Pligget

Through the American Looking Glass

OK, so it's all the things we kind of knew, but it still knocks the wind out of you to see it listed quite so bluntly.

I'm especially impressed by the last few bullets. Having dealt peremptorily with France, it goes on to remind us the dastardly Frogs are not alone:

Russia is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that Russia, a key American ally in the defeat of fascism, and its President, Vladimir Putin, oppose the war against Iraq.

Germany is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that Germany, a country reconstructed by America and its allies after World War II, and its chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, do not support the war against Iraq, despite assurances of "liberation" and "reconstruction."

China is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the most populated country in the world, opposes America's war against Iraq.

India is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that India, the second-most populated country in the world, is against America's military action.

Mexico is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that the leader of our neighbor to the south, President Vicente Fox, stated that Mexico is "against the war."

Canada is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that the leader of our neighbor to the north, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, called the war "unjustified".

Turkey is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that Turkey, our European ally with the largest Muslim population, and its president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, voiced opposition to the war while its parliament rejected billions for the right to use it for raids against Iraq.

The Vatican is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration, not even Roman Catholics, cares that Pope John Paul II stated that America's war lacked "all legality and all international legitimacy."

The UN is irrelevant. No one in the Bush administration cares that Secretary General Kofi Annan, The UN Security Council, and the United Nations are against the war.

Hans Morgenthau (see right) where are you now?

It's All Going Pear-shaped

The big chiefs back at headquarters are clearly left with much egg-on-face now that it seems the mission in Iraq is going to last much longer than expected. They had obviously planned for a lightning campaign lasting just a few days, and the idea had been to send the boys straight in - with minimal preparation of the ground - for a saturated "Shock and Awe" approach until it was all over.

Now it's all going wrong they've started to blame... the military. You can almost hear the angry communiques now:

"How on Earth are we expected to keep funding all these embedded correspondents for weeks on end? They're all on double time with 20% danger-money and $200 per diem!"
"What sort of copy can we expect them to file if they're just sitting around waiting for some fighting to start?"
What are we going to do with the butchered TV schedules now we've cleared the decks for the duration?"
"How are we going to keep viewers tuning in when they start to lose interest?"

I suppose we can expect to see more and more criticism of the coalition forces over the next few days, as the quest for something new to say (for 8 hours a day, or in 1000 column inches) gets more and more desparate.

"The noble art of losing face, will one day save the human race"

Hans Blix, in this interview, exemplifies the first of the Bertrand Russell quotes on the right.

I'm left wondering when that day will come.

Big Ishooo!

So, it seems that a month of war is going to cost the US $75bn. That's a cool $2,500,000,000 per day. I wonder what the effect would be of loading a Hercules with, say, half that in small denomination bills, and air-dropping it over Baghdad every day from now until Easter.

Thousands of lives would be saved.
The Iraqis would fall in love with the US.
They would overthrow Saddam (so that they could get to spend their new-found wealth on holidays to Florida).
The US would save itself $37.5bn to give away to the richest 1% of its population in tax cuts, thereby ensuring a second term (and the Nobel Peace Prize) for Bush.
Jeb Bush would rise to be the next President on a wave of support from his newly wealthy constituents in Orlando.

On second thoughts, maybe they'd better stick to bombs.

It's Worse than I Thought

Major General Patrick Cordingley, the Today prog's regular war pundit, made a depressing observation this morning. They were discussing (ironically) to what extent the day-to-day media intrusion into the operations in Iraq - all the "embedded" war correspondents - affected military planning. He said that, when he was commanding the Desert Rats in GW1, they crossed over into Kuwait a week earlier than they had originally planned to, largely because of persistent media comments that nothing much was happening (after 5 weeks of carpet bombing). He imagined the pressure to be much worse this time, because of all the extra reporters and 24/7 rolling news channels there.

So because all those camera crews are there - supposedly to slake the public's thirst for "information" but actually just vying for the "Most (porno)Graphic Shot of the Day" award - they are in danger of morphing into the film crew for the sequel to Saving Private Ryan, with the US equivalent of Alastair Campbell playing Steven Spielberg.

This takes the old Heisenberg metaphor (that an event cannot be reported without the report changing the nature of the event) to ridiculous extremes.

Absent Friend

It would have been my Dad's 81st birthday and 51st wedding anniversary today, had he not died 40 months ago.

