Blah Blah Flowers

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger was one of the best books I've read in a long while, a love-story across lifetimes, so I was eager to read her second book, The Three Incestuous Sisters. Big on paper she made a number of books like this, carefully crafted works of art. It's a shame that in mass-publication what is presumably the carefully crafted paper of the original has been discarded in favour of the regular stuff. Without it the artwork has only a limited charm, the page where a baby is surrounded by things and their names bears a resemblance to Frida Kahlo's painting of her miscarriage. But all we have is little more than simple sketches, if this took years for Niffenegger to create, one wonders exactly what it was that took so long. Every other page is a rather simple undetailed drawing, coloured from a limited palette in solid washes of colour, there honestly doesn't seem to be that much to it.

The story? Three sisters, their relationship is shattered by a gorgeous man, he falls in love with one of them, another causes her death then commits suicide, the third survives and finds some peace. It'll take less than a half-hour to read. So this is a book you can read between meals without spoiling your appetite.

Why is it, do you think, that neither CSI: Vegas or CSI: New York have any actors in it that feel the need to be shown, every week, giving extra-special help to a member of the community? This week Horatio was helping out an old Cuban-American who's store had been fire-bombed. The other week it was the child of a murder victim. Gil Grissom doesn't do that, he solves a case then goes back to his pickled foetus collection. Mac doesn't do that, he finishes a case then goes back to obsessing over his dead wife. Mind you, none of the other actors keep putting their sunglasses on, then taking them off, then putting them on...

What on earth has happened to Waking The Dead? It looses two main characters and then gets rid of baffling plots in favour of baffling plots and extreme melodrama and shouting. What a shame.

It seems I now have rats as well as squirrels in my garden. You better all buy Elbow's Leaders of the Free World or I'll be setting my fucking rodent army on all of you.

I wish I had a TV where I could kill people on screen just by pressing a button, that would be so cool. Mind yous, I'd need an 'undo' function because making David Blunkett do the explodee just once is nowhere near enough.

I am ill. Pray for my recovery. Meanwo He-Man sings [via B3ta].

Elsewee, the unstable still get to choose the unelectable. Might I suggest that whoever takes over this sinking ship next actually look up 'Conservatism' in a dictionary (or, if it's one of the young 'uns, perhaps Wikipedia) and start the party acting like it rather than thinking it means being nasty to brown people or Europeans?

Threshold looks promising. I'm only one episode in at the moment but they haven't introduced the unnecessarily annoying member of the team who slows everyone down by putting up obstacles, the s.1 Cordelia if you will. Still, plenty of time to go. It seems to be pretty much the over-arcing alien conspiracy of The X-Files though that's not a criticism, before that show degenerated into pantomime and farce it was those episodes when it was at it's best.

I'm falling out of love with Boston Legal nearly as fast as I fell in originally. Living TV seem to enjoy showing blocks of series one at a time and date of choosing presumably based on the Tarot, but at the moment it's very early in the season, and while the subject of Crane's Alzheimers borders on bad taste Poole's mental instability tips over. Then there's Alan Shore's deeply unpleasant attitude towards women which seems to be ignored, allowed and tolerated because deep down he knows he's a shit. His behaviour towards Sally towards the start of the season would be okay if it wasn't for the fact that, towards the end of the season he's seeing Tara and there's a big thing about how he's morally outraged, outraged I tells ya, by the behaviour of a guy who kills his mother in a fit of rage and then gets Alan to defend him. The problem with comedy-dramas is that sometimes they get the two mixed up when they need to be kept clear.

House series two. Again, only seen the first episode so far but it looks good, though I wish they hadn't changed the original title music for Massive Attack. Although drafting in his ex-partner gives them someone who's allowed to be even more rude to House than Dr Cuddy this show could stagnate quickly if House continues to break the rules and get away with it and always saves his patients. Season One showed us that all is not right in that perma-five o'clock shadowed cranium and now they need to follow that up and quickly.

Constantine. Surprisingly fun really. By bearing absolutely no simularity to the comic beyond the title character's name it leaves Hellblazer free for someone to actually do a film of that somewhere along the line. As it is this is witty and sharp in places, with good central performances, especially Tilda Swinton as Gabriel and surprisingly Gavin Rossdale as Balthazar.

