"So let me see if I've got this all straight now: Pakistan will allow us to use its bases Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — provided we bomb only Taliban whose names begin with Omar and who don't have cousins in the Pakistani secret service. India is with us on Tuesdays and Fridays, provided it can shell Pakistani forces around Kashmir all other days. Egypt is with us on Sundays, provided we don't tell anyone and provided we never mention that we give the Egyptians $2 billion a year in aid. Yasir Arafat is with us only after 10 p.m. on weekdays, when Palestinians who have been dancing in the streets over the World Trade Center attack have gone to bed. The Northern Alliance is with us, provided we buy all its troops new sandals nd give U.S. passports to the first 1,000 to reach Kabul. Israel is with us provided we never question the lunacy of 7,000 Israeli colonial settlers living in the middle of a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip..."

26/10/01 - A movie, Electra Glide in Blue, that I thought was brilliant when I first saw it (on Moviedrome many years ago) but not nearly as good the second time around.  But that ending...

26/10/01 - The Most Terrible Time in My Life, an interesting Japanese noir:

"[T]his is a timeless comedy punk noir that could be taking place anytime from  the 1950s onward -- Mike's classic mini-convertible and the groovy 70s wacka-chicka score only add to the temporal displacement. But TERRIBLE is serious fun, a B movie with an agenda: sending up Japan's notorious xenophobia. Plus, it's "Recommended by the Japan Association of Detective Agencies," so it's educational, too."

"Like the chase, the freak-out scene is a cinematic tour-de-force, a foray into pure cinema in the midst of a drama that could just as well be acted out on a stage or read in a book. 

The freak-out scene stands in its film to leave us dazed, to make us see things differently, to take us to the last few minutes and credits of the film as if with new eyes, the scales fallen down to the pop-sticky floor under our feet."

"Southampton had a sterling record at their old ground - no doubt helped by it's tiny size. After all, would you want to take a corner when, a matter of feet away, a bunch of bellowing bumpkins are spitting straw in your general vicinity?

(I jest here in case a couple of the Saints' crew are contemplating hopping aboard their tractor and chugging their way to the big old smoke)."

25/10/01 - The minerals of Scotland, Strontian.

25/10/01 - The chemical industry has been doing some bad things.

25/10/01 - Fascinating account of how a schoolkid who shot and killed a classmate was treated in 1978.

25/10/01 - Article on the BBC.

25/10/01 - Analysis of the NPR Top 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.

25/10/01 - Andy Devine at the Mohave Museum, Kingman, Arizona.

"Devine was also a very successful television star, with the role of Jingles in Wild Bill Hickok  being the most famous.  In 1974, 20 years after the series, Andy was boarding a plane in Miami when a bomb was reported.  All the passengers had to open their luggage so everything could be inspected.  When the FBI agent came to Andy, he passed him through saying, "If you Can't trust Jingles, who can you trust.""

25/10/01 - The boycott of the 1968 Olympics. (via Spike Report)

25/10/01 - More exciting than watching paint dry, watching pitch drop. (via 24-hour drive-thru)

25/10/01 - Old interview with Bud Cort. i.e. it was old when I originally noted it.  It's even older now. [warning: NY Times registration]

25/10/01 - US motels.

25/10/01 - Douglas Adams and new technology.

25/10/01 - The Simpsons and religion.

25/10/01 - The inside of a Sheffield chippie:

The Chip Cult.  Remember 'Chips control the world'.

24/10/01 - Those money-grubbing bastards at Central Trains, by cancelling their Apex fares, have effectively increased my fare to Norfolk from £23.90 to £41.20.

24/10/01 - John Darnielle has a suggestion:

"I am not renewing my demand that Jackie Wilson’s "Higher and Higher" replace "The Star-Spangled Banner"; I am proposing an accommodation, not a replacement. "God Bless America" has its place. But the seventh-inning stretch is not that place. "God Bless America" does not whip up the urge to kick ass, nor does it instill the desired fury. It is not for me to say whether that fury is in fact a thing to be desired; I leave that business to more passionate political thinkers than I. My position is simple: I know a better song, one that can bring us all together and put the "jing" back in "jingoism."..."

24/10/01 - Testing the new update form and blogtracker né SubHonker.

22/10/01 - An appropriate Blog Twin, /matt.

21/10/01 - Roadside Architecture in 1950s America: Reflections of Society.

21/10/01 - Another article that talks about alt-country and the Beyond Nashville festival at the Barbican, but this time looking back to its early roots.

21/10/01 - More music links, the CDs I bought at Vinyl Fever on my Florida trip.

The Plastic Mastery 'Before The Fall' - what V89 DJs sound like.
East River Pipe 'The Gasoline Age' - more lone singer-songwriter stuff.
Lonnie Smith 'Live At Club Mozambique' - the name in jazz organ.
Parliament 'Greatest Hits' - give up the funk (tear the roof off the sucker).
Kind Of Like Spitting 'Nothing Makes Sense Without It' - kind of like the Mountain Goats?
Bingo Trappers 'Juanita Ave.' - the best Dutch band since Golden Earring?

