Friday 18th January
Oops! I’m not sure why James Earl Jones should have a plaque in his honour to mark Martin Luther King Day, but if this sort of thing is going to be done, you need to get the name right. You absolutely don’t want to make a mistake like putting on the plaque the name of the guy who assassinated King…
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A lot of stuff has been appearing in the news over the past few days about what Al Qaeda may be (or have been) planning. An attack on London, perhaps; an attack on targets in Bosnia; and of course the videotape I mentioned a couple of days ago which suggested plans to assassinate world leaders at a golf tournament. It’s beginning to be obvious even to many of the sceptical that America was not overreacting in its response to the September attacks, and that a less vigorous response would in no way have stopped future attacks. I’m not convinced it’s going to be easy to stop them as it is, but the disruption done so far to the Al Qaeda organisation has to help.
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Tuesday 15th January
It can’t be true! Can it? Is the Lord of All Evil, scribe of the Mallificarum Sumpta Diabolicite Occularis Singularum, the Book of Ultimate Control, truly dead?
No. Of course not. What we have here is part of an ingenious Net companion to a new film, Nothing So Strange (premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival on Sunday), which is based on the idea that Bill Gates was assassinated on December 2nd, 1999. There is also a conspiracy theory site, of course:
Both the known evidence and the lack of cooperation from the authorities raise disturbing questions about this putatively "solved" crime. Why were no fingerprints found on the alleged murder weapon? Who was the man seen running across 6th Street minutes after the assassination? Why is so much of the official report, including autopsy reports and photographs, still under seal a year after the crime? Why has the officer who shot the alleged assassin to death never given a public interview? These questions and others lead Citizens for Truth to believe that the "last great crime of the 20th century," as the media label it, may not in fact be the Gates assassination, but rather the official bungling of the investigation and even perhaps a cover-up of a wider conspiracy.
The websites are extensive — Wired News wonders if the sites exist to promote the film, or vice versa?
The director explains:
[Brian] Flemming and producer Brian Clark realized that part of the furor around a major assassination would take place on the Web. So they built several sites that extensively detailed the crime and its aftermath…
"From the very beginning of this project we saw the potential to tell broader stories on the Web then we could ever fit into one feature film," Clark says.
"I still think most of Hollywood doesn’t get the Web, which has been relegated to marketing departments along with poster design and television advertisements. (The studios) approach the Web as a way to promote product and end up missing out on the incredible opportunities it provides for storytelling and interacting with fans."
And for those with no sense of humour, no of course I don’t really wish Bill Gates had been assassinated. (Now, if we were talking dumped in a deep, windowless cell with his only contact with the outside world being a, say 100MHz Pentium PC with no more than 32Mb RAM and, oh, a 6Gb hard disk, on which is installed no software which has not been produced by Microsoft, and a 56k modem Internet connection — that would be a different matter.) Buy a dictionary and look up "humour" and "joke" for starters…
No competition this year — I know some of you spotted that. Bad memories tied up with Insa’s illness. Anyway, for those who like a puzzle: there’s a reference to a work of fiction in the first paragraph of today’s entries — who is the author and what is the title of the book?
Monday 14th January
Well, that was a nice long Yule & New Year break…
In the tradition of starting as we left off, there’s a new worm around which (you can see this coming, can’t you?) makes use of MS Outlook to spread. The Gigger worm, written in JavaScript, usually arrives in an email with the subject "Outlook Express Update" and an infected attachment "mmsn_offline.htm". This nasty little beastie will, given half a chance, delete files and format C:. (Which I grant you could only improve a Windows box… )
Thank goodness he wasn’t walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Incidentally, don’t you love it that the BBC thinks it has to explain what a pretzel is? They helpfully give two descriptions: pretzel - a salty snack
and a favourite American snack
. Well, I’m enlightened.
Video tapes found at an Al Qaeda training camp near Kabul raise some unsettling questions:
The tapes … provide what appears to be a rare glimpse into al Qaeda’s training methods showing Arab and Pakistani militants rehearsing for various scenarios including an attack on a motorcade and a mass assassination of world leaders while playing golf. But since the training was carried out almost a year ago and the camp was never hit during United States led operations, the question is where are these well-prepared militants now and what are they doing?
The tapes are being passed to the US military for analysis.
Talking of Al Qaeda naturally brings to mind the carnage of September 11th — odd to think that is only four months ago, given that a war has been fought and won in that time, yet it also seems strange to think that so much time has passed given how vivid the images remain in the memory.
One of the obnoxious things — obnoxious is really not a strong enough word, but any attempt to put down what I really think would take us into South Park territory (you know, "not suitable for anyone") — which happened in the wake of the attacks in New York was companies and individuals trying to cash in, either literally or metaphorically. Here’s a particularly egregious example — if the Red Cross talked about how well they had coped, well, fair enough, but this pile of, IMHO, crackpot shite?
For those who don’t look very closely, note that this site is a UK site, aiming to attract clients from the UK who have been distressed by what happened in the USA. Pretty damn cynical. Particularly troubling is this approach to the definition of cure, which you’d have thought was reasonably easy to define:
In a successful treatment all trace of the original problem disappears - by the patient’s own report. In the event of a return of the problem, this doesn’t mean that a cure was not achieved in the first place, only that it has been undone.
This seems to me to be the classic get-out clause: your symptoms don’t come back — I’ve cured you; your symptoms do come back, I still cured you but something’s "undone" it — you’d better have some more treatment, then. Get your wallet out. (I can’t find any info about prices, but I’m sure it isn’t cheap.) No proof is offered for this that I can see, only an analogy of treating headaches. In my experience when people depend solely upon analogies to support their claims, solid evidence is pretty thin on the ground.
Aren’t scientists wonderful? It looks like a sort of catastrophic failure of the pipe
— ah, that’s why it spewed out 60,000 litres of radioactive liquid. A layman would never have figured out it might be a catastrophic failure of the pipe, he’d probably just have thought it burst or something…
Later reports suggest that this leak at a South Australian uranium mine is far from an isolated incident: more than 20 leaks, denial of a cover-up — it all sounds depressingly familiar, doesn’t it?
Still in Australia, ABC reports that the egregious Pauline Hanson has departed the political stage. Clearly she’s not someone who generates mixed feelings: We really will be very pleased to have the racist and very conservative, right-wing negative point of view and very bad feeling disappear from the community,
says a spokesman for "ethnic communities".
It seems that the ability to digest lactose — something most adults in the world can’t do but which confers an evolutionary advantage to people in cold climates — is down to one single mutation.