I seem to remember there was talk a few years back of how farmers in the American midwest were facing failing crops. The US has had deaths a plenty, what with the terrorist attacks in New York and then their attacks on anyone who was foolish enough to be an Afghan or an Iraqi. War? Well, obviously. And now Joshua Micah Marshall has pointed out that the Republicans are rolling out the welcome wagon for the last of the Four Horsemen:

I was looking over the list of budget cuts proposed by House Republicans to save the president's tax cuts. But a bit down further into the document which they put out there's a $1.8 billion annual cut in funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). That's great thinking, seeing as though we don't need to worry about Avian Flu from South Asia or other contagious diseases any more.

Still, I'm sure Josh doesn't need to worry, after all, it's only the poor that are going to die, right? By saving the tax cuts for the rich, the Republicans have ensured that they'll have the money to spend on bird flu vaccines. After all, 'God helps those who help themselves', as the Good Book doesn't actually say.

Oh... my... god... Please ignore the drooling...

Had intended to go into town this weekend, especially to see the Alison Lapper statue, on the Fourth Plinth. Unfortunately I didn't make it.

I'm finding it very difficult to find valid arguments against the statue, as quite often they boil down to the sorts of negative opinions on display in this Guardian blog piece which are often just offensive, such as Some guy did a freak with flippers and we have put up a statue of it? and It looks like the product of Jimmy Carr bedding a sea-lion. Is that wrong? It becomes grimly amusing when faced with the person towards the end who insists that this is all unnecessary and tries to imply that we're all incredibly well-adjusted towards images of physical deformaty and the disabled so therefore could we just get rid of this big statue of a pregnant disabled woman please?

American kids: "We didn't want freedom anyway." I don't know whether this is short-term stupidity caused by bad news reporting and September 11th 2001, or longer-term idiocy caused by crap schools for decades. Maybe the US could ship some of these kids to Guantanemo for a few weeks, then see how important their freedom feels to them.

Rupert Murdoch reports Tony Blair as attacking the BBC for 'gloating' coverage of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath 'full of hatred for America'. This comes only a few weeks after a someone in the Labour leader's office leaked a story to a Murdoch paper about remarks made at a dinner by the BBC's John Humphries about the Cabinet. What I don't understand is why Government isn't moved to Wapping, after all, it must be really inconvenient for News international execs to have to cross town every time they want to decide national policy.

Fox News discovers Googlebombing and gets pissed off that it's used to have a go at Shrubya. Oh yeah, they mention Michael Moore too, but you know they wouldn't be pissed if someone Googlebombed Mikey.

Is Blunkett involved in another 'mis-use of his powers' scandal or is it just someone being malicious?

So, Bones, or, as I shall persist in calling it from hereon in because I am teh funny, CSI: FBI. That tells you all you need to know. FBI Agent Seeley (David Boreanaz) Booth who, probably due to childhood taunting over his first name, was an Army sniper until deciding to try and make amends by becoming an agent, works alongside Dr Temperence (Emily Deschanel) Brennan, a forensic scientist from the Jeffersonian Institution and writer of books. He finds the bodies, she fiddles with them, her sidekicks quip, the FBI glowers, the case is solved.

In the first five minutes Booth says "Yeah, we're Mulder and Scully", later there's an argument which I guess is a reference to the CSI/Law and Order rivalry in an argument over whether it's cops or scientists that solve murder cases. The answer from this would seem to be that it's scientists, but they need cops, or FBI Agents, to do the dirty work of arresting people or shooting them.

It is by no means a bad show, it is just the CSI map laid down over the FBI, complete with ludicrous science and a scene where Brennan arranges fragments of a skeleton into the correct order while some American indie is played over the top. None of the characters are shown to have much of a life outside of work, though there is a scene with her ex-boyfriend coming into her apartment at dawn to reclaim his TV and do some infodumping about how she's emotionally distant, has issues with intimacy and was orphaned at a young age. This latter point is repeated several times during the show, presumably in the hope that this will pass for emotional depth. This is pretty unnecessary and just slows things down.

