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I do this when I can, OK? And sometimes I can’t, so there. You’ll get no more promises from me of "regular updates" that seem lead to sudden hospital visits, leaking plumbing, possessed keyboards and who knows what else.

Saturday 16th February

Gee, I wonder who The Onion were thinking of when they put together this story?

There used to be a cartoonist — the name escapes me — who drew pictures of unfortunate fellows committing some terrible social gaffe. The offender would be in the middle of a wide circle, and the rest of society around the edge scowling accusingly at him. This would be captioned The Man Who [whatever].

This popped into my mind as I read about The Man Who Thought Taking the Fifth Would Save Him: Kenneth L. Lay, once chairman of Enron, surrounded on all sides by people baying for his blood. Front runner in the "tell us what you really think" stakes is an Illinois Senator:

Senator Peter G. Fitzgerald, Republican of Illinois, told Mr. Lay he was "perhaps the most accomplished confidence man since Charles Ponzi." He went on: "I’d say you were a carnival barker, except that wouldn’t be fair to carnival barkers. A carnie will at least tell you up front that he’s running a shell game."

I’m no expert on cosmetics or the beauty industry. When I heard some women chattering a while ago about something called botox, I assumed it was spelled "beautox" and was some dumb "beauty treatment". Well, I was right about that — it’s dumb with a capital DUH.

What botox actually is — get this — is botulinus toxin, one of the most toxic substances there is. This neurotoxin is being used by vapid women desperately trying to cling on to babehood: it’s used to paralyse the facial muscles — seriously — to get rid of wrinkles.

There’s an enlightening New York Times piece about it.

"It is now rare in certain social enclaves," she observed, "to see a woman over the age of 35 with the ability to look angry."

A face with character is passé. A face without expression is chic.

(Well that would certainly help explain the mysterious popularity of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who’s proof enough that you can look like a pod person without using botox — but she’s young, of course.)

The article quotes a New York dermatologist to the stars who says, A scowl is a totally unnecessary expression. I suppose that depends upon whether or not you actually want other people to know how you feel — if you do, the option of scowling is totally necessary, and only an ignoramus could suggest otherwise.

The article also notes the irony of women trying to get men to respond to their emotional cues now removing their ability to display these emotional cues, but am I being over cynical in wondering if anyone shallow enough to think pumping neurotoxin into their facial nerves just to try to hide a few wrinkles is likely to be emotionally rewarding enough for a sensitive, emotionally attuned guy to want to be around?

Oliver Stone, it seems, has a conspiracy theory (what a surprise) to explain why Osama bin Laden hasn’t been caught yet. It’s because big business doesn’t want him caught in case the Saudis get upset. This is such crap because… Hell, I can’t be arsed. Earth to Stone, Earth to Stone…

Thursday 14th February

The dogs of war: George Junior wants to show the world how tough he is, so he’s gonna kick that evil Saddam’s ass…

Problem-solving, Microsoft style: There’s a bug in our software? Well, just change the English language and you’ll have no problems!

It’s not been widely reported here that BT is in court in America trying to claim that it owns the patent on hyperlinks — so every link on every US web page (the patent, whether it actually covers web hyperlinks or not, has expired in other countries) should be subject to a licensing fee. I particularly like this paragraph from the Wired News report:

Upon making the fortuitous discovery that it had developed hyperlinks, BT contacted 17 U.S. ISPs, including America Online and Prodigy, in June 2000, asking them to buy a license to use hyperlinks. After receiving unanimous refusals from the companies they contacted, BT decided to take legal action.

Gee, to think they wouldn’t pay up. The judge thinks it will be very hard for BT to prove their case, not that that’s stopping BT from going ahead with it.

"The language of this patent is archaic," said U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon. "And it appears that this technology was already outmoded by the time it was patented."

Well, duh, it was Prestel, which was never exactly hi-tech. Anyway, there’s a rocky road ahead for BT:

For BT to be successful, the company needs to prove that the claims of their patent covers the technical concept used by hyperlinks. For Prodigy to prevail, the company will need to provide evidence that no one else had developed a similar technology before 1976, the date of BT’s Hidden Page patent application.

