i am teh 33VUL!!!1111

... because I am writing this from Windows. My dialup connection went down a couple of months ago and I couldn't get the new wireless connection to work, so in diagnostic desperation, I installed Windows XP on the partition that used to have Windows 98 before it went belly-up some time ago. This reminded me that in addition to my external modem, I also had a crappy internal modem, so I fired it up and managed to connect, thus showing that the problem was that although my external modem was chatting away nicely to my computer, it was not having anything to do with the outside world. Shortly after, I managed to get a faint signal from the wireless network. It comes and goes, and when it comes - hey, it's download time!

The downside is that I'm having the Windows XPerience, and it makes me feel kind of slimy. Unlike Windows 95/98, it isn't ugly - in fact it's quite a passable imitation of Aqua. And there are all these cool programs and games you can install off those CDs you get with computer magazines. And ... no, it's still yucky.

Delicious Irony

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Diogenes' Tub

Sometimes, usually late at night when I've had too much coffee, I amuse myself by thinking up silly ideas for books. The latest is Diogenes' Tub. This would be a novel in that peculiar genre where the central character is a companion to some famous person: Mary Magdalene, Socrates' Wife, Alexander's catamite, some animal on the Ark, and so forth. Here the hero would be a sentient cistern.


"Come out, come out, we know you're in there!"

Over-reacting?

The title of this post was originally going to be something about storms in teacups, but too many years of linguistics and programming left me in agonies of parsing confusion. "Two storms in a teacup" implies that there is only one teacup when there should be two, "Two storm in a teacups" only parses correctly if you insert hyphens (or parentheses (for logicians (and (LISP) programmers))). "Two storms in teacups" parses best, but loses the original idiom somewhat.

Anyway, the first storm which I found a little teacuppy, or the first molehill-generated mountain if you prefer, is this case of the Republican party "spying" on people who respond to their CD-ROM about the evils of gay marriage by visiting their website and providing personal information. Forgive me if I'm being politically naive here, but I would have thought that if the GOP had some nefarious data-gobbling in mind, it would be the people who are for gay marriage that they would want to spy on. And if you are in favour of gay marriage and enter personal information on a Republican website, then you obviously have no concern about the privacy of that information, since you're already giving it to your enemies. It would be like ordering Viagra online, then worrying that your email address could be given to spammers.

The second is this kerfuffle about Tony Blair and God. I didn't see the whole Parkinson interview, just the bits replayed on BBC News, but to be honest, it doesn't look that damning. Talking about his decision to go to war, Blair said: "I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people." Note that he said "other people": not gods, elemental spirits, astral masters ... people. Parkinson immediately picked up on this, and pressed Blair to clarify, to which he somewhat reluctantly replied "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well." Well yes, if you happen to believe in a Judeo-Christian kind of god, as rather a lot of people do, then it follows that you will believe God will judge your actions. He might not be so concerned about what you had for breakfast, but a decision to start a war which will kill thousands of people ... well, we can assume that God might take more than a passing interest. But this was not enough for Parkinson, who was pushing Blair to admit that he prayed for guidance. Blair said something evasive about searching his conscience. I should bloody well hope so. I would find it more worrying if a committed Christian (or Muslim, or Jew) went to war without even thinking what God might have to say about it. If Blair were a Buddhist, I would expect him to do some serious meditation, if he were a Utilitarian, I'd expect him to think hard about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and if he were a shamanist, I'd expect him to dance around a little and do something with bits of dead animals. Of course, if such things were the only criteria for waging war, it would be worrying, but it's not as though Blair is claiming that he had some Joan of Arc kind of vision in which God told him to smite Saddam. Blair may lack wisdom and integrity, but he's not stark-raving mad.