And for ludicrous scientific stuff, Brennan's team have created the world's first holographic display computer, allowing them to feed in data from skull fragments and allow real-time alteration to build up composites of what the person would have looked like. Next week I assume they will have a human cyborg that will solve crimes if they teach it what 'love' is.

Acting is competent, Boreanaz seems to be acting pretty much as Angel in his lighter moods, Deschanel is like most of the women from CSI, her character is gutsy and driven and blah blah blah. Like I said, the show isn't bad, it's just been done before. This may have been based on what producer Kathy Reichs used to do for a living, but she's been passed on the TV highway while she was writing her books.

So, Fell #1, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Short detective stories is the name of the game here, sixteen pages, with a couple more for backup data and stuff. The key point, as Ellis explains, is that with price increases comics are not in a position they were some twenty or thirty years ago, where kids could afford to buy a comic with the loose change in their pockets, and with the changes in the way comics are created these kids can't buy a random comic and have a complete story before them, which doesn't insist they have to know what happened in any other issues to understand what happened there.

The idea with Fell is that you could read just one issue from the run, any issue, and have a story that you understand. And it'll be cheap too. The unanswered question is exactly why Ellis is doing this. After all, with a story that includes failed suicide attempts, attempted rapes and alcohol enemas, along with typical Ellis-ian dialogue, this isn't exactly for the kids. This is a police procedural after Ellis has spent several days watching The Shield episodes one after another. Detective Richard Fell has transferred to Snowtown for reasons unclear, Snowtown being a lawless kind of place with minimal civic services and even less police. But Fell has read a couple of books on neuro-linguistic programming so is a very good judge of character, which I guess is crucial when you only have sixteen pages to solve a crime.

It's all very noble what Ellis is doing here, but it's going to be selling to exactly the same people as almost all his other work sells to. Plus, considering the story is only sixteen pages long, aren't the different audiences that Ellis might be aiming for going to see this as rather thin and pass over it. Market limitations rather screw this from the start, even if the team for this only get paid if it turns a profit.

Being a mainstream comic person I didn't even know Ben Templesmith existed prior to this, let alone come across anything he had a hand in. His style for this seems to be satisfactorily grimy, in limited space he really gives the idea of a city of crumbling walls, stinking stairwells and unceasing wind. His characters are a little more inconsistent, the bar-girl Mayko, who Fell meets in the middle of the story to allow Ellis to show us how clever he is, seems to wander freely between three different hairstyles, before ending up with her hair covering her face and a big nose. There seems to be an experimentation going on between whether to draw people 'straight' or cartoony. Colour is used in washes, urine yellow for most building interiors, blues for exteriors, Fell has blonde hair (on the cover) or yellow hair (interior) to add some vital colour to the scene.

I'm not convinced either by Ellis's reason for doing this comic or the execution of the same, but the story is actually quite a good one and, once the scene setting is out of the way this might be quite a good little thing, especially as the length means we'll be spared more Ellis decompression or his more outrageous cliches. Completely stand-alone stories brings us back to CSI, and whether Ellis can make us care about characters when you don't rely on seeing them every time they're on.

Dear Jessica Simpson,

Just... fuck off.

Please.

I'm begging you...

If those boots really are made for walking then just leave now and never trouble our international consciousness again.

Please?

Love, someone with ears, eyes and taste.

Dear Dandy Warhols.

RE: Your new single.

What the fuck happened to you guys?

Love, An Ex-Fan.

It's an almost perfect Autumn day here in my little part of London today. I wish I could bottle it. It's sunny yet crisp and chilled. But when I stand outside there's that indefinable je n'est sais quoi, to mis-quote Pulp, it's the smell of Summer packing it's bags and preparing to leave town. It's magical, mischievious, it's mysterious, Autumn is not a season who will suggest marriage after one good day, it'll take a lifetime to charm her. But I guess I'm a romantic and Autumn will always have a hold of my heart.

