Hillary

You can see much more of Tom Tomorrow's work at his website here.

Argh!

I'm just too busy at the moment...

My birthday passed by along with the rest of the week-end in a sort of rushed blur, with work at 7:00AM on Saturday, a long drive home, and then back to London yesterday after more work in the afternoon.

The week-end was not improved by the antics of an ex-heroin addict and an aggressive/selfish pacifist.

Hey - at least I managed to stay off-line for over 48 hours. And THANK YOU for the e-mails and calls and texts - I've been re-reading a few this morning.

Another First...

H and myself decided to stick a collective two fingers (yeah, that's four fingers) at this rubbish Easter break and played our tennis match this morning, as re-scheduled for the third time.

As the snow fell, often quite heavily.

I took my right glove off to hold my racquet, and took my left glove off to toss the ball for the serve.

The conditions produced some strange optical illusions - the ball moves in one direction while the snowflakes swirl around in the same direction and suddenly the brain's trajectory/speed/anticipation computer crashes.

Well that's my excuse for losing 1-6, 0-6, but actually H is a much better player.

So anyway, that's another first nailed:

"Have you ever played tennis in a snowstorm?"

"Yeah."

Rachel Corrie 1979-2003

A video still of Rachel being interviewed two days before she was murdered.

Today is the fifth anniversary of Rachel's murder by the Israeli Army.

There's a good article by Tom Wright and Therese Saliba in Counterpunch this week about the attempts by the Corrie family to discover who was responsible and why it was felt necessary to roll a bulldozer over a 23 year old woman dressed in an orange hi-vis vest and armed with a particularly lethal bull horn.

And then roll the bulldozer back over her, with the blade down...

Wisdom from Ms. Paglia

D and myself occasionally enjoy the commentary and criticism of Camille Paglia – especially her celebrated feminist analysis on the Basic Instinct DVD.* **

In today’s Salon.com, Camille says:

Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.

Not really a condition I seem especially prone too, but then middle management has always been a step or two beyond me...

* Shit jobs sometimes have their minor compensations. One such featured a lady in another department called Catherine Tramell. Sadly she wore knickers, didn’t write novels, and didn’t drive a white Esprit.

** Director Paul Verhoeven also did Starship Troopers; the best comedy of the 1990s.

HM Prison London

A brilliant picture by Paperlilies shows a poster against the introduction of ID cards. It says:

HMP London

Open Prison
ID Must be carried
At all times

Rather like the hovercraft, ID cards are a classic case of a solution looking for a problem. They wouldn’t have prevented the 7/7 bombings or the pathetically amateurish attacks that have followed.

I’ve also got vivid memories of Paris in the mid 90s, when a small terrorist campaign was waged by French citizens whose parents came from Algeria. France has had ID cards for decades and… it didn’t prevent that or previous campaigns either.

For the vast majority of people ID cards will just be another thing to pay for, have to renew, occasionally lose, and sometimes forget.

I can’t think of better way of adding stress to everyone’s life, or a more unpopular measure. Except perhaps, getting us all to swear allegiance to the Queen!

The longer the Brown regime goes on, the more it seems that the PM and his team have been in the elite leadership bubble for so long they’ve completely lost touch with reality. It happens to every government that's been in power for several years, and it's strange that what is so obvious to us outsiders is so hidden to those within.

So British!

Comment overheard at work just now:

Right! I'm going have a nice cup of tea and calm down!

The fact that the lady who spoke is Polish makes it even better.