I'm sitting here treasuring the memory of the last minutes I spent alone with him - the day before the operation from which he never regained consciousness. He was as gentle, considerate and shy with me that day as he always was with everyone he met, and I clutch that image of him to my heart. As my own life tumbles on, putting more distance between that day and this, I gain an ever stronger impression of just how much he loved us all.

I'm really pleased that my Mum, who was in love with him from the age of 16, and who so cherishes his memory, can endure the pain of his loss and still have an eye on her future life. As I write this she's probably making a few enhancements to the scale model she's made of her self-designed dream bungalow (complete with removable roof and lift-out attic rooms), and looking forward to her next chance to see her four dear friends from her Cambridge days.

I salute you Mum and send you my love, as I'm sure do your other three sons, your 10 grandchildren, your sister and your many nephews, neices, cousins and friends around the globe.

Watching Through my Fingers

I'm trying to avoid TV coverage of the war now, despite my voyeuristic tendencies. It seems to comprise a mixture of (a) snuff movies (of distant bombs hitherto, but no doubt much worse to come once the street fighting starts), and (b) various coalition chiefs giving press briefings telling us how well it's all going.

On the first topic, the only reporter I've seen who hasn't behaved as if it's some kind of thrill-ride is Nicholas Wichell. He looked ashen while reporting events at the weekend, and reminded us that every explosion we saw in that night's "spectacular" Baghdad bombing footage was actually snuffing out lives. There - that flash - that just killed someone like you and me. Do we need actually to see recognisable chunks of flying flesh before we deem this kind of thing unacceptable?

On the second topic, what is the bloody point? We already know the real aim of these briefings - not so much reporting to us the true situation, as trying to convince the Iraqis that resistance is futile in the hope that they'll surrender without a fight. OK, so that's a laudable motive, but do they really imagine the Iraqis don't know that too? Do they honestly think that, because they're dealing with a bunch of gullible towel-heads, everything they say will be believed?

Of course we are sophisticated Westerners, and we understand that when Saddam or one of his cronies comes on the TV and announces that the US-led invasion is about to collapse, we dismiss it as transparent fiction and crude propagandising - another example of the cruel manipulation of his hapless people. Fortunately for us, the Iraqis aren't capable of our type of reasoning, so we can confidently base our military strategy on the knowledge that whatever we feed them they will swallow. Once they hear a translation of what these unknown, but clearly well-meaning, infidel invaders are saying, they will choose to believe that rather than the transparent lies of their compatriots.

I'm left in a position where I can't believe anything either side is telling me, so what's the point in tuning in? All I'm doing is justifying the unsightly competition between private media interests to try to scoop each other.

I'm too knackered now, and I've got packed lunches to do before I can crawl into bed, so I'm just reminding myself that I want to jot something down about the present snuff movies coming from Iraq. Maybe tomorrow.

Less is More

I liked this article by David Mamet in Friday's Guardian. I so want him to be right about this.

It's something you can't see, and yet you just know to be there, that creates that subliminal connection to an actor's performance. Some might write it off as Emperor's New Clothes, but it really is there. It's what the brain does when it receives only partial information - it fills in the gaps, creates the full picture.

(If you don't believe me, the next time a person's face gets the digital mosaic treatment on the TV to protect their identity, screw your eyes up so they're almost closed, and you're just about managing to peer through a forest of eyelashes at the screen. You'll find that your brain can't see the edges of the mosaic tiles any more, and instead makes a good stab at creating a full facial image. You'll believe you can see enough of the person's true features to be able to identify them in a police line-up, even though the face you see only exists in your head)

If the actor can simultaneously maintain a blank emotional canvas, whilst clearly existing as a believable part of the scene, your perceptions and experiences flood onto that canvas to create their picture. Because they're your emotions and perceptions, and not the actor's or director's, you momentarily become that character and the connection is complete.

This, to me, is what makes the difference between Nicole Kidman's compelling intensity in The Hours, and virtually everything that poor Nicolas Cage tries to do. At a superficial level, Kidman seems passive and expressionless virtually throughout the film, even hiding behind that nose, but somehow her character reaches into your gut. With Cage, on the other hand, I can't escape the impression that he's clearly trying his damndest to cram every sinew, of whatever character he's trying to play, with visible meaning. This leaves no room for your own perceptions, so you can't make the connection. He's clearly just acting.