Dear BBC,

I'm as happy as the next blogger that we won the Ashes, it's probably the most important thing to happen to the English game since the last time we won it, but could you stop using that to fill the dead space on News 24. Why not fill it with news about other places in the world. Why is it that the news on the regular channels is too short for in depth yet a twenty-four hour news channel often suffers the same problems? I mean, Newsnight and Panorama often spend more time on a topic than News 24 yet they're only on for half an hour a night/a week. What gives?

And it's amusing that the 'In Depth' feature on BBCi, your digital replacement for Ceefax, gives a few reports which are perhaps two or three hundred words long rather than the sixty or seventy word length of most of your normal reports. Is news such a discredited televisual form?

P.S. And VH-2, what on earth has Paul Weller done to his hair? I mean, obviously he's dyed it, but I can't quite figure out why he'd freely choose that colour...

"I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible."

Uh-oh! Bush make pee-pee in his pants!

And now, a choice of viewing:

German inventor powers car with dead cats. Although outraged animal lovers should note that he does not appear to be doing anything to hasten the deadening of live cats, he's not poieoning, clubbing or running them over, he's quite happy to let nature take it's course.

I'd like to congratulate ABC for it's clever idea of removing all program content from it's website in favour of ads for the new seasons of it's shows. Well done, I didn't really want an episode guide for season one of Boston Legal really. I will however be looking out for Commander in Chief because with both Geena Davis and Donald Sutherland it looks as though it might be bad enough to be entertainingly bad, although it does have a young child in it so that might drag it back into the realms of just bad. Fox has Bones which has got David Boreanaz, in daylight! And might also be crapply funny, or funnily crap.

Oh crikey DM! The US is preparing a strategy for the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against WMD attacks against the country. Now the phrasing of this is a bit odd, so it may be the Pentagon is developing the missile shield thing, but alternatively this could mean that the US will use a nuclear attack against a country such as Iraq, the advantage being that when it's been hit by nukes no-one is going to be able to tell whether they actually had WMD or not.

A very dull report on the state of the moist toilet paper market in Eritrea.

This is a joke. This must be a joke. There is no way this is not a joke. There cannot be any way in which this is not a joke. Joke this must be. Confucious say: "You're having a laugh aren't you?" Tell me this is a remark of the completely humorous variety.

I would go and see Revolver if I received written assurances that the proceeds from the film are going towards fixing whatever the fuck Ray Liotta has done to his face. And was Jason Statham double-dared to grow that moustache? I'd say it makes him look stupid but the man's career is based around being in Guy Ritchie films so credibility is obviously not on his agenda.

Cripes! An American newsman has his "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" moment. I hope Paxman sees this and takes notes. Angry without acting superior.

Last Night of the Proms.

19:45: Aargh! They've got bloody Titchmarsh introducing it again! Just 'cos the little bastard doesn't want to do Ground Force any more, why on earth do they get him doing stuff like this?

19:46: Fighting with BBCi to get the multiscreen option. It comes up but I can't switch to any of the other channels. Titchmarsh still talking crap.

19:47: Concert begins. Some Walton, the overture to 'Portsmouth Point' or something. Titchmarsh gone. Music a bit dull. Will try BBCi again.

19:48: Hurrah! Now works properly! Will open bottle of wine and then see what's going on in Hyde Park.

19:49: Crap, the cork has broken in the bottle. This will take a while...

19:50: OK, I'm wine'd up. Let's see what's happening at Hyde Park. Some bloke singing with his eyes closed. BBCi has borked again. I may be stuck here. Send rescue ships. Rescue ships made of booze. No, send Captain Jack Harkness, that would be much better. Forget plans of escape.

19:56: Made it back to the Albert Hall for some Handel. Still send Captain Jack anyway. Apparently he's in town to be in 'A Few Good Men' with the also delectable Rob Lowe.

19:57: Fuck, they're playing 'Ombra Mai Fu (Xerxes)' with countertenor Andreas Scholl (notice how BBCi's notes have started working again). His voice is amazing. How did he get it to that pitch without a violent misuse of farming equipment as a young lad? This was supposed to be sung by a castrato and I'm not bloody surprised. Opera is mental anyway.

20:04: I wonder if this means Antony from Antony and the Johnsons is a countertenor? Maybe not quite. I don't think he could reach quite the same pitch.

