March 20th - March 26th 2006
Sunday Length
Saturday Shopping
Friday Nuked
Thursday Also
Wednesday Rotherhithe 2005
Tuesday Crumbs
Monday Cut'n'paste
Sunday 26th March
I was much taken by the nobility of La Huffington's apology for her highly contentious blog-entry purporting to have been written by George Clooney.
I was even more taken when I spotted her epigraph at the top of the page: "DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005"
I guess 10 months is a long time in the blogosphere.
Saturday 25th March
Adventures in shopping, part two
On Wednesday, whilst waiting for troubled-diva to emerge from the toilets at The White Swan, I drunkenly attempted to stick my much-loved 10-month-old little camera on a ledge prior to taking a photo, only to watch it tumble five feet to the floor and fail to bounce.
Closer inspection revealed the zoom extension canted to a distinctly unaesthetic angle, a not entirely unlikely explanation of why the damn thing refuses to close up and go to sleep. Or, indeed, do anything much other than act as an attractive paperweight.
On Thursday, having bought a set of jeweller's screwdrivers, I attempted to open the camera case in the faint hope of seeing it all magically revert to the way it was always meant to be (an entire life-history of my benighted optimism, right there).
That having failed to happen - because, of course, you can't slide off the case while the lens is still obstinately stuck out through it - I reluctantly went shopping for a replacement.
On Friday, I found, on Amazon, a later version of the same camera, with 25% more resolution, at £7 less than I paid for the original.
And on Saturday, it was delivered to my door. Total time without camera: 58 hours.
(Lest you should think that I'm somehow blessed with supernatural shopping skills, I'm obliged to point out that the other major disaster in my material life, the lack of anything larger than a kettle's-worth of hot water, remains entirely unresolved: the plumber who promised me an estimate over a week ago remains resolutely incommunicado; the soonest his potential (gay!) replacement can make it to inspect the damage is next Wednesday. Thank heavens Spring is here.)
Friday 24th March
So there's you, Photoshop-savvy media-literate that you are, turning to page seven of yesterday's Daily Star and having hysterics at the unbelievably piss-poor 'artist's impression' of some swivel-eyed hysteric's imagination of "How the Bluewater shopping centre might have looked after a bomb attack".
And then you spot "nuke" in the headline, and you look a little closer at the graphic, and see, yes, a mushroom cloud hovering over (the aptly-named) Gravesend.
And a cold shiver of sheer terror runs down your spine because you, informed reader that you are, have been paying close attention to reports of the trial of the latest seven men accused of plotting bomb attacks on Britain.
And you're all too aware that the only evidence of intention that's been heard so far has been reports of casual conversations between the young defendants, during one of which, in passing, one of them boasted of the possibility of "a little explosion at Bluewater - tomorrow if you want. I don't know how big it would be, we haven't tested it, but we could do one tomorrow."
Which seems quite a long way away from planning to unleash a nuclear bomb on the place.
It's true, of course, that the trial has been told of rumoured attempts to buy a radio-isotope device - aka 'dirty bomb' - from the Russian mafia. (It has also heard the prosecution admit that their informant, himself hoping for a lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony, dismissed these rumours as groundless.)
But a radio-isotope device, whist arguably the 'nuke' of the Star's headline, is very distinct from an H-bomb. It doesn't produce a mushroom cloud, for one thing. Or even flames, necessarily.
So wtf is going on in this idiotic graphic?
Contempt of court, for one thing, you might think. The defendants are, after all, charged with the comparatively innocuous crime of possessing fertiliser in order to cause explosions.
But think again. Perhaps The Star's coverage is more subtle than that.
Many see this trial as the latest episode in the UK government's increasingly comic attempts to terrorise its citizens into willingly giving up their hard-won civil rights.
You'll remember the ludicrous (and entirely useless) tanks at Heathrow in 2003.
You'll recall the ricin plot trial which ended with the jury finding all members of the alleged terrorist cell not guilty of conspiracy to murder.
Is it not just possible that, in illustrating this latest terror scare story with such a laughably inept graphic, The Star is actually satirising these attempts to frighten us back behind the sofa?
No, you're right. Probably not.
Thursday 23rd March
Customers who rented this also enjoyed...this.
Wednesday 22nd March 2006
Rotherhithe, Winter 2005
Tuesday 21st March
That would explain a great deal - if I was treating my insomnia with Ambien, which I'm not.
Monday 20th March
Cut-and-paste, cut-and-paste: a modus vivendi that becomes depressingly familiar the older you get.
(That's the best excuse, sorry rationale, that I can offer for the fact that it appears to have been 2005 lately here on Blogadoon.)
......previous week