I'm a novice thesp who's been dabbling in local community theatre projects over the last few years, and this article has woken me up to the importance of mask work. I must give it a try some time soon.

Shock Horror! Mild Controversy at the Oscars!

I'm almost loath to write this, because what kind of idiot sits up until gone 4am, with work the next day, to watch something as banal as the Oscar ceremony? Whatever.

Two things:

I was pleased to see Michael Moore's standing ovation as he approached the stage to collect for Bowling for Columbine. It's a shame Charlton Heston wasn't there. After the warm reception, I was surprised by the loud booing (and more stony grins from the celebs) once he started his entirely expected tirade. Maybe Heston was there, boo-leading from the back.
By the time the foreign language film came around I was sitting at the PC with the telly turned up in the other room (well, you can't just sit there in front of that crap), but, although I wasn't paying full attention, I got the distinct impression it was handled in the most patronising way. Something along the lines of "Isn't it nice of these people to go to all that trouble to add a bit of variety, by making films with subtitles for us?" Considering how outlandishly flattering they normally are, this sounded like a restaurant reviewer remembering to mention the table decorations. Then, when the presenter opened the envelope, she said "And the Oscar goes to [fumble, break seal, open flap, pull out card, dramatic pause] Germany!" When did this become the Eurovision Film Contest?

Abroad Thoughts from Home

Another little nugget from when I was in France:

When watching telly, there was the occasional advert for some awful crooner or other, ending with a closing caption saying the latest album was available on CD and K7. I thought: hmm - K7 must be their format name for audio cassettes. How quaint.

Then on another occasion there was an advert for a movie which had just come out - on DVD and K7. Now I'm thinking: wait a tick - audio cassettes and VHS can't possibly have the same format name - they're nothing like each other. Typical Frog illogic.

It was weeks later that I finally twigged. It's not "K7", it's "ka - sept". It was just French shorthand for "cassette". Silly me.

There must be loads of examples of this in all sorts of languages. The only English one I can think of off hand is "IOU". I wonder whether there are any French people over here wondering quietly what an "eeyoo" is...

On watching films abroad

I've had an idea for a comedy about the movie business, but it's very foetal (and probably faecal). When I was in France I came to realise there's a whole set of actors out there who provide the voices for all the dubbed Hollywood films in non-English-speaking countries. For example France has a handful of actors (some of whom are apparently household names) who provide the voices for Cruise, Crowe, Streep, Zellweger etc., and for obvious reasons the same dub-actor always does the same Hollywood star (because the audience recognises "their" voice).

This means that the dub-actors' careers are powerlessly dependent on the choices and successes (not to mention relationship and drug problems etc), of some distant foreign actor that they may never have met. For instance, imagine being the guy who got the job to do Robert Downey Jr. for Chaplin. He must have thought he was on the gravy train.

Extrapolating that to all countries, there must be a dissociated group of actors (a Frenchman, a German, a Spaniard, a Pole etc. - who've probably never met each other) who all depend on, say, Tom Cruise to remain successful.

The kernel of my idea is that something befalls a Hollywood star which threatens the livelihood of the disparate "United Nations" of dub-actors who do his/her voice, and the dub-actors are forced to club together to save the star's career. I can see lots of potential for culture comedy - something along the lines of that excruciating sitcom from the 70s where the young guy was trying to teach English to a class of racial and national stereotypes.

OK so it's not much of an idea...

Never read reviews

OK, so that's a sweeping generalisation - oops - tautology alert. I mean - that's a generalisation. Get on with it. OK.

A few years back I was working on my own in Madrid, and hadn't been there long enough to learn the language (ahora puedo hablar un poco - y mucho más cuando estoy borracho). Besides books, and the handful of Irish bars, the other English-speaking outlet I had in the evenings was the half-dozen or so cinemas that showed the subtitled (rather than the more common dubbed) version of foreign films. The Madrileño equivalent of Time Out (or, more closely, Pariscope) was the Guía del Ocio, which provided the normal listings and reviews of the latest movies.

I could work out where a film was showing, who the director and stars were and, from the scoring system, whether they thought it worth seeing. The thing I couldn't do was read the review, so if it was a movie I'd never heard of I had limited clues as to what genre it was, and no idea of the plot.