And that’s where BT’s case may hit a snag, copyright lawyer Neil Justin said. Justin and other legal and Internet experts say there are several documented prior uses of linking technologies, including a 1965 book by British scientist Ted Nelson, and a Stanford University 1968 research project, which many believe is the first documented example of hypertext-style linking.

The thing is, even if BT wins the case, how will it benefit from it? As another Wired News piece explains, not only do lawyers think that BT has almost no chance of collecting royalties for past use of hyperlinks, Programmers insist it would be a trivial task to code an entirely new way to link Web pages.

"The Web was designed as an open-source method of communicating that is accessible to anyone with a computer and some very basic software," said programmer Vincent Vandel. "Programmers will not allow the Web to be shackled with fees and patents. It’s not real hard to figure out a technical way to bypass this so-called patent."

Another voice raised against BT (and there are many) is that of Bob Bemer, who may have invented, the, er, hyperlink.

Bemer started programming in 1949 and came up with the notion of the "escape sequence" while working as IBM’s chief of programming standards. "Escape," which can be accessed on most keyboards through the "ESC" key, may seem like an innocuous, seldom-used feature to some computer users but its capabilities are heavily used in virtually all programs.

Escape’s powers are huge but at its most basic level, it is a command that tells a computer to make a shift in its processing — allowing a user to move up, down or sideways through files, programs or networks. For example, every press of a phone key that allows a user to move through an automated information service is an invocation of Bemer’s escape principle.

Escape also appears in every hyperlink as a slash (/), a programming command that allows Web users to move from computer system to computer system, or from page to page, in a website simply by clicking on a hyperlink.

Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world’s technology right now. But Bemer chose to write an article about escape in a programming newsletter instead, stating that he wanted to put the idea into the public domain.

As he says, Advanced technology only happens when people take a basic idea and add to it. All this new patent stuff is crazy and counterproductive.

And as plenty of other people are saying, all BT seems to be doing is going around stirring up ill-will against itself.

Monday 11th February

I do love the fact that the announcement that Labour and the Tories are co-operating because they think MPs don’t get enough respect comes only a few days after Madame Tussauds announced that, for the first time, the Leader of the Opposition would not have a dummy made of him. IDS, says Tussauds, is just too dull:

A Madame Tussauds spokeswoman told The Times: "We want figures who will inspire strong emotions and provoke strong reactions.

"In our view, Mr Duncan Smith, who most people have never even heard of, is unlikely to achieve either of those feats. Ever.

"He is hardly in the news, nobody ever talks about him, and the people who do know who he is do not seem to care less about him either way."

How to win friends and influence people: The Shrub spoke to the USA and told the nation that Iraq, North Korea and Iran formed an axis of evil.

Colin Powell had to move very quickly to defuse some of the anxiety this rash comment provoked. Well, he tried to, at any rate:

"It does not mean that we are ready to invade anyone or that we are not willing to engage in dialogue. Quite the contrary," Mr Powell said.

But it did not even reassure the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whom Mr Powell was addressing.

Obviously G.W. intended to evoke memories of the Nazi Germany – Fascist Italy alliance; but since Rome and Berlin are only two points on the globe a straight line can be drawn between — moreover it is a line running pretty much north–south — so it was a reasonable metaphor to speak of them forming an axis round which all those European States which are animated by a desire for collaboration and peace can revolve, as Mussolini put it. And with a straight face, too.

An attempt to describe three states (not cities and therefore not points on the globe) as forming an axis makes me profoundly grateful G.W. isn’t in any job where he has to design wheeled vehicles. In fact, it was even more woolly-headed than that, because what G.W. actually said was, States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil. [My emphasis.]

Broken metaphors aside, Bush’s castigation of these three countries in such terms seems — I can’t resist using Patten’s description again — not to be a thought-through policy. (In plain English: "Has the President’s brain been scooped out?")

