Alasdair Watson

Off to Dublin for the weekend. Try not to break anything while I’m gone. Back Monday.

Have to say, the new iTunes flip-through-covers function is bloody marvellous. I’ve just packed all my jewel cases into boxes and put them into storage, and this has put back the only thing I might possibly miss about never thumbing through my CD collection.

It’s five years since the single most memorable terrorist atrocity committed on American soil.

Here are three things that the current American administration has been up to in the last year, in the name of the War On Terror that you might not have heard about, especially if you live in the US.

US operatives have tortured people to death.

The Pentagon has taken yet more steps to ensure that it can’t be held accountable by journalists.

A Haliburton subsidiary has been paid quite of lot of money for building detention camps in the US.

Remember: if it’s done in the name of dead civilians, anything goes.

Unless the dead civilians are foreign, obviously.

I don’t really like animals. In my mind, the non humans kingdoms of the world divide down more or less like this:

Animals (food) – I have no desire to coo over anything I might one day eat. This, I should add, would include human babies, were cannibalism legal and safe.

Animals (dangerous) – Anything that might leave me in pain, really. I don’t want to admire that at a distance, because you never know when one of the bastards might have snuck round behind you. Or worse: behind the sofa. Nature documentaries are just a cunning hunting ruse, invented by a particularly lazy lioness, you know.

Animals (allergic) – This pretty much covers the all the smaller land mammals, who I basically loathe and or fear.

Animals (aquatatic) – I don’t like fish. They are in league with Cthulhu and are not for eating. No.

Animals (avian) – basically boring. They have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to say to them. Except for a few of the smarter parrots, and even then, my interest will wane once the thing has learned how to swear properly.

Animals (creepy) – I am suspicious of things with more than four legs, unless they are Strandbeest.

Animals (a few of the smaller reptiles) – Which is more or less everything that’s left.

On the day John Peel died, a quick script I ran up this afternoon to check the archive counted 22 mentions of him on my friends list.

Already today, 23 people have mentioned Steve Irwin dying (yes, I know I have just made that number 24 – fuck off). The day is some hours from over.

This is, I feel, indicative of the sick, sad state of the culture we live in.

I recently vowed to watch no more TV that pandered to my worse instincts. Nothing that appealed to my sense of snobbery, or schadenfreude. Nothing that humiliated people, or pandered to the proletarian. I shall be quite happy to drift further and further out of cultural touch.