Year: 2003

If there’s one thing worse than all the spam I get, it’s the spam I get from real people. The other day, I was sent a forwarded email that I was sure to find funny and interesting. It wasn’t, and I didn’t.

It was an email that is currently doing the rounds that purports to be Robin Williams’ “Plan For Peace”. It isn’t, by the way, as snopes reveals here, it was just attributed to him because at some point someone appended a Robin Williams quote to the bottom, and it was then interpreted as indicating his authorship of the whole list. Ironically, the quote appended to the bottom seems to present the diametrically opposed viewpoint to that expressed in the rest of the email (unless the whole thing is supposed to be ironic, but I doubt it).

But I digress. The thing that intrigued me about this email, and the reason for writing about it here, was the assertion at the top that it is “hard to argue with [the] logic” of this “plan for peace”. Well, actually, I don’t think it is hard to argue at all. Anyway, that sounds like a bit of a challenge to me, so here goes…

The version of the email I was sent is the one shown on snopes; the original – slightly different – usenet posting is here.

1) The US will apologize to the world for our “interference” in their affairs, past & present. We will promise never to “interfere” again

So no more installing puppet dictators and/or tyrannical regimes around the world in accordance with the needs of the prevailing US foreign policy of the day then? Let me see, Pinochet, Hussein, the Taliban… I could go on, but somehow I don’t think that this kind of interference is quite what they are referring to.

3) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We’ll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.

4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 day visits unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don’t like it there, change it yourself, don’t hide here. Asylum would not ever be available to anyone. We don’t need any more cab drivers.

It’s depressing enough to hear this kind of right-wing, not-in-my-back-yard attitude expounded in this country by little-England Daily Mail readers et al., but coming from a country of immigrants, it rather smacks of hypocrisy. Of course, if that’s what you want, why doesn’t everybody in the US who can’t trace their roots back to the native Americans pack up and head back to their countries of origin. If the last person out could just turn out the light, that’d be great.

Oh, and no one from a “terrorist nation”? How are you defining that, then? I suppose St Patricks’ Day is going to be a quiet one next year.

6) The US will make a strong effort to become self sufficient energy wise. This will include developing non polluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.

Well, what’s the point of conserving areas of outstanding natural beauty when Soccer Moms have SUVs to drive…

7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don’t like it, we go someplace else.

First, perhaps this link might help explain how prices for commodities, such as crude oil, fluctuate according to supply and demand.

Secondly, the obvious fallacy in logic here is that, if you’ve already offered all the oil producing countries $10 a barrel, how are you going to go “someplace else”?

I could go on, but I think I’ve probably made my point by now. Don’t get me wrong, none of these comments are intended to be anti-American in any way, or anything like that. I just object to the circulation of this kind of ignorant, racist, right-wing nonsense and felt the need to respond.

Rant over… for now ;)

I’ve been having a bit of a mare today.

It started around 7.30 when the alarm went off and I couldn’t really believe it was time to get up already.

Then I broke the shower. Well, I say “shower”, but I use the word in the loosest sense of the term. It’s really just a crappy piece of white plastic stuck onto the taps that redirects the water through the hose. At least, it used to be. Now it’s a crappy piece of white plastic half stuck onto the taps that sends a jet of boiling hot water shooting across the bathroom when you turn it on, and that looks like it’s going to fall off due to the pressure at any moment.

Somehow, in spite of various problems on the Victoria line (and the 20 mins I spent trying in vain to screw the shower attachment back onto the taps) I made it to work on time, albeit in my obviously un-ironed shirt.

Still, it’s not all bad. Today in my email, amongst the spam, I found a short story that’s someone in Washington DC has submitted to Paste (that’s only the second time ever that someone random from the InterWebNet has actually sent something in. Hmm. Probably shouldn’t say that, should I?) I’ll be putting it up on the site at some point today when I get a spare moment.

Oh, and we’re off to a comedy club tonight, which looks like fun.

I’ve talked about Metro before, and, as I said then, I really shouldn’t bother reading it. The letters page, however, continues to provide a rich source of comic material. If ever there was an illustration of the insidious right-wing obsessions of middle England, this is surely it.

In today’s edition, under the headline pregnant moaners, there’s a series of letters responding to an earlier missive on the subject of giving your seat up on the tube for pregnant women. Astoundingly, most of the correspondents writing to today’s issue seem to be of the opinion that, if you’re pregnant, you deserve everything you get, shouldn’t be travelling on the tube, and have no more right to a seat than anyone else. Here’s some quotes: “Mr Pinstripe didn’t tell you to have a baby, and it is unreasonable to expect him to be inconvenienced because you are unfit for train travel”; “Jo Collier [writer of initial letter] [wasn’t] forced to become pregnant… she probably nagged her partner for years about having a baby and now she’s got what she wanted, she needs something else to moan about.”

It’s one thing being a heartless bastard, but I’m amazed that people feel the need to write to a shabby paper to let everyone know they have no respect for other people. I look forward to next week’s editions telling me why, say, the elderly deserve everything they get (“it’s not my fault they’re old, why should I be inconvenienced?”) and will have to fight for that seat if they really want it. It’s a jungle out there, kids…

Now that you’ve registered at the NY Times site (what, you mean you don’t just blindly follow every link I put up here because I tell you to like you have nothing better to do?), you’ll be able to read this opinion piece on the dangers of private ownership, which is particularly scathing about everybody’s favourite hugely powerful media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch.