20:09: Ooh, it's Terry Wogan at Hyde Park. And it's being heckled! Big band action in Belfast, being conducted by a John Adams impersonator. Now BBC2 have got Brian May on! Quick, to Swansea! Gah, it's 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'. Back to Hyde Park. Some 'Saint Saens'. Always liked him since he did the theme tune to Jonathan Creek...

20:19: Hmm, Channel 4 are starting a five part series about The SS. What with everything that's been on telly in recent months, the thing about The Warlords, the series on Auschwitz, the big drama on Speer, the Hiroshima stuff, the series on what happened after the war... I feel kind of Nazi'd out right now.

20:20: Terry is still being heckled, but he seems to be thinking he's presenting Miss World. Oh hang on, he's not being heckled for himself, it's because G4 are on. What an amazing vacuum of charisma.

20:21: The Albert Hall seems to have been taken over by folk players.

20:22: Aaah, that's better, some Mozart in Belfast. It's from that advert too, British Airways I think? Oh damn, it's just finished. I was enjoying that. Now there's some Kirsty MacColl-a-like, so I fly away to Swansea. Actually, I'm not sure if that was Mozart, the BBCi 'Playing Now' thing seems to be behind the times. Might have been Delibes.

20:26: Welsh singers, singing something Welsh I would imagine. The Welsh audience seems to be wearing Twister mats to keep themselves dry. Is this the new fashion in the valleys?

20:29: Presumably the reason they've got Brian May in the Albert Hall is to stop him from going to Hyde Park with a gun, as G4 are butchering 'Bohemian Rhapsody' as though they were Jack the Ripper. Patricia Cornwell is wrong about Jack being Walter Sickert by the way. Her proof is all circumstantial, and some day I may even read her book to find out what it is. I like the way she put those full page ads in the Saturday papers a few weeks back, to insist she wasn't obsessed. Because nothing says 'I'm completely sane' than putting huge ads in national newspapers when no-one really cared in the first place. But if she's got all that money presumably she can afford a copy of 'From Hell' to read the epilogue where Alan Moore points out that you can never prove who Jack was.

20:30: Big harp in Belfast.

20:37: That's not Aled Jones in Wales is it? < Hurries off to the BBC website >

20:40: No BBC website. Why would I want to know what's going on in Swansea? If I want Proms info I obviously only want to know what's going on in the Albert Hall.


You Englicentric cretin.

20:45: Gosh, it is Aled Jones. I didn't think he sung any more. Anyway, the band is doing the theme to Thunderbirds so, moving on...

20:49: The Can-Can in Dublin. Now The Can-Can in Manchester too.

20:51: 'By the Rio Grande they dance no sarabande' apparently.

21:00: Interval time, though Glasgow seems to have Christopher Biggins bagpiping, with big drummers. It actually rocks a generously proportioned one. More wine!


...Hang on, The Proms in Glasgow? Why isn't that one of my multiscreen options?

21:16: Seconds out, round two.

21:32: Lovely bit of Korngold.

21:34: Paul Daniels (the conductor not the magician) talks to the crowd. "The English don't like music but they adore the noise it makes." Beecham said that apparently. He's making up for the guy who used to do it, Leonard Slatkin.

21:38: 'Scherzi' by Simon Bainbridge. Lots of dabs of instrumental colour, some tom-tom drums I think, tambourines shaking, xylophones picking away. Doesn't seem much of a tune really, more just lots of little events in a musical collage.

21:43: BBCi has gone tits skyward again. We're obviously at the edge of what they can manage. 'Scherzi' has finished. Not particularly impressed, stops just when it really starts to be interesting.

21:45: AAAAAArgh! Simply Red in Hyde Park! Urge to kill rising...

21:48: I take back what I said about the conductor in Belfast looking like John Adams, it's clearly Steven Spielberg. Andreas Scholl is back on stage at the Albert Hall.

21:56: Andreas has finished, and they've given him flowers. How sweet!

21:58: Here we go... 'Pomp and Circumstance March No.1' ... Suddenly the Albert Hall is awash with flags of all different nationalities. The hoorays at the front are doing that knees-bending dance that seems to be the thing for this situation.

22:01: Now everyone is humming 'Land of Hope and Glory'...

