Google: searching for Big Brother

Weird. IM'ing a pal in the Googleplex's Gmail division, he casually mentioned he's in the 'monitoring of Gmail' section tonight. (Midnight on a Saturday.)

And two seconds later, the IM connection was lost...

Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats

Unashamed plug for a pal: the vast textually-integrated conglomerate Klink Bros (NASDAQ: BADASS) has published Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats and I've just finished reading my copy on the Tube. It's a grab-bag of eBay horror stories - and some of them are really, really bad; you'll feel your face flushing when you think how many times you came close to making precisely the same mistakes.

Ed's looking for contributions for a sequel, so drop him a line with your own worst eBay experience and maybe he'll put you in the book. Unless you happen to be Belgian and it's about two inadequately-packed loudspeakers you bought from a British guy five years ago, who due to travel commitments wasn't able to refund your cash for nearly a month. That story will never make it in.

Feeling sorry for Red Ken

I'm no fan of Ken Livingstone. But I'm angry the London mayor's off-colour comments have cost him £80K. And cost London even more; the lawyers are laughing, as usual.

OK, so comparing a doorstepping Jewish journo to a concentration camp guard wasn't the wittiest of insults. But should a casual barb delivered between individuals - one of whom works for a newspaper strongly anti-Livingstone - cost so much judicial and professional time and money, when the journo could simply have shrugged it off?

Religionists are notoriously sensitive to insults; it's another area demonstrating Muslims, Jews, and Christians are just different words for the same mindset. But the real problem here isn't with the scribbler's Jewish background; it's a problem with journalists in general.

Journos today have vast power; the ability to control what millions of people see in the morning. But increasingly - in Britain, it dates precisely to Rupert Murdoch - this power is wielded without responsibility. They're quick to dish it out - to twist words, overegg interpretations, slant events - but rarely strong enough to take it.

In this case, the punishment is vastly out of proportion to the crime. With this thought policing and trial by media initiated against one individual they disagreed with, perhaps the Standard should think about who the real Nazis of this story are.

Why is Livingstone's trial a front page story? Because it involves a journalist being criticised - and the one thing journalists just can't take is criticism.

The name's Craig, Daniel Craig...

Some people just have too much time on their hands. I mean, give the guy a chance! He was pretty damn good in 'Layer Cake'.

Aquatic revelations

I've just realised why I can't increase my swimming speed.

It's because of my habit of 'making the numbers' - assigning numerical targets and round figures to everything in life. (I know precisely how much wealth I want, how much I want to earn, how many children I want, etc etc.) And my swimming time over 1500m - 25 minutes dead - is exactly one metre per second. 25sec for my 25m gym pool; 60 lengths at 25mins. And whenever I've tried to get faster my subconscious has interpreted it as messiness, and forced me back to a metrically satisfying metre per second.

Now I know the enemy, I know a way to beat it! I'll recontextualise my mind to think in terms of strokes not distance - because a stroke carries me about 1.5m; all I've got to do is think in terms of a stroke per second instead of a metre per second. Hey, that'd be 17mins, putting me on the tails of the Elites!!!

Irving: not going to Berlin

Dear old David Irving is spending a few years in a bunker. And however the proles may applaud this nasty little man's incarceration, it's very, very bad news for democracy.

I mean, three years for exercising freedom of speech in a democracy nearly two decades ago? Opinions, however nasty, don't deserve jail sentences - unless you're acting on those opinions, such as setting up a gas chamber in your back garden. The thought police across Europe are getting stronger by the day.

Interesting choice of headline

Maybe it's just my self-inflicted near death experience the other night - but I'm not sure 'Why Asian Muslims didn't explode' is really an appropriate headline about a religion that inspires suicide bombers.

Speed hating

Potential web phenom: speed hating. Meet up with strangers and insult them as much as possible in three minutes.

Suicide bomber blues

THE SCENE: a perfectly normal Jubilee train, normal people travelling home from their normal jobs. Pulling into Bermondsey, a Muslim guy got up and stood in the doorway.

He wasn't a big guy. But he was wearing a very, very bulky coat. What I noticed most were the wires trailing out of it.

And as he stood there, he .... raised his arms and started chanting. The singsong murmurings of a muezzin or imam, the tone-poems of an ancient faith gone bad.

