Monday, February 3, 2003
Yadda yadda war yadda yadda «
Gosh I’m really getting tired of Blair, but so is Alan Watkins on of the best things about the Independent on Sunday.
On the whole war thing, there’s a very good Salon article on crowd counting at protests: it was always one of the major debates when I was in CND. Nice to learn that it’s the quality that counts.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:52 pm GMT
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Hate Figures «
Is it possible for Uri Geller to fall any lower? Being a lousy magician (uglier than Paul Daniels, less funny, and with a piss-poor repertoire: I can bend spoons oooh). Well yes it is. There’s his interview on Today where he ‘defends’ his paedophile friend Michael Jackson. I suspect the friendship isn’t reciprocated, as Geller is neither a primate nor a sexually immature boy. Even that isn’t fatal, but there’s his line "I’m no great psychologist, even though I’m related to Sigmund Freud." (Relying on relatives seems an admission of both personal failure and a lack of integrity: but his career testifies to those anyway.) The Viennese quack’s claims to ‘greatness’ apart, we can take it that he’s also not an ex-Liberal MP and Radio 4 comedy show panellist, a great artist (and I mean great there), or indeed a talentless hack, though is (if part of the Freud clan) related to all of those too. Geller does such a fine line in distorted argument that Alastair Campbell should hire him immediately. He said, in defence of Wacko Jacko, that he has two kids—the implication being that he wouldn’t want them to come to harm, and so wouldn’t associate with child molesters. Mr Jackson has two kids, can we assume that he doesn’t want them to come to harm? Heaving them off balconies is good for their health?
Anyone wanting to know about the famous ancestor is advised to start with Karl Popper, especially The Poverty of Historicism.
Anyway, that’s what got me going yesterday. I only found the clip above when I looked for the redoubtable Jim Naughtie’s interview with Tony Benn following from Benn’s own interview with Saddam Hussein. "If you want a punch up, go and talk to somebody else…If this is the BBC, you’re your own weapon of mass destruction" Good stuff.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:58 am GMT
Friday, February 7, 2003
In one’s own words «
The BBC note the similarities between a Californian academic, Ibrahim al-Marashi, and the Intelligence Service’s Iraq dossier. United Press International describe some of the material as being "more than 10 years old."
The main difference seems to be that Ibrahim al-Marashi says ‘spying’ but the security people clearly don’t recognise the term, preferring the anodyne ‘monitoring.’ Monitoring clearly doesn’t mean visiting the counrty in question or any of that James Bond stuff; it means pissing about in libraries, well what is a university education for?
I think about Saddam and I think about Blair, and to quote Morrissey, "neither one, particularly, appeals to me."
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:55 pm GMT
Saturday, February 8, 2003
Analyse this «
I particularly liked the question: Favorite input device? Keyboard || Mouse || Trackball || Touchscreen || Sausage of Power But then I would.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:24 pm GMT
OK, I’m still working on/thinking about writing my own CM system. I’m battling with RSS at present; I’ve still no idea whether it’s any earthly use. All I know is that it’s popular. I’m still trying to find which version is supported. My initial instinct was to leap into the lastest release 2.0, but that’s like requiring Flash MX, or whatever new widgets will come will IE7. All very cool, but user-hostile.
I’ve got working PHP code which writes RSS file on the site I work most on. As there’s no update function in the PHP as pages are changed mostly by my uploading them with FTP, and as some are changed and rewritten by other users on the site, I’ve settled for a compromise solution where the rss file is rewritten the first time the index page is requested after some other page is changed. I think that there’s some philosophical concept at play there. It doesn’t matter if the RSS file out of date really, although an RSS seeking robot could download it without triggering the PHP rewrite. The time lag between a page being changed and the index page being checked should be recorded in the RSS file (as each page has a last updated date). What I do like is the simplicity of fixing the date in PHP (it’s date("D, d M Y G:i:s", $modified), unless I’ve misunderstood the standard). What I’m not happy about is that I’ve had to use a flag, which is something that I only ever used comfortably in COBOL programming (which I hate), to decide whether the RSS file needs rewritten.
