The received wisdom apparently goes: as you get older you get more Right Wing, more disposed to religion and more inclined to embrace the establishment. How true is this?
I’m finding that as I get older I get more Left Wing, more staunchly atheist and more rampantly anarchistic. Should I be worried?
Read More »Worry Not
So now Blair is banning Happy Hours in pubs? Have I heard this right? My reaction: at least, for once, this new initiative isn’t one of the endless stream of ploys to screw more money out of people (to consolidate some of Brown’s humongous debts)… but it’s still another instance of asserting a growing degree of control over people’s lives. *sigh*
Can I just briefly say that Tony Blair is a bastard and all politicians are scum? I’ve said it before, but I’m worried I might not be allowed to do it before long. Thanks.
Read More »Your Legal Daily Entitlement to Oxygen is…
You have to love George Bush. He has an innate crudeness that is almost charmingly primitive. But not quite. The latest news is, he apparently wants to know WHY no WMDs were found in Iraq.
Well, Dubya, old buddy, that sure is a toughie. My only suggestion is: take a wild guess. It might just save you an extra few million bucks.
Read More »Dubya
I’ve been tempted to write a lengthy ramble about the so-called Hutton Report, it being one of the few things sparking my attention in the news… but, nah, I’ll be brief (I think).
What does this report mean, anyway? Are people getting confused about the Lord in Lord Hutton? It doesn’t mean Lord as in God, you know. In my opinion, for a report of this kind to carry any kind of weight, it needs to be the result of analysis by panel (in the same way that a trial verdict is reached by jury). Even that hardly ensures true objectivity—whatever that is—but it’s probably the best we can hope for.
One man’s allegedly objective analysis simply isn’t good enough, particularly when he admits the ‘scope’ of the report is so limited as to rob the process of any genuine context. Aw, who needs a context anyway? Hilarious.
Read More »Report Schmeport
By way of a moan about the government in general, you might be interested in the state of the pension system these days. My mother was 60 on August 13th (which was a Wednesday). Two weeks later, her pension still hadn’t been paid. She started making angry calls. No one had a good explanation for this, except mutterings about ‘backlog’ and things not being ‘processed yet.’
She did finally get sent a giro for the first two weeks of her pension, last week. It should have been paid into the bank, but they seemed to be having trouble with this concept. It was dated from August 18th. Here’s the fun bit: she phoned to inquire what this meant, and they told her the pensions are only paid on a ‘from Monday’ basis, so since her birthday was on a Wednesday, she loses five days of pension simply because it didn’t fall on a Monday! (How much like an evil ‘save every penny we can get away with’ government plot does this sound?)
Read More »The Wonderful System
I was talking to mom about this New Deal stuff earlier, and in particular having a moan about how I felt misled, i.e. that this work placement would be waged, etc. She said: ‘Well, they’ll do anything to get you on these things. They’re just doing what Mein Fuehrer says.’
(Mein Fuehrer probably meant Tony Blair. I didn’t bother asking.)
Read More »Der Fuehrer Sez Jump!
New blog entries from Salam Pax, the man in Baghdad. As he currently has no Internet access, they have been posted by someone else on… Read More »Straight from Baghdad
Link for amusement value only: We Love the Iraqi Information Minister. Well, he was only thing about the whole mess that managed to raise a… Read More »Misinformation
It was great news to hear that Ali Ismail Abbas has been flown to Kuwait and is receiving proper medical care. On a more cynical note, how good it was of Mr. Blair to condescend to ‘comment’ on the situation. But I’m not going to have another war rant…
Monday, I went to buy the video of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. A bit of extra money came our way, and since this counts as extravagance in our current impoverished state, what the hell! We watched it Monday night.
I thought the first HP movie was just okay. This one was a huge improvement, although as each of the books is longer than the last, there was much more condensing. Arguably, the plots also get better, so perhaps a stronger plot suffers less from omission. It was fast-moving and slick. The younger cast were much more polished. Robbie Coltrane was his usual awesome self. The FX were much better, in particular Dobby the house elf… I thought they might mess him up, but he was a wonderful CGI creation, furnished with a wide range of extremely realistic and endearing mannerisms.
Or, is the war over? (Same link as yesterday—current Middle East news from BBC—so if you’re reading this in 2004, it will likely be irrelevant!) Okay, okay, enough about the damned war!
Having mentioned the new David Suchet Poirot episodes the other day, I thought I might as well give a link to the story here. The first (of at least three) will be Death on the Nile. I can’t wait!
Read More »Death on the Nile