If some thought had been given to it, one of the consequences that might have been anticipated would be tens of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets to demonstrate against the USA.

It seems to have been quite a carnival atmosphere:

Many people said they had come to show their anger at the American threat and their determination to defend their homeland should it be attacked.

But BBC Tehran correspondent Jim Muir says it was a good natured occasion with fresh early spring sunshine adding to the holiday atmosphere.

A gold coin was offered as the prize for the best of the effigies that were paraded and then burnt at the rally, and there were some innovative slogans in English such as "Bush is Dracula".

There’s a thought.

In the aftermath of September 11th, Americans got really shirty with people suggesting there was anything wrong with the USA’s foreign policy. Unfortunately there has tended to be much wrong with it, and part of it is the tendency to see countries which don’t much like the USA as being "evil". Yes, twenty-three years ago a revolution ushered in a fairly hard-line Islamic regime. Yes, that regime was anti-American. Of course it was, because the USA had kept the odious Shah in power.

But now there is a reformist government in place, and other Western countries are forming better relationships with Iran — something which has to be good for everyone.

Except, perhaps, G.W. and his Good Ol’ Boys may have thought it through after all — <megacynic>if The Shrub calls countries "evil", that might foment anti-American feeling, which just might stimulate anti-US terrorism from new quarters which will give him the opportunity to send the "white hats" in, which will keep his approval ratings high and possibly keep him in office until another fuckwit twig of the Bush family can take over.</megacynic>

Perpetual war to keep a government secure seems familiar…

There’s an American children’s game called Where’s Waldo? which, as far as I know, involves looking at a picture and trying to figure out where Waldo is. Jon Hilkevitch of The Chicago Tribune reports on a hot new variation of this for US air passengers: Where’s The Air Marshal?

I particularly liked the end of Hilkevitch’s piece:

A Chicago Tribune editor who happened to be on the same flight as me from Washington back to Chicago asked whether I observed what he thought were a dent in one of the plane’s engine cowlings (it wasn’t) and a major crack where the base of the tail section is attached to the fuselage (ditto).

Feeling a little more relaxed, his next question was, "Have you picked out the air marshals yet?"

What’s so special about NGC 4622? It’s rotating the wrong way. Puzzled astronomers all round.

The bizarre, affected, not at all spontaneous public exhibition of something (grief it wasn’t) when Diana Windsor died because she was too foolish to put her seat-belt on is, I’m relieved to see, not being replicated for her mother-in-law’s sister:

When Diana, Princess of Wales died four years ago people queued for up to 12 hours to sign books of condolence. Police were prepared yesterday for a similar outpouring of grief. On the Mall, crowd control barriers had been lined up to hold a queue yards deep. Every few minutes, one or two people would walk up between the empty barricades. By midday yesterday around 100 had signed the 10 books opened for Margaret at St James’s Palace.

I also have to say, whatever one might think of Margaret, she doesn’t really deserve to be "praised" in such Blairite terms as these:

"She was neither a Lady Di nor a Queen Elizabeth, which are the preferred models of British society," said Gabriel Abad, 28, adding: "She took a middle way."

What she did was live hard and suffer the physical consequences of extensive drug use. Totally legally, of course, I’m not implying any illegal drug use. Nor am I criticising her. It was her body, and if she wanted to drink and smoke until she lost bits of lung and had strokes, that was entirely her affair (I wouldn’t have wanted to sit in the same room as her, though). My only criticism at all is that it was the public who were footing her bills.

Anyway, it takes a pretty bizarre worldview (this is of course synonymous with "Blairite") to propose the heavy drinking, heavy smoking life of Princess Margaret as a "middle way" between Diana and HM the Q. (I am assuming that Mr. Abad was referring to Elizabeth Windsor and not Elizabeth Tudor, a previous English monarch, since Elizabeth of England’s nickname, "The Virgin Queen", makes the idea even more bizarre.)