Although I agree entirely with the article (and despise Murdoch as much as the next guy), I did just wonder if the fact the he is singled out has anything to do with the fact that he is the proprietor of their rival New York paper, the Post?

From this week’s NME, classified section, listed under ANNOUNCEMENTS:

The Trustee in Bankruptcy of Andrew Michael Rouke (formerly of “The Smiths”) wishes to sell Mr Rourke’s royalty stream. Any interested party should contact Joey Byrne, Turner Parkinson Solicitors… Manchester.

Wow. Rourke (and drummer Mike Joyce) might have won that 1998 court case when the judge memorably branded Morrissey “devious, truculent and unreliable”, but I guess it wasn’t enough to keep the wolf from the door.

Although what Rob says is pretty accurate, it’s not quite true that no one in the US “gets” Ali G, as this article from the NY Times demonstrates. (You’ll have to register with them to read this, but registration is free). It includes the following transcript of some of Ali G’s interview with James Baker (former US secretary of state):

YOUNG MAN: Isn’t there a real danger that someone give a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying, ‘Bomb Ira–‘ and the geezer doesn’t heard it properly and bombs Iran instead of Iraq?

MR. BAKER: No danger.

YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?

MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues… is you deal with carrots and sticks.

YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it’s like a million tons of carrots that you’re giving over there–

MR. BAKER: Well, carrots – I’m not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid – money, money.

YOUNG MAN: Well, money’s better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them–

MR. BAKER: Well, don’t get hung up on carrots. That’s just a figure of speech.

YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation–

MR. BAKER: No, no.

YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?

MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.

I watched “The Day Britain Stopped” last night. A “documentary-style drama” set in the future describing the events of a particular day in December 2003, when Britain comes to a standstill, and death and destruction ensues. It all starts fairly innocuously – but then a sequence of what would, individually, be serious, but relatively minor, events combine to create something much worse. A train strike pushes more traffic onto the roads; a couple of accidents gridlock the M25 leading to the (unprecedented) closure of the motorway; air traffic controllers can’t get to work to replace the staff currently on their shifts. Then someone makes a mistake at NATS in West Drayton, and there’s a mid-air collision between a passenger plane taking off at Heathrow, and a cargo plane landing.

Despite the quality of the “acting” from the talking heads telling us their experiences during the day, it was actually quite a believable scenario. On the whole, I’m not a huge fan of this kind of disaster TV. It’s incredibly sensationalist – the sort of thing that you expect to see on Channel 5 after some real disaster somewhere else in the world with a tagline like “It Could Happen Here!”, or on one of those documentary channels you get on Sky.

This being the BBC, however, it was still lowest-common denominator tabloid TV, but it was very well done. To make the drama seem more like a documentary, it was interspersed with footage supposedly from the news reports of that day, each of which featured real news anchors (Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark, some people from Sky News, a plethora of regional BBC presenters) and looked pretty authentic. Even though I knew I was watching a drama, there was still something quite chilling about watching a newsflash where Channel 4’s Jon Snow tells you that he’s just getting reports of two planes colliding over Hounslow. [And much potential for my parents to switch on at the wrong moment, unaware that this was a work of fiction, and misunderstand, War Of The Worlds style.]

They kept saying it as well. Hounslow crash this. Hounslow crash that. [I mean, why does it have to be “The Hounslow Crash”, not “The Heathrow Crash”?] Here’s a picture of the severed BA tail fin on the ground with a BBC News 24 logo on screen and the words “HOUNSLOW PLANE CRASH” in big letters across the bottom.

Scary. But not quite as scary as the fact shown onscreen as the “documentary” ended, about a report published 10 years ago, the conclusions of which are not endorsed by NATS. The report “calculated there would be one collision following a missed approach at Heathrow, on average, every 20 years”. The scary part? That bit of the documentary is actually true.

Popped out at lunchtime to hunt for a birthday present and card for my dad, who’s going to be 60 next week. I wasn’t really expecting to get anywhere with the present, but I thought I might at least manage to pick up a card.

I was wrong. I failed spectacularly. Not only did I fail to get anything for him, I ended up buying one book for myself, I had to stop myself from buying another, and I almost picked up a couple of DVDs as well. I think I’ll try again tomorrow.

Some thoughts for the day.

1. Failing to qualify for Europe is no excuse for taking your website down as soon as the season finishes.

2. It’s not the same without Graham (although Alex is as bored as ever) but it’s still bloody fantastic.

3. Sometimes you just have to do the things that you don’t want to do.

4. I suppose it’s better to do the right thing later rather than never…

5. If 192 is being shut down to be replaced by hundreds of different 6 digit numbers, which number do I call to get the number for directory enquiries?

6.

Because the world is black and white.

[to be continued…]

Looks like they have Internet access back in Iraq: “Salam Pax” is back online. Well worth a read, now that the attentions of the mass media appear to have turned elsewhere…