This made a huge difference to my involvement and enjoyment. It's difficult to explain the excitement of watching it unfold when you don't know whether it's going to be a comedy, a thriller, a morality tale or whatever. For this reason, one of the best cinema experiences I've had in recent years was when I saw Pleasantville there. I deliberately haven't linked to any sites about it, and won't say anything further in case you don't know the film - but I recommend that you try it some time. If you already know that film, try seeing something else that you've heard is good, but don't know ANY details about. Make sure you avoid any plot synopses, movie trailers or critiques (beyond simple marks out of ten).

I'm a big movie fan, and I used to be an avid consumer of preview shows like Film 2003, but I've realised that all they do is give you a sneak peek under the gift-wrapping, and that ruins the surprise.

Putting your money where your mouth is

I've been thinking about something Robin Cook said:

[it appears that] our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq. That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

There is a way of finding out whether this is true. I'm not normally one for conspiracy theories, but this one intrigued me.

hardly anyone remembers what Hussein actually did in November 2000. It was then that Hussein stopped accepting U.S. dollars as payment for Iraq's oil exports.
When Hussein made the move, the euro had declined 30 percent since its January 1999 debut and it didn't show much promise as a reserve currency. It took 82 cents to buy one euro. Radio Free Europe, one of the only organizations to report Hussein's switch, spent much effort trying to understand why Hussein would take such an economic hit just to irk the United States. Later, he also converted his $10 billion U.N. oil-for-food escrow account to euros.
Since then, circumstances have changed. The U.S. Treasury quietly shed its "strong dollar" policy in March 2002. Almost immediately, the euro began gaining on the dollar, moving well beyond parity in November 2002. It now takes about $1.09 to buy one euro. Essentially, Hussein has profited greatly from the switch, even after subtracting currency exchange fees, and may profit even more if the dollar continues to slide.
CNN reported last year that, in light of political tensions with the United States, North Korea ended dollar-denominated trade on Dec. 1, 2002. Other countries, including Iran and Venezuela, have also considered switching to the euro as their reserve currency.
At this point, "disaster" for the United States is not a military attack from Iraq. Rather, it is the possibility that other nations -- specifically nations of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries -- will follow Hussein's lead and switch to euro-denominated trade accounts.

Unlike most such theories, this one can be tested. If, after he kicks Saddam out, Bush restores the Dollar standard for Iraqi oil, we'll all know why he invaded.

Short Order Cook

Just for a moment there, I was impressed by an MP. Regardless of what you might think of the man, Robin Cook's resignation personal statement yesterday was eloquent, gracious, forensic and fair.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Difficult to argue with.

Then, today, we are brought back to Earth by the decision of Clare Short not to resign, despite saying at the weekend that she would, were the second resolution not to materialise. Her reason for staying? Apparently resignation would have been the easy way out...

How can she possibly believe that anyone will take her at her word ever again?

Bugger... bugger... bugger

Oh well - so much for optimism.

A guy at work made a (now redundant) suggestion this morning. It seems clear that the US and UK pulled out of proposing their further resolution because it wouldn't have received majority support in the UNSC - covering their real motive by blaming their action on the French universal veto. They are now planning to go to war bolstered by contentious legal argument that tries to say they didn't need the resolution (that they spent weeks sweating blood to get accepted) in the first place.

Just so we can get a proper idea of how much support there would have been for the new resolution, my friend suggested that either France or Russia could table the exact same resolution - or, even better (thinking about it now), a completely unambiguous and clear statement along the lines of:

"Because of Saddam's failure to comply with previous resolutions, the UN now supports the US proposal for military action to disarm him."

and put it to the vote. They can do that safely, knowing that their partner (either Russia or France) could veto it if need be. Then if it failed to win a majority, as it probably would, there would be no doubt that military action would be unlawful.

OK, so that would be too cynical. But why doesn't France at least put its money where its mouth is, and write a resolution proposing a different course of action from the one the US/UK are taking - and put that to the vote? So far the French have behaved as if they were in parliamentary opposition - blocking proposals put by others. If they want to be seen as diplomatic heavyweights, playing a leading role in the UN, it's about time they offered something more constructive than vetos.

Maybe that's the problem - the only people with the balls to do anything are the ones doing the wrong thing.

..judged by results, not by intentions

Cicero would have been proud of RND03 last night.

