Assange will be internationally known someday!