22:02: Back to the march, back to the bobbing...

22:03: And the rousing final chorus.

22:05: An encore for everyone to sing 'Land of Hope and Glory' again. "How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee" with a camera view over the rain-bedraggled hordes in Hyde Park.

22:09: "Hello Manchester!" "Hello !" "Hello Swansea" "< cheer! >" "Hello Belfast!" and so on...

22:12: It's sea-songs time. With bugle-calls from the other sites in the UK. This should be interesting, let's hope The Proms lines are running better than BBCi.

22:14: That worked okay, though a few duff notes at Hyde Park.

22:17: Some mock-crying in the crowd at the sad bit of the 'Fantasia on British Sea Songs', honestly, it's worse than The Rocky Horror Show.

22:19: Aaah, the Sailor's Hornpipe, with accompanyment with horns from the audience.

22:23: Out to the provinces. 'All Through the Night' in Wales,

22:25: 'The Skye Boat Song' from Glasgow,

22:27: 'Danny Boy' in Ireland,

22:30: 'Home, Sweet Home' brings us back to The Albert Hall.

22:32: Something about a conquering hero, and everyone in the Hall pretends they can whistle.

22:34: And be upstanding for 'Rule Britannia'.

22:39: Cheers for Sir Henry, creator of The Proms.

22:41: Now Paul Daniels is given flowers too.

22:44: 'England expects that every man will do his duty... And win The Ashes' A banner on display.

22:46: Daniels reminds us of music beyond boundaries, music of peace and reconcilliation, and we're into 'Jerusalem'.

22:49 The monarch's traditional freebie, 'God Save the Queen', then everyone crosses arms and sings 'Auld Lang Syne'.

That was fun.

// posted by Loz @ 6:47 pm |

One of the best Doctor Who tributes ever.

"Rain, rain,
oh please stay,
until at least,
5:00 pm Monday."

(Excluding Sunday morning and evening when I'm going out)

And now, something funny to cheer us all up. The UK Government has steadfastly refused to accept the bombing and killing of uncounted numbers of Iraqi and Afghani civilians has any effect on Islamic extremists attacking people, both here and abroad. "It's just an excuse" they say.

"We must let Turkey join the EU!" Say the UK and US. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, warned in a hard-hitting speech that snubbing Ankara's hopes would give ammunition to Islamic extremists, while welcoming it into the EU would help avert a "clash of civilisations" between the Muslim world and the West.

So that's clear. Anything that the UK and US do directly does not fuel Muslim extremism. Anything anybody else does, does.

Hurricane Katrina- Now someone is blaming it on a Jew. The Jew in question being Ariel Sharon and the blamer being Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Lewin. God is apparently pissed off with the U.S. for encouraging Sharon to build the wall, yet strangely God hasn't got round to doing anything nasty in Israel to show his displeasure. I mean, He's God. If he were really pissed off he could disappear it, or go back in time and make sure Sharon never thinks of the idea. Why on Earth would he kill a load of poor, black people on the other side of the world? That goes way beyond 'mysterious ways'...

"Those that... for their freedom... are willing to... something... their liberty... deserve neither something nor something."

1) Mr Clarke, is the British Government ready to officially reintroduce torture?
2) Mr Clarke, why are you wanting to extradite people to countries which do torture?
3) Mr Clarke, why are you being such a pussy? You want people tortured but not by the British? Come on you coward! Just say the torturers are defending democracy! Come on, that's what the Americans do!

Still, it is amusing when the people that Clarke wants to deport to 'hot irons applied to the nipples'-estan now start complaining about their rights being infringed? "You mean I can't bankroll terrorist groups to kill innocent people in other countries and this one whilst creating training material on how to make suitcase bombs and maintain a website showing people having their heads cut off and suicide bombers praising the name of Osama Bin Ladin? What about my freedom of speech?" Muppets.