Sure, their intentions are good - a lot of people's are. I suppose even George Bush has a vestige of good intentions tucked away in there somewhere. The difference with Comic Relief is that they achieved a fantastic RESULT. Perhaps their timing was fortunate. Perhaps the whole country is brimming with despair at the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. Perhaps we have been sensitised to the plight of the powerless. Whatever the reason, the amount of cash raised last night was 50% up on the previous RND, and it was enough to make even the dryest cynic warm to all those shallow showbiz celebs.

Tag-lines like "To change their lives..... just add water" went right through me, and I felt incredibly moved by the hysteria that greeted the running totals. People (millions of us in fact, just by pledging a bit of cash) were DOING GOOD.

Then, around midnight, we had our own humanitarian - or rather, hamsterian - crisis. My younger son, A., went to say goodnight to Jess, only to find her curled up in her bed, virtually comatose. She was cold to the touch and had the resting heart-rate of a marathon runner, instead of the normal humming bird. After a few panicky and anguished moments we warmed her up, and she slowly began to surface. She managed the odd twitch of the whiskers, but little more. I offered her a hazelnut, which she took, but it just sat in her open jaws. She didn't have the strength to gnaw it. It was obvious from her emaciated little body that she hadn't eaten in days. In despair, I warmed some milk and offered some drops in the palm of my hand. She eventually licked a little and seemed to perk up, even opening her eyes slightly. I chopped the hazelnut and she nibbled a bit. We gave her morsels of bread and she even found the strength to hold them in her front paws while she ate them. Then she seemed to slump again. She'd only eaten a scrap and the effort had exhausted her. She couldn't be made to swallow any more. By 2am, the only thing left was to put her back in her bed with a few bits of food, and cross our fingers. We all prepared for the worst.

This morning, A. burst into my bedroom at an ungodly hour, and in his hand was Jess - seemingly back to her normal perky self.

In our own little way we had experienced, in microcosm, what Comic Relief is succeeding in doing. We had taken what seemed to be a hopeless situation and we had gone in there, worked long and hard, hands-on, and solved it. It wasn't just the material resources that saved her, it was the care, concern and energy of the people applying them.

I salute not just the celebs who turn out on RND to publicise, and to raise those astonishing wads of cash, but also the people who spend the money - and more importantly their own time and energy - making the difference which turns people's lives around.

Through one relatively trivial incident, I now know how that feels.

Strange times at work

I work for a multinational company with sites in the UK, Germany, France and Spain, and which is the product of recent mergers between single-nationality companies. Largely driven by disastrous financial results caused by industry down-turn, but also as an inevitable conesequence of the mergers, a big re-structuring was announced yesterday. Three main impacts for me personally:

my department will survive and be expanded
a sister department in Germany, including colleagues I've been working closely with for nearly three years, will close in favour of my department
many, many people in other departments at my site will lose their jobs

I'm finding it very difficult to sort this out emotionally.

My main problem is dealing with the guilt that I feel relieved.

A Ray of Hope

I was filled with optimism yesterday morning - not something I'm normally prone to, especially about the Iraq crisis. It currently seems unlikely that the US and UK will get their new resolution passed by the UNSC. This got me thinking. There's good and bad to come from this.

The bad is:

Saddam will feel victorious

He will hang onto more WMDs for longer

The UN will find it much harder to impose its will in future

Chirac will preen and congratulate himself on being a force in world politics

The good I predict is:

Given his rapidly weakening support at home, Blair will not prosecute a war without UN backing (just because I'm naive, doesn't mean I'm wrong)

He will be able to say to his critics "Well, I did what I knew to be right, but was thwarted by less visionary people beyond my control."

He will avoid accusations of wavering or U-turning, whilst also avoiding the risk of being prosecuted for war crimes at the new ICC.

Bush will be stranded. He will have a choice of (a) complying with the UNSC's decision (and thus retaining a vestige of authority on the world stage) whilst suffering the humiliation at having been humbled by lowly foreigners; or (b) waging war anyway, and marking distinctly the point in time at which future historians will be able to identify the start of the decline of American world influence.

I told you I was optimistic.

This boy will go far

If only I'd had the gumption to write something like this when I was an undergraduate.

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

I'm indebted to Iain for linking this first.