Next up, how to store old entries. Database sounds good, but I don’t have a good reason for creating a page for every request. Flat files seem more useful. I don’t know.
Less thought, more action might be a good idea.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:37 pm GMT
Monday, February 10, 2003
The wonder of CCTV «
I mentioned earlier today (ie that’ll be below this entry, because that’s how blogs work) that I had to go out to buy a present. So I’m feeling very uninspired. Books? Maybe, but she likes Tolkein and stuff that I’ve no affinity with. So I try out Forbidden Planet and the window has a massive hole in it, sort of sealed up with masking tape. But I can see people inside so I go in, and while I’m lurking around, trying to work out if this saga is better than that saga, and I eavesdrop on this middle-aged guy talking to the slacker at the counter about the window, and they’re talking about a guy in underpants ‘totally off his face’ smashing it with a shovel in the middle of the night, and causing eighteen thousand pounds worth of damage. And all down Queen St there are broken windows.
It’s in the local rag under Pants man in window-smashing spree. Sadly the site doesn’t have pictures.
I bought a present for my friend Dave whose birthday was yesterday, but not what I was after. Of which, more anon.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:52 pm GMT
There’s a disturbing mixture of sense and nonsense in Camille Paglia’s interview in Salon. Omens? She belives in omens? "If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he’d call it off." And this is supposed to be good? It’s the typical superstitious approach to life which characterises fascists like the Romans. (Listening to Mystic Meg does’t decide battles; technological superiority and training do.) Totally dippy. The Nazis believed in all that crap too.Why would a university professor believe in such things? Richard Dawkins on ‘Start the Week’ this morning on Radio 4 put forward his usual contempt for equal media space for religions, on the grounds that they don’t represent real knowledge only ossified learning. (Think of the ‘Father Ted’ episode where Dougal drives the milk float with the bomb that will go off if it slows below 4 miles per hour. Three priests think all day and draw diagrams and their solution at the end is to say another mass.) Paglia realises that she too represents nothing. She knows nothing about Iraq, or military strategy, or the science behind ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ or anything really; all she can talk about is books and ancient history. She talks better than Rumsfeld, but he remains essential; she is only gloss.
However much I dislike Bush, his advisers know their stuff, and are mostly sane.
But she is right, though it’s not new, and doesn’t take her to say it, that Bush is parochial. I’ve met cosmopolitan Republicans, and lots of confused Democrats who don’t know what languages are spoken in Southern America or what Germany calls itself, but it does seem that certain types of ignorance as looked on as worldly by the American right. I mean that Dan Quayle totally dumb approach. Kennedy and Clinton seemed much more broad-minded than either Bush (though Bush senior was wiser than he liked to let on). It doesn’t seem that knowing where Iraq is is the sort of thing that gets a president elected.
Paglia on Condoleezza Rice: She’s got a military mind. I love her steeliness, but there’s something a little harsh in her view of the world. She lacks the human touch. A little self-knowlwdge here would be a wonderful thing.
[’Haruspicate or scry’ is part of a line in The Dry Salvages the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets. I remember the phrase because I had to look both words up. In this context, ‘haruspicate’ means ‘use the entrails of an animal for divination’ and ‘scrying’ is crystal ball gazing.]
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:50 pm GMT
We need a new look. Oh yes.
(Not very original and rather dated and recondite British political joke. Not likely to travel. But it took my mind off the next task of what to buy my ex-girlfriend for her birthday tomorrow. For about a minute,)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:21 am GMT
Who says Microsoft are all bad? Me, most of the time anyway.
However, there’s a thread on fixed side menus (ie emulating frame behaviour with CSS) on WebMasterWorld. So far, so so-so; fixed menus seem to have the same faults whether they’re in frames or CSS: if the menu is longer than your window is high, you’ve got trouble… However the discussion included this hack
[if IE 6]
… //IE hack stylesheet
[endif]
I wasn’t the only person who read [if IE 6] as meaning ‘insert browser detection here’. But no! MS in their infinite wisdom have this rather curious little easter egg Conditional Comments. Suddenly hiding styles from IE becomes easy. Whether it’s any use or not, I’ll have to see.
