Shine on you Crazy Diamond

There are rumblings coming from number 10 and 11 Downing street. The new threat comes not from the Middle East but from the north. The insurgents this time are threatening to go to the ballot box and bring down another oppressive and corrupt regime. Yes, in the spring of 2007 Scotland will have national elections to form its next devolved parliament. To the great chagrin of New Labour, Scots look like voting in the Scottish National Party - separatists bent on independence.

This is not new movement by any means (it was formed over 70 years ago), so you may well wonder what’s brought this change of public opinion in Scotland? The reason, I wager, is the failure, fatal to every politician: the failure to listen. Just ask President Bush about his recent thumpin’ in the mid-term elections. Could Scotland be reacting to Blair’s failure to listen too? I bloody hope so!

The threat is so real that both Blair and Brown have brought out their big guns to fight back. These being fear, doubt and uncertainty (FUD) and yet more failed Blair policies and lack of backbone on foreign policy. If I were a Labour MP I’d want Blair out before the election next Spring, just ask the Republicans if it was a good idea to wait to let Rumsfeld go until after the election. I dare you!

Having lived in England for many years, there’s one thing that consistently bugs me about the English-centric media - it the way they tag “and Scotland” onto news reports, see quote from BBC News below. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much but normally you would naturally group London with other world capitals like Paris, Rome or New York, not a whole other country! I’m assuming it’s because reporters are too lazy to look at a map, or perhaps they think that readers are too simple to understand that Scotland has “geography”. But the most likely reason is because readers just don’t care (What does that say about Scotland’s status within the UK? Roll on independence!)

And it’s not confined to just Scotland. For example, if you’re reading this from outside the UK ask yourself, “Besides London where else is there in the UK?” Can’t think of any where? What about in Russia besides Moscow, or any African capital? Well, I have to admit I’m struggling too! Now I come to think about it perhaps I was being far too unkind to those ‘British’ reporters after all.

The announcement follows reports that pirated DVDs of Casino Royale were on sale in London and Scotland last week.

In fact, reports are saying it was 14 Iraqi family members that were blown up in the latest US air strike. The story being reported in the media is that 3 men were seen digging a hole, suspiciously looking like an emplacement for a roadside bomb. So far there has been no confirmation of the bomb being found. The men were tracked back to a house by an unmanned aircraft and using the latest precision weapons-of-medium-destruction their house was blown up. The US military and US press are down-playing the event stating the casualties are unavoidable.

What’s not reported in the online US media, but you’ll find it in British reports, is that

Local police chief Colonel Sufyan Mustafa said he believed there were no anti-US insurgents present in the house.

“I absolutely confirm there were no terrorists in this house,” police chief Colonel Sufyan Mustafa told Reuters. “Even if there had been, why didn’t they surround the area and detain the terrorists instead?”

For some years I’ve been more than impressed by the Japanese fascination for bathroom technology. Not only do their sophisticated gadgets obviate the need for toilet paper (your bum gets washed and blow-dried) after a visit the bathroom analyzes ’samples’ using lasers, collates medical information, making it able to detect early signs of certain health problems, including kidney disease and cancer. Weird, or what? I like the idea of lasers shooting out bit.

Well, the latest news is they’ve got that one step further: there’s now integrated MP3 toilet technology with detachable remote. What more could you ask for, eh? Link

Update: another great product for the bathroom.

I dare you. I double-dare you! Find me something more boring than this.

There was I thinking these guys created something interesting or useful! Phah! Call this news! Grrr!

This’ll be the UK in a few years from now. Link

Next time you see a French woman, high on sleeping tablets and alcohol, trying to open the emergency doors mid-flight so she can have a quick smoke outside remember in French they say, “Mon Dieu! Nooooooooooooooooooooon!”

Despite being high as a kite, wasn’t it very decent of her not to subject the other passengers to the long-term dangers of passive smoking? You got to give her that.

As I sat watching BBC 24 while chewing my Cheerios, a report about President Bush came on. “More bad news?”, I wondered to myself. No, as it was Sunday he was attending a church in Beijing and mumbling something about “God Bless Chinese Christians”. That surprised me as I thought the Chinese government wasn’t that keen on religion (and I wondered why, apparently, God doesn’t love non-Christians in China).

For a while I was mildly impressed that Bush had made a stand for what he believed in, especially, in front of a Chinese audience. Until the guest in the BBC studio pointed out that none of the Chinese media would be reporting this event or showing any images of Bush going to church. According to him, this was all stage-managed by Bush and his counterpart, so that both heads of state could look good to their domestic audiences.

You could say it’s appalling that we’re being manipulated like this, but there’s a positive ’spin’ to it. Afterall, it only goes to prove that US and Chinese relations are a strong as ever. Don’t you think?

Dragon’s Den has returned, as good as ever. It’s a TV series is the UK where every week a new bunch of inventors pitch their ‘fantastic’ new product to 5 venture capitalists in the hope of winning somewhere around £100K+ of investment in return for equity in their start-up company. More often than not the entrepreneurs crash and burn, but occasionally there’s one that jumps out and captures the interest of the VC experts. In the last programme, one guy had three separate bids from the experts, which was a relief as all the other pitches were rejected very quickly. It’s very entertaining to see the weird and wonderful things that real people think up.

But what can be more weird and wonderful than the latest idea to come out of the US: brothels for women?

In Nevada, where prostitution is legal Heidi Fleiss is hoping to set up a brothel charging women $250 for an hour of passion with some of the best men in the world. She even plans to fly high class prostitutes around the world for the paltry sum of $10,000 a night. As she explains, “women, these days, are very liberated”.

I hope she does well. But I suspect that like a lot of entrepreneurs that enter the dragon’s den, she gets eaten alive.

My regular readers may recall that I like to read Google News to find out what’s been happening in the world. In fact, I rely on it these days. So when I first took a look at Google Video, what I expected it to be was some sort of extension of their excellent news product. Perhaps, it would even contain a dash of the interactive features that the likes of youtube.com offer (i.e. rating, commenting and providing easy external links into content). I certainly wouldn’t have expected the big G to ask me to put up with a cold lifeless search interface into a database I can’t navigate. No doubt there’s bound to be some fantastic content in there but how am I supposed to find new stuff if there are no reviews to read.

Imagine what you would do it nobody reviewed films when they came out in the cinema. How would you know which ones to go and see and which ones to avoid? Wouldn’t that be insane?

Well putting that aside for the moment, one better-than-Google service I’ve been trying recently is video aggregator, blinkx.tv. I can say with complete confidence that it’s going to be a great success as they host that secret key ingredient that has historically propelled all new technology into the main stream, that is, porn.

Besides the ‘oohs’, and the ‘aahs’ you can find several video feeds from numerous well known news providers, e.g. CNN, Fox and especially our much admired BBC.

The thing I like about view video news online is that I have the choice of when to watch and what to watch. One thing I certainly won’t miss from terrestrial TV is the cricket. Damn straight!