My stupendous degree project was to design and build a circuit which produced... wait for it... a square spiral trace on an oscilloscope. They laughed at me then, but now the whole world appreciates the benefit this has brought to mankind. I suppose talent will out.

What's in a name?

I have three names.

For the first 40 years of my life, I was known as Tim to everyone apart from my mum and dad, who insisted on calling me Timothy...
When I was a kid I never managed to acquire a nickname, but that's probably just as well. At school most nicknames sounded straight out of "Jennings", and were all pretty scathing - Tich, Urn, that sort of thing.

Even my two sons don't call me Dad - from day one they've both called me Tim, presumably because everyone else did, and that's fine by me.

Recently though, I've acquired two other names - one at work, one at home. At work, I'm an honorary member of the Gentlemen's Dining Society - an elaborate cover-name for a group of ex-(but still want to be)students who are old enough to know better, but still think it's cool to go out once a month, get hammered and murder a curry. The default outing is the CCTV night, which stands for Club, Chequers, Taj, Vomit. You get the picture.
Within the hallowed walls of the GDS I'm known as Jelly - an abbreviation of Jelly Head - a character in Viz comic who had a lime jelly in place of her brain and who, though lying completely inert on the ground, managed to foil a robbery and capture the robbers. Can't think why they chose that for me. Oh, and just in case you were burning with misplaced curiosity, the other GDS members are: Shep, Pilch, Spoon, Large, Doug, and Badger. Sadly Dr. Bollocks is no longer with us...

My other nickname is Pligget - hence the name of this blog. Over the last 6 years or so, I've been involved in a number of experimental theatre projects in Cambridge - mostly for the cunningly named Cambridge Experimental Theatre group. In the early days I took part in an acting workshop where one of the exercises was to introduce ourselves to the group and relate a funny anecdote - all in nonsense language. Apparently I introduced myself as "Pligget", in a vaguely Estonian-sounding accent, and went on to tell a story that had everyone in fits - I wish I knew what it was about. The name has stuck - even to the extent that it appeared as my credit in the programme for the last show. So I have a stage name. Somehow it doesn't have the same zing as "Prince" or "Sting" or "The Edge", but then I'm not a pretentious twat... yet.

So, for the record, my formal name is Pligget Troezersnaek, but you can call me Plig.

The root of all evil?

Once again that man Bush displays his grasp of the how the world works and ensures the instability of the Middle East, at least for the duration of his term in office:

Adopting a thoroughly US capitalist view of terrorism, that suicide bombers are only in it for the money, Mr Bush wants to wait until the funds for Palestinian attacks on Israel have been cut off.

He goes on to suggest that other countries allegedly responsible for funding Palestinian terrorism must be dealt with after Iraq. They include Syria and Iran, but also, according to the Israelis, Saudi Arabia and the EU.

Once these regimes have been sorted out, there will still be the problem of suicide bombers who are not trying to earn a bit of cash for their families, but are supposedly attracted by the prospect of 72 virgins awaiting them in paradise.

At that stage, Mr Bush may have to consider further military strikes to bring about regime change in heaven: that could prove to be an especially interesting confrontation.

So that's it. The "Axis of Evil" is really the "Axis of the Love of Money" - at least it is where he comes from.

I'd better stop writing about him - I wreck the keyboard every time I get this angry.

Gol'darn it!

Don't you just hate it when you get one of these error messages?

Leading Bush by the nose

If you want to know what it's like to be a powerful oil company, try this.

Gentlemen, start your Ingens

For my day-job I'm a Satellite Antenna Engineer. Most UK people I tell this to jump to the conclusion that I spend my days driving a white van and clambering around on people’s roofs nailing up Sky dishes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being an antenna fitter, it’s just that I’m not one of them. What I am is a professional engineer working in the space industry – I design the antennas that go on the spacecraft that beam all those lovely shopping channels to your home.

I’ve found recently that the best answer I can give to the “what do you do?” question is to say I’m a Rocket Scientist. I have very little to do with the rockets themselves - I work on the payload, the thing they stick inside the nose-cone at the top (the rocket itself is after all just a glorified firework) – but it’s the closest label that people recognise. OK so it's a cliché that has intellectually glamorous associations, but what's a guy to do?

If truth be told (and this is a blog, so it must) I’m one of the thousands of whingeing UK engineers who bash on and on about how badly we are treated in this country compared with our colleagues abroad. Engineers love nothing better than to whinge, and this is the perfect topic – something which occupies us for inordinate amounts of our working lives, and which bothers other people not one jot.