(You have to wrap the conditional statements in comment tags, but Greymatter is determined to treat them as comments, in which case they don’t appear on the screen. And when I try using special characters, it just undoes them back to angle brackets.)
You could always use it evilly, as in [if IE ] document.write("You have a crap browser.") but we would never dream of doing that.
(Disclaimer: written using IE6.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:15 am GMT
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Past and present «
I bought a book yesterday. So inspired.
It’s a little hard to explain, but it got suggested that I buy T a dildo. I mentioned the suggestion — or rather, I said that I wouldn’t say what had been suggested, and she guessed anyway. The she emailed me on Sunday and asked if I’d bought one. I hadn’t. I hadn’t even taken the idea seriously. But if she saw fit to raise the subject…
So I went to the shops she mentioned, Ann Summers and that awful place on the Hayes: not exactly a long list of depravity. Ann Summers is a surprisingly long inside and there are a lot of women browsing — and almost no men. The dildos are surprisingly small, I thought they’d look like horse’s willies or police truncheons, but they’re mostly more modest than that. The Ann Summers ones came with bizarre warnings: “Not to be used for the treatment of cramps”, “Do not use in the bath.” (They were odder than that, but it’s not a place to take notes.)
The place on the Hayes was much less female-friendly, though their selection was equally broad, it was more expensive. Needless to say, I bottled completely out of buying anything. An afternoon of anthropological study.
And to cap it all, she’s gone off Lemony Snicket since seeing the BBC4 documentary on him. (John Walsh being “his usual snobby self” was how she put it, and Daniel Handler was “crass.”)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:30 pm GMT
Thursday, February 13, 2003
The harmless, necessary cat «
Gordon, my overweight rescued cat has developed a new fetish. He’s taken to sleeping on my pillow at night. Why are cats so difficult? I’ve given up moving him: he comes back immediately. What disturbs me is that he washes my hair as I fall asleep. I thought that he just rested a paw against my head as he washed and occasionally he missed in the dark, but I’ve come to realise that he’s grooming me. He thinks I’m a cat. He’s strange, because he hardly purrs if you don’t count his meow which always starts with a "qurr" or "purr" sound. He’s an odd cat, but I’m glad that I took him in. Not as glad as he is though.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:44 am GMT
Friday, February 14, 2003
Nothing’s sweet «
Salon celebrates Valentine’s Day with a topical story on child labour in chocolate production.
NB I’m in two minds on this. I think it’s ironic that the enlightened capitalists (as we on the left see them) including Rowntree and Cadbury are part of such an abhorrent trade. However, I also believe that these farming methods are endemic to all crop farming in Africa—and we should still buy food from them. Without our trade, all they have is our charity, which is nothing more than bondage by another name. As the article says, Fair Trade isn’t making enough of a dent in the market.
(Ah, all the headlines I let go. Oh bondage, up yours, Slave to love, etc.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:10 pm GMT
These foolish things «
Surfing* through blogs I came across this 100 Things.
- I associate colors, in my mind, with each day of the week
- Monday is blue, Thursday is brown, Saturday is yellow
Now, I’ve always associated days of the week with colours—Monday was blue for me too. Wednesday and Friday are sorts of yellow. The rest have gone over the years. I think it dates back to primary school, but I can’t be certain. It’s no more than the mild synaesthesia that everyone seems to have in some degree, but feels personal because it’s so irrational, and not really shareable.
* I use ‘surfing’ to mean, ‘to wander aimlessly’ and I derive its usage from ‘channel surfing’ —just another name fpr ‘channel hopping’ the blight of the remote control and watching tv by oneself where one ends up seeing a little of lots of things and none of it adds up to anything. However, I believe that it was intended to mean something more deliberate, like the consious process of following up references, and getting to the root of something: the analogy being ‘catching a wave’. I don’t believe that anyone uses it in this way now.
If you want to know my surfing pattern, it went like this Sue Bailey → Shinybluegrasshopper—No War → Bloggerel → 100 Things. Easy really.
