Blog posts

It feels a little like Bush’s speech on September 11th has made a hole in some floodgates. Since then, outspoken critics of US foreign policy have had a new hook on which to hang our arguments. This piece in the Guardian, the fore-runner to a documentary on Saturday explicitly links the US regime with the cult of (roman) empire which was a dominant force in the culture the early church was born into. It feels a little like the “you’re either for us or against us” has finally sunk in and a lot of foreign (and some domestic) critics are simply accepting that the Bush regime has forced them onto the opposing side. ...

I’m trying to work out how to respond to the news today. On the surface, Iraq’s latest offer appears fantastic: if it’s serious it should destroy all this talk of war and allow for increased security in that region. It’s no surprise, but rather sad, that the US government appears to be dismissing the offer out-of-hand. As with Afghanistan a year before, I wonder what exactly the Iraqi government could do to convince the US of any sincerity. Certainly they could hand over a stockpile of weapons, but that would require them to have the weapons in the first place…. if they don’t have weapons of mass destruction, is there anything they could ever do to convince Bush of the fact? ...

I’ve been searching for the photo from Friday’s Guardian online. The one with George Bush speaking to the UN while behind him and above him Kofi Annan holds his head in his hands. It’s a marvellous piece of photojournalism. It says it all. While I continue to search, this article is worth a read. If anyone knows where I can find the image (it was by reuters and used by the Guardian and the Independent for their front covers) please do post a comment and pass on the link. ...

I should have known that as soon as I broke down and went back to boots the sun would come back out. And so it has. A day of getting bits and pieces done: booked my train and plane tickets to go to Ireland; checked out The Postmodern Condition and Readings In Natural Language Processing from the library to help me get a bit further with my dissertation; worked on some possible designs for julielee.org; added some more press releases to greenbelt’s site; and that kinda thing. ...

My summer ended today. As I watched the rain pour down, I put aside the sandles which have seen me through the past three months and returned to my boots. The hope was to keep the water out, but that wasn’t to be. I’d forgotten about the holes in my boots. But the principle of the thing remains. Not much to report from the weekend. A good visit with family over the weekend. Viewings of unremarkable films. A fair bit more delicatessen planning (front page now updated). And my house is a fair bit tidier. ...

It must be an amusing spectacle to be sitting at an international conference surrounded by stuffily dressed delegates from across the world, debating the arcane points of a policy which will never actually be applied because the establishment don’t have the political will to do so, when all of a sudden a representative of the world’s richest nation stands up and kicks into a stand-up routine. Of course I’m not sure that that’s quite what Colin Powell had in mind when [and I know I’m coming to this a little late] he read through the drafts of his speech. He must have known that what he was saying wasn’t going to be accepted by many of the delegates, but laughter? That probably wasn’t in his imagination. ...

The first delicatessen of the season came and went and seemed to be quite the success. Good crowd right from the start and all three acts were well received. Particularly of course Julie Lee and ’the axis of evil’. Steve’s recorded his version of the history of the axis and I have a few photos for your viewing pleasure. And while all that was keeping us in Reading busy, the Earth Summit drew to a close much as we expected it to. The responses none of the NGOs wanted to have to release but I’m sure most expected to have to release are around. FOE sum it up pretty well, as did the guardian.

Continuing to plan apace for the next series of delicatessen. Looks like we’ve secured an act for October 17th, as well as ensuring that the PA will be in place tomorrow night and working out some special guests for Julie Lee’s set. Popped in to see Matt and Clare in their new place and ended up helping them unpack while discussing the delicatessen website with Matt. We have plans. And as usual after a discussion with Matt I found myself visiting a website I’d been meaning to visit for ages and not quite made it to yet. boxes and arrows will probably only appeal to the web geeks out there, but is sure to get a lot of traffic from this particular web browser. Not quite sure why they feel the need to have separate pages for printing. Surely CSS should do the trick? ...

It was funny returning to Farnborough yesterday. Moving away, aged 16, I was devastated; returning at every available opportunity. But now some years have passed and the visits have become less and less frequent. The only visit I can remember in the past two years didn’t see me going further than the railway station before I was whisked off to Basingstoke in Craig’s car (to see the fabulous Amelie). So walking those oh-so-familiar streets but no longer seeing any familiar faces felt more than a little strange, specially since so little had changed. Okay, so the post office in Queensmead has been demolished, the Red Cross hut on St. John’s Rd. has been replaced with houses, and various shops have opened and closed. But they all felt rather superficial. It was home, and it wasn’t home. Returning to familiar streets as if for the first time. ...

It’s not exactly the done thing, but I highly recommend watching stunning Spanish cinema as a celebration of the end of a friend’s bachelorhood. In actual fact, there are still a couple of weeks to go before their big day, but last night suited so last night it was. And the latest offering from Almodovar certainly didn’t disappoint. Well shot with plenty of visual gags but an eye for subtlety, sensitively acted and beautifully crafted. One to watch out for and perhaps one to muse after.