We moan that anyone in the UK can call themselves an Engineer – whether they design, build, install, test, mend, or simply scrape the crap off something. Abroad, you can’t call yourself an Engineer unless you have the recognised professional qualifications – much the same as doctors and lawyers here. This is the nub of the problem – we want to be grouped together with certain people (i.e. high status, middle-class achievers), and not others. We’re elitist, but not of the elite.

I have the perfect solution:

In the English language, the word Engineer has a strong association with the word “Engine” – implying that we work with hot, noisy, oily contraptions, wear overalls and have dirty fingernails. In most other European languages the word for engineer sounds very similar (Ingénieur, Ingeniero, Ingegnere), but in fact has a totally different root, shared by the words for “ingenious”, “ingenuity” etc. It implies a creative problem-solver – someone who works with their brain, rather than their hands - which is much closer to the truth.

My solution is that we elitist professionals switch a couple of letters around and call ourselves “Ingeneers”. Imagine the hordes of impressed dinner party guests, bank managers and golf partners.

All we need do then is:

acquire some social skills,

find some means of trebling our salaries,

do things in our spare time that could be made to sound fascinating,

befriend members of the opposite sex,

take a critical look at ourselves in a mirror from time to time,

and we’re away.

Who are they trying to protect?

I tuned in during a Today programme interview with a US general this morning. I missed the pretext for his comments, but he was saying he thought there was too much emphasis on the avoidance of Iraqi civilian casualties in some or other battle plan.

He thought there was a danger that ground troops would be sent in early, after only a short aerial campaign (so that the inevitable consequences of carpet bombing the cities could be reduced). His concern was that they were trading off allied military lives for Iraqi civilian lives.

Presumably his logic was that the US and UK Air Forces could and should bomb away with impunity for a bit longer, killing the very people they were supposed to be "liberating", so that fewer US lives would be lost in street-fighting.

Am I the only one here who thinks that's perverse? That he'd rather see umpteen more innocent and powerless civilians killed than a few more professional military volunteers?

What if Saddam were holed up in Houston rather than Baghdad? Would he be equally happy to see masses of civilian Americans caught in the crossfire to protect the military? Of course he bloody wouldn't.

He must have an equation in his head:
1 US life = n Iraqi lives, where "n" is presumably a very large number

Having then heard Law In Action this evening, I'm sure he would be breaking the law. Military action is required by international law to minimise the risk of civilian casualties, but he's promoting a policy deliberately intended to kill more of them.

Can anyone in the US military tell me what is the value of "n"?

R.I.P.

Had a vaguely interesting moment a few days ago. Overheard my mother and her sister talking about how useless Iain Duncan Smith is – as you do.
Remarkably though, rather than it being a source of mirth, as it is amongst everyone else I know, they were deeply depressed. Little gems like Linda Smith’s comment in a recent News Quiz on R4 (“he’s a sort of Unsuccessful William Hague”) leave them exasperated – because they know it’s true.

However much the Tories might want to dismiss the recent kafuffle over The Quiet Man’s latest bid for inaudibility, and blame it on the cynicism and smugness of “The Media Class”, they must realise this: If respectable Daily-Mail-reading seventysomething ladies in the home counties are slagging him off, it must be time to read the large-print-edition writing on the wall.

In the 6 years since they were in power, the Tories haven’t come up with a single idea or a single voice that has done anything to interrupt their decline – they should be grateful to “the media class” for at least keeping them in the public eye, and providing a modicum of opposition to Blair’s dictatorial power.

I know this is hardly topical (OK, so I didn't have a blog back then), but I especially liked it when they tried to explain their disastrous showing at the last election: "We didn't explain our policies clearly enough - we need to work on making our message clearer, so that people can see better what we're offering them". How patronising can you get? The reason people didn't vote for them is precisely because they DID understand what was on offer - and they rejected it.

Poor loves. Makes you want to pop in and visit them every now and then – cook them a nice bit of brisket, make sure they’ve got enough kindling for the fireplace and a fresh set of batteries for the TV remote.

With the Tories heading into the wild Blue yonder, and Tony Blair providing the Red stripes in the star-spangled banner, we can be left with only one conclusion:

The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.