With the immediate crisis drawing to a close, FoxNews is now doing its damndest at damage limitation for Shrubya, starting with Brit Hume attacking FEMA, druids and Sean Penn but definitely not George W. Bush and John 'terrorism is good for business' Gibson attacking FEMA and saying George W. Bush's only fault is that he's just too nice a guy. He attacks FEMA for not acting quick enough, unlike Condi Rice who I'm sure was shopping for wet-weather gear or Shrubya who I'm sure was perfecting his 'water water go away, come again another day' song before heading down there. Then there's Bill Reilly attacking Kanye West, when right next to him on the page, looking for all the world as though he's just another Fox talking head, is Shruyba himself.

That Fox is probably closer to, and works harder to promote, the policies of a head of state since Goebbels in the Thirties is bad enough, that they persist in pretending that they're 'Fair and Balanced', and that people believe this, is what is really galling. And Fox wouldn't be able to blame FEMA if the American people had any idea what is going on in Iraq on a daily basis.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if we were invaded by malevolent green blobs from the planet Dave, after all our biscuits? No? What's wrong with you? Play this.
[via B3ta]

I'm interested in trying to get my hands on the rest of this article:

The Christian Paradox- How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.

Though what is printed in this excerpt is scary enough...

Read This.

And yes, it looks like God Hates Fags have also weighed in on the 'New Orleans deserved it' tip.

It is a sin NOT to rejoice when God executes His wrath and vengeance upon America.
Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans.
Pray for more American bodies blown to smithereens by cheap home made Iraqi IEDs - like the IED America bombed WBC with August 20, 1995, hoping thereby to terrorize us into silence about America's fag sins.

OK, now how is this any different to what Al Qaeda say? Why is it bad to say this stuff if you're a Muslim but not if you're a Christian?

This is my Hat. My Hat is a Magic Hat. It can control people's minds and make major picture studios think hiring Renee Zellweger is a good idea. I love my Magic Hat. And at night, my Magic Hat whispers to me about it's plans for us to take over the world. Already it has made a non-aggression pact with scarves, and most of the world's footware is on our side. All your pumps are belong to us!

I'm still not entirely feeling Lost yet. I'm about five episodes in and while it's all in the broad band of okay I'm still not convinced as to whether I should care if any of them live or die. The 'stuck on a desert island' sequences just aren't as interesting as the 'flashbacks to their lives that led to them being on the plane'. The episode from a few weeks back with the old guy who wants to go outbacking was very good, with a genuinely surprising twist. I'm still going to watch it in the short term but as things stand I'm thinking another several months of this will be really dull and I wait to be surprised about that.

What's really annoying about suicide bombers is that because they kill themselves you can't point out to them what wankers they are. And there is something especially odd when a suicide bomber talks with a Yorkshire accent, it's as though in the middle of the Fifth Test Geofrey Boycott suddenly called on us to rise and invade silly mid-off.

But anyway...

I'm sure by now the media's painted a suitable picture of me, this predictable propaganda machine will naturally try to put a spin on things to suit the government and to scare the masses into conforming to their power and wealth-obsessed agendas.

Dude, you wanted to kill as many people as possible! They don't need to do much spinning and scaring.

Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.

Bullshit you pathetic little coward. If you wanted to 'avenge your Muslim brothers and sisters' you would have gone and fought with the insurgents in Iraq, instead you decided to kill more of your Muslim brothers and sisters in this country.

I object to my country being attacked by morons.

A spokesman for known terrorist Jehova claimed responsibility for Hurricane Katrina as part of Jehova's continuing campaign of violence and intimidation of teh gays. A spokesman for the White House refused to confirm whether the Silver City is now considered part of the Axis of Evil. Jehova has been responsible for many acts of terror against various groups that he has disliked over eternity, however the UN Security Council received great criticism when it refused to act over His flooding the planet and killing everything (except for the quick actions of wine enthusiast and committed family man Noah who somehow managed to fit two of every animal onto an ark that wasn't big enough to hold even one hippo) thanks to a veto by France. Almost simultaneously committing another attack ,or 'Act' as they are known, under his alias of 'Allah' we have to ask, will no-one stand up to this evildoer?

And of course there's the whole Black People 'Loot', White People 'Find' thing.

It's a ghastly mess out there and the news doesn't give much hope for things getting better until they've gotten worse, but might I suggest to the town planners that if they decide to rebuild they consider putting New Orleans on stilts?