The compilation CD that this song comes from sounds pretty interesting. Rolf Harris doing 'I Touch Myself' anyone?

And Tonespy joins my list of great sources for free mp3s

21/10/01 - If you cringed at the performance of  'No Charge' on TOTP 2 on Wednesday then this website will have you weeping.

21/10/01 - An interview with Jarvis Cocker.

21/10/01 - It's a year old but it's still funny - winning entries in a competition to find the stupidest things blocked by Net Nanny and the like: (via Pith and Vinegar)

"The Poetic Justice Award

An anonymous submitter noticed that the Web site of Richard "Dick" Armey, Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives and a staunch defender of censorware and strict Internet regulation, is himself a victim of censorware. Netnanny, Surfwatch, Cybersitter, N2H2, and Wisechoice are among the "software solutions" which Armey advocates. All of them filter his site because it contains the word "dick.""

21/10/01 - Smog's Bill Callahan name-checked in this Sunday Times article.

21/10/01 - From a profile of Kylie Minogue, it seems she has to take the blame for the current situation:

"The Daily Mail celebrates her as one of the cultural treasures of the West that Osama Bin Laden would most hate. She is a geopolitical statement..."

"Sometimes, standing in the small wood that shields my house from the north, I whisper the word 'Pigs!' Within a second, bursting from the laurels, alert and obedient as no dog could be, comes a pair of Gloucester Old Spot gilts to nuzzle my hand... Indeed, to me a wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women."

Interesting comparative statistics.  From the New York Times:

"By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by 300 separate cameras in a single day."

"By one estimate, the average American is filmed six times a day, and the figure is considerably higher in cities."

"Suppose this magically effective face-recognition software is 99.99 percent accurate. That is, if someone is a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "terrorist," and if someone is not a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "non-terrorist." Assume that one in ten million flyers, on average, is a terrorist. Is the software any good? 

No. The software will generate 1000 false alarms for every one real terrorist. And every false alarm still means that all the security people go through all of their security procedures. Because the population of non-terrorists is so much larger than the number of terrorists, the test is useless. This result is counterintuitive and surprising, but it is correct. The false alarms in this kind of system render it mostly useless. It's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" increased 1000-fold."

18/10/01 - A review of a new book collecting Philip Larkin's miscellanea.

18/10/01 - Looks like it's the beginning of the end for Audiogalaxy.

18/10/01 - The internet makes life easier in so many ways, but the ability to report power failures wouldn't seem to be one of them. (via Keelhauling)

18/10/01 - Great name for a weblog, if I say so myself, Daily Cup of Tea.

18/10/01 - Crisperanto, all things Quentin Crisp. (via Splinters)

18/10/01 - Can you tell the difference between Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden?

18/10/01 - The Wehman collection, photos showing troops and equipment massing for the Spanish-American War, Tampa, 1898.

17/10/01 - The news that weblogs.com will no longer be spidering weblogs is a shame.  You now have to inform the site yourself.  Fine(ish) for those using weblog software or those who host their own weblog.  I think I'll be using this bookmarklet.

17/10/01 - Something to go with your corduroy blazer?  A Tiffany box. Read and wince. (via I Love Everything)

17/10/01 - Anthony better watch out:

"Anyway, had an interesting weekend. Had a friend of mine have the cops come to her house because a friend of ours has a Negativland "Car Bomb" sticker on his car, and the locals thought there was an actual car bomb there. Because, by law, you can't own or operate a car bomb, let alone detonate it, without the proper labeling. Duh."

17/10/01 - This story appeared in the Grauniad on October 4th: [warning: italicised not online]

"The majority of car key crime occurs when people are loading or unloading their cars. Thefts of car keys from houses accounted for 29% of cases in the Met's survey.

People leave their car keys on a desk in the hallway, and thieves have become adept at hooking them through letterboxes with bamboo canes."

17/10/01 - An interview with Noam Chomsky, on MSNBC!

17/10/01 - The article about the band 'Anthrax' has been well covered but few have pointed out this quote, from the band's singer Scott Ian:

""People keep coming up to me and saying, 'Hey, wouldn't it be funny if you got anthrax?' I'm like, 'Oh, that'd be hilarious.' " But he isn't taking any chances. On Monday, his girlfriend's mom went to her doctor and picked up some Cipro, an antibiotic used to treat anthrax. Ian vowed: "I will not die an ironic death.""

17/10/01 - Nothing like a trip to Florida a few weeks after terrorists kill thousands AND anthrax on the loose to worry the relatives.

This wedding pic is most unflattering.  My strange expression is because I'm blowing bubbles towards the bride and groom. (As you do.)