Arrows from Arrows, part of Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:27 pm GMT
Saturday, February 15, 2003
Drumming up support «
Who to link to? The obvious one is Stop the War Coalition. The ever redoubtable Metafiler reports that "Web sites protest by going black" but it didn’t go down well with the regulars who regard it as rather navel-gazing. It’s too passive for me. (Besides, who would notice?) Anyway, I’ve forgotten how to make Flash objects validate; if you want me to link to you, don’t use a Flash button and some irritating movies.
I can’t help thinking that a lot of these buttons springing up are link whores using this as a form of self-promotion. The good thing is, no matter how cynical they are, backing down now will be hard.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:44 pm GMT
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Make Tea, Not War «
Anti-war rally makes its mark; even the police figure puts the London march at 750,000, especially generous when only 500,000 were expected. The BBC has some pictures of the marches, of which this is my favourite.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:51 pm GMT
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Go my own way «
Dean Allen has released the beta of Textpattern, which would be a temptation if I weren’t so determined to go it alone.
Going it alone has its own difficulties. As Mr Allen says "I tapped out lines of inelegant PHP code until droplets of blood formed on my forehead and I was hoarse from screaming well why the fuck not at a computer screen every time something refused to work – and of course things don’t work, things don’t like to work –" Now, for some reason, I know that feeling.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:58 pm GMT
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Synchronicities «
I’ve been struck by the way that Auden seems so appropriate right now. Modern war doesn’t produce good poetry. Yeats didn’t like Wilfred Owen, claiming (if I remember correctly) that passive suffering is no subject for poetry. This may have one generation failing to see any merit in its successor—although Yeats really hit his stride after Owen was dead, though his only First World War poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death is one of his best. Auden’s September 1, 1939, apart from being full of quotable phrases, catches my mood of gloomy ambivalence far better than any recent anti-war verse. (Though I’ve not come here to knock Andrew Motion or Harold Pinter.) One of the later poems that sticks in my head right now, though I can’t work out if it’s rubbish or not runs:
The ogre does what ogres can:
Deeds quite impossible for man.
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desolate and slain,
The ogre strides with hands on hips
While drivel gushes from his lips.
And there I shall leave you in the hands of Neal Pollack, who advises all commentators on the war to just Shut Up. Link found on Metafiler.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:44 pm GMT
Friday, February 21, 2003
Styles «
Interconnected has some great links to various style guides, including The Guardian and The Economist. I could read these all day. I must be sad.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:13 pm GMT
Saturday, February 22, 2003
Real Things «
When I was about five, my father and I went to the dairy every Sunday evening. This was, as I hope should be obvious, a long time ago, when there still were small local dairies that delivered milk. I think we really went to pay the weekly milk bill. Maybe it was Saturday evening, maybe Friday. I can’t imagine why they would be open on Sundays in those days. Nothing else was. I think I was, originally anyway, too young to know different.
What I remember is that we bought six bottles of Coke on every trip. They were the old ‘No deposit No return’ type, shaped like a woman, and they came in a carrier box with three on either side of the handle, like the crates milkmen used to carry milk from the float in, or you get if you buy lots of wine from supermarkets. They came in sixes, but we only bought them once a week, so if I limited myself to a bottle a day, there would always be a day without. I think this may have been intended as an early lesson in self-restraint, and, to the extent that I drank a bottle a day, it worked. It was always the last day, the Saturday, or the Thursday, that I went without. And, perhaps as a result, I’ve always had a thing about not eating too many sweets, although this never seemed to extend to alcohol.
Now I was born in 1962, and I always thought (until today) that there was cocaine in Coke up to 1961, so I only just missed it. However the Snopes page on cocaine in coke says they stopped adding it in 1929, and even before that it was present in vanishingly small quantities.
It surprises me that I drank the stuff at all, and didn’t grow up to be some kind stunted halfwit. Coke is just sugar, caffeine, and a little lime juice. (I learned this last ingredient from a brief browse of Secret Formula: How Brillant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World by Frederick Allen in the university library many years ago.) I think I can name the last three times I drank Coke, and the first of those was on holiday 13 years ago, and it stood out because I hadn’t tasted it for years before then. The other two times I think I was driving or something.