OK, I thought. That's it. It's all over. 35 years old, not a bad innings I suppose; my primeaval ancestors rarely made it past 30. In ten seconds I'll be just a blur of scarlet graffiti, and no future nanotech reanimator will be able to defrag that.

You know the thing about your life flashing before your eyes? It really does. Gliding drifting flying in the space behind my eyelids; explosions of jittering fastforward replaying things I thought I'd forgotten. Childhood memories. The first adult ones. A chorus of names, people standing up and pointing accusing fingers, mouthing YOU. I make my final thought. And it's not about who I expected.

Most of all, there's the sense that I won't just die, I'll be GONE. Nothing left. Instantaneously zonked into my component molecules. This wasn't how I expected it to end. What happened to the mountainside Japanese temple at daybreak? The summer's day by the riverbank with a glass in my hand? The final showdown with giant snakes in the dark richness of a rainforest? Even an autoerotically inspired self-inflicted hanging in a hotel room would be preferable to this; it'd entertain people.

As the doors open, the Muslim guy lowers his hands from the handrail, which he'd been holding on to for support. He adjusts the trailing cable of his iPod... as the chant he'd been singing along to finishes. And steps off the train.

I walk home with my heart still doing 180. I've given up drinking at home on weekdays, but tonight I bought a bottle of Rioja and necked it in 14 minutes straight.

Police State Britain: a big leap

The much-amended ID Cards bill made it through last night. Labour rebels have had their fun recently; they obviously figured they'd lose their balance of power in New Labour if they gave Blair yet another black eye. So the creepy-sounding National Identity Database flickers into life in the sewers below Whitehall, a filth that sticks to everybody, ready to capture every footfall on the streets above. For now - freedom is finished. A dark day.

American political humour - never quails

Of all the comic mileage in Dick Cheney's hunting rage incident, The Age's laconic Strine drawl probably strikes the best tone: "President Bush was then informed but, according to the White House, the President felt no need to talk to Mr Cheney and Mr Cheney felt no need to tell the President he had shot someone."

Since the Whittington guy has now suffered a heart attack too, can he now fill Dick full of lead and say they're even...?

Muslim rampaging: a beautiful game

The continuing 'cartoon violence' is almost comical. And like a good comic, it can be read on several levels.

The first level is straightforward; the protests are an over-reaction by hypersensitive people with no interest in getting along. (On the other hand - if you want to get along with your neighbours, do you publish drawings making fun of them?) These protests didn't even begin until the cartoons gained prominence beyond the Danish press; the scenes of Islamic countries banning Danish products before realising they didn't have any Danish products to ban (bacon was rarely on the menu in Saudi Arabia anyway) are packed with comedic mileage.

Now, the cartoons are everywhere, multiplying as the protests continue. Which must be infuriating to the fundamentalists. So the first take is probably the most wrong: it's an extreme reaction by violent people.

The second level, however, goes a bit deeper. It's less about religion, and more about the desire to be taken seriously. Those who desperately want to be taken seriously usually end up taking themselves more seriously still - and end up looking and sounding merely ridiculous, trumped-up little twerps with shrill voices rather than ambassadors of a valid culture. That's another view on the East vs Middle East situation: they feel we're not taking them seriously.

The third level, though - the one I believe - is simplest of all. These kids are just plain bored. Underemployed, disaffected, low skilled and with few prospects; that's the lot of Britain's young male Muslims today. Just as black-on-black shootings in London are often the result of trivial street jostlings, and Council estate vandalism the product of subliterate white kids with nothing but underage drinking to fill each day, disproportionate reactions to a perceived slight are normal in this context.

So there you have it. These protests are just Islam's equivalent of football violence. No philosophy, rhyme or reason to it; it's just a way of killing time with your mates.

At least it's unambiguous

The protests from Britain's Muslims seem a bit too convenient to me. Was this set up as a deliberate mediafuck by savvy Muslims? This is just too neat, too photogenic, too damn perfect.

Cartoon Violence 'kills one'

Hmmm, if I didn't already know the context of 'Cartoon violence' in this headline, I'd have thought someone had died from an anvil falling on them or something. Or perhaps from being in an elevator dropped out of a plane where they didn't open the door and step out a millisecond before impact. Or...

Nominative declensionism rules da House

So let's get one thing straight. After 'Tom of the Lay', the new House Leader in the USA is called 'John A. Boner'? You can't make shit like this up.

If the USA didn't exist, we'd just have to invent it. Oh - we did.