The BBC’s Trouble at the Top this week covered the New Coke debacle, which I again thought was a deliberate conspiracy. The programme nailed that one as a myth: they weren’t that smart. Coke was losing out to the taste of Pepsi, despite the slick marketing and all. It’s not like a vintage oak-barrelled Bordeux. I can’t believe that taste matters in a fizzy drink of little nutritional value, which rots your teeth and dehydrates you, though I suppose I’ve put worse poisons into my bloodstream over the years, like vintage oak-barrelled Bordeux.
The most frightening aspect of the programme was people’s devotion to a drink. One said "I am 46 years old and I bought my first Coke with a nickel when I was five years old. I helped build this multi-national corporation. My daughter is now 21 and her first word was Coke, her second was mommy." She’s kidding right? You can’t wean your child on Coke. They should put you away for that.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:32 pm GMT
Monday, February 24, 2003
Dying Falls «
Salon looks to be going out of business. It gets some, but not a lot, of sympathy over at Slashdot. I’ve liked Salon in the past enough to email articles to friends, but not enough to read it every week or anything. Like one /. wag, I’ve got the BBC. The debate, as ever at /. is varied. A lot is made of Salon’s having spent $80 million, without printing presses or distribution and sale or return overheads. The ‘success’ of Amazon (look, you know the url, you don’t need a link) is held up in defense of the spend ‘em while you got ‘em line of thought, though it doesn’t seem a satisfactory argument. Salon went wrong by being lavish in all the wrong places: swank offices in San Francisco, when all you need as /. and a million bloggers show is somewhere to park your arse and a laptop.
There are other theories. One is the politics. Many readers seem to feel that Salon is too left-wing. At the risk of betraying my own prejudices here, I don’t think that washes. They only need around 100,000 readers, and there is little liberal competition in the US press, so it seems an ideal niche position. Then again, others say that columns by conservatives alienated readers and heralded doom. Again, I can’t buy this. All the British papers give space to opponents of their editorial line. It’s the thing which distinguishes them from the rant-papers like Socialist Worker — and it keeps readers writing in, which shows that they’re awake.
There are parallels between Salon and Amazon. The differences should be clear. Salon attempts, by concentrating on comment and opinion, rather than straight news reporting, to actually create content. In that sense it is unique. Amazon is a bookseller, and you can buy the books somewhere else (from the publishers, or from second-hand and antiquarian dealers if the books are particularly obscure). Both trade on being online businesses. Amazon capitalises on that by gathering information on customers, and trying to personalise its responses. Salon, by extravagant spending missed the one advantage it had. What has happened is that the rest of the world has caught up. Now all newspapers are online, and getting better at being so every year, as they tweak themselves to greater usability or readability. Even the New York Times, famous for its free subscriptions, now lets Google crawl its pages so that they can be read without the subscription. (The Daily Telegraph, which has fantastically convoluted urls with session id stuff, is also crawled by Google, which is useful to know if you ever want to link to an article.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:32 pm GMT
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Addendum «
Ahem. In writing about the difficulties at Salon (either directly above or archived here), I should have linked to Raise Limbaugh’s blood pressure! Keep Salon in business: Editor David Talbot’s plea for survival.
Note to the cynical: I am aware that by linking to what everyone else is linking to I get a link from Popdex : the website popularity index, thereby affecting my own popularity. Ironic, isn’t it?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:36 pm GMT
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Cops and Robots «
Finding a common enemy is the simplest way to unite a people. Some ememies are imaginary; some are toothless. Most internet users come across spammers — and we hate them.
Dive into Mark (one of the most useful sites on the web; I found Greymatter through his Dive Into Accessibility) addresses one of my favourite web topics: How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell. Webmaster World has A Close to perfect .htaccess ban list. I’ve been playing with mine for months, and I’m still ambivalent about it. For one thing, it’s easy to block real people — something I would regard as criminal. The W3 are against the practice of banning, saying "Avoid agent blocking: Even though some agents may be badly broken, refusing to serve content to users of such an agent means lost business (traffic), and flexible technologies, which ensure that the content may be handled by any agent, should be preferred to this practice". This is generous, optimistic, and naiïe. As Mark Pilgrim puts it, rogue bots and download agents are eating up his bandwidth allowance. (One of his stupider commenters asks if the US has unlimited bandwidth, which is apparently common in Russia. There is no such thing as unlimited anything. ‘Unlimited’ just means that we haven’t thought about that yet. As with the NTL broadband fiasco limits will turn up.) There are better and more flexible methods than a static .htaccess file. I don’t have access to my server as I use shared hosting, but Robot Cop sounds very tasty.
The other option is Marsall Roch’s Bot Bomb — which I recommend very highly because my name is in the credits. (Open the index file, view source, and TA-DA! though you have to look for it.) Bot Bomb poisons the spammers with potentially enough email addresses for the whole galaxy. If enough people start using it on their sites, the bot companies will become discredited, and maybe just maybe (ok, it’s very unlikely) the spam will stop. In the short term, it may piss off someone, which is fine with me, because they piss me off mightily. On another page, I’ve gone into email encoding.
One final point on the banlist approach: the Apache module mod_rewrite page suggests that the conditions for forbidding or redirecting a usr-agent can go well beyond the HTTP_USER_AGENT and the HTTP_REFERER, they can include among others, the REQUEST_METHOD and the time of day. All food for thought.
On the defensive side, rather than filling your email-client’s ‘deleted items’ with spam, send it back from the server (this also means that viruses will never reach your machine) using Mail Washer.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:30 pm GMT
So you want to write about yourself. There is a right way (Caring for your inner introvert) and a wrong way (Why Nerds are Unpopular). The first is only a lightweight, throwaway piece, but it’s so well balanced that it seems to have hit a nerve, and shot to the top of Popdex’s popularity index. Well, perhaps it’s well balanced, perhaps nerds just like reading about themselves.
There’s something irritating about Paul Graham’s essay on popularity. As he politically avoids reaching any conclusions, it’s hard to say what that is, and, as he’s invested a lot of time in thinking about it, saying so seems a little unfair. FWIW, I think that the premise misses the point. For one thing, nerdiness as he uses it seems to be defined by unpopularity. It’s not as if there was an inverse correlation between intelligence and what he considers popularity. For another, the heirarchical, non-democratic, caste systems of childhood have nothing in common with comtemporary political credos. Popularity is not their currency. I’m not even sure I know what he means by popular. Is the top kid the one who everyone likes? And the number two the one who one person dislikes? In the sifting allegiances of children these don’t seem trackable. Is the popular kid the one most others would donate blood for? If the unpopular kids were really unpopular wouldn’t they eat on their own?
I think there are strata in childhood society, and they’re not about money. They’re a product of potential power (Graham seems to forget that a lot of childhood is determined by fear of violence, rather than fear of exclsion), mutual loyalties, and luck.
A Graham inspired thread "Advice You Would Give to Your 12 Year-Old Self?", popped up on /. which could easily be retitled Why Nerds are Superficial, wandering off into ‘which stock would you buy?’ Now there’s a topic to get you excluded.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:20 pm GMT
Friday, February 28, 2003
Taking Care of Business «
Read any good books lately? David Sexton lifts the lid on book reviewing. I reviewed books as a student, and I read all the ones I wrote about. There were some I didn’t start at all, and I tried to sell those later. No bookshop would take them. I ended up giving them all to Oxfam.
Sympathy for the devil: this isn’t the easiest piece to read — the first sentence is nonsense to me, but it’s a considered and original discussion of the current international situation, which isn’t too far away from my own analysis.
I’m not convinced by the "there has never been a war between two countries that harbored McDonald’s franchises" so I looked it up on Snopes.com, but no dice. They did blow the lid on the Lincoln and Kennedy myth very nicely.
It’s a great joke here, but probably unreported in the States, that a 72-year-old charity worker was arrested in South Africa at the request of the FBI, and held for three weeks without trial. He was innocent. This is how our allies deal with suspected criminals. Still he got a call from the president, which I thought was sweet. However, it was the SA president. Bush and Rumsfeld clearly don’t apologise.
So it’s nice to know that Americans are taking the coming crisis seriously and maintaining a high alert.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:54 pm GMT
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