Although I still don't have an iPod, I use the free iTunes program quite a lot to play music while I work. But I've been a bit troubled by its apparent tendency to favour certain songs over others. I realize this is probably just the luck of the draw, but I'd prefer to avoid it, and now I can.
I found a tip somewhere on the Web that seems so obvious once it's pointed out. Just set up a smart playlist that excludes any songs played recently. I chose to exclude any songs played in the last month.
I read that the police reckon they've identified the London bombers as young men born in England to Pakistani families.
I don't think it makes much difference whether this was an attack by foreign enemies or by British enemy sympathizers. What interests me more is that the four bombers were apparently recorded on video as they assembled at King's Cross. I think this will happen more and more in the future: we'll be constantly watched and recorded everywhere, so that whenever any criminal incident occurs, police can just rewind the tape to see exactly what happened.
Initially the surveillance is mostly of urban public places and commercial premises, but already some security-conscious people are starting to monitor their own homes, and this will become routine in time. In the end I suppose even wild areas of countryside will be monitored somehow, perhaps by satellites.
It's believed that at least three of the bombers blew themselves up along with their victims — which seems remarkably unnecessary. All they had to do was to leave the explosives on a short fuse and jump out at a station as the doors were closing. Either they were very stupid, or they valued their own lives no more than they valued other people's.
So far only the perpetrators seem to know the reasoning behind the London bombings yesterday. But the main candidate explanation so far seems to be that this was intended as revenge for the war in Iraq.
If so, among the expressions of shock and accusations of barbarism, it might be well to reflect that various supposedly civilized countries have been guilty of such barbarism at times, as a matter of official policy. The indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians in the course of a conflict isn't nice; arguably it is indeed immoral and uncivilized. But, in the Second World War (for instance), the Germans did it when they bombed British cities; the British and Americans did it when they bombed German cities; and the Americans did it most memorably when they atom-bombed Japanese cities.
If Saddam Hussein had been able to mount an air strike on London, it would have counted as a normal act of war by modern standards. When a non-governmental organization such as Al Qaeda bombs cities, it's doing exactly the same thing but on a lower budget. An objective observer would condemn all such behaviour no matter who does it.
When the British government decided to go to war in Iraq, it exposed both its soldiers and its civilians to possible retaliation by the enemy. It hardly ever happens in war that all the casualties are suffered by the other side.
The most guilty person in Iraq was and is Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer and warmonger. It would have been a good result if the Americans could have eliminated him and perhaps some of his accomplices without harming anyone else and without setting foot in Iraq. Perhaps in future they'll be capable of such operations. They should have enough motivation to consider it: the Iraq operation has been a horrible mess, killing lots of innocent people, leaving the country in chaos, and spending vast amounts of money; and Saddam Hussein still sits in comfortable captivity while all this goes on.
I've just been rereading Worlds apart by Richard Cowper, a delightful book that sadly seems to have been out of print since it was first published in 1974. I managed to get hold of a second-hand copy in 2002, having read a library copy many years before.
It tells the story of George Herbert Cringe, "parent, breadwinner, and Junior Science teacher at Bagshot Road Comprehensive School", who cherishes two fantasies in his miserable life: one is relatively modest, realistic, and achievable; the other is totally fantastic but very charming. Both fantasies unexpectedly come true for him, though only rather briefly.
The book paints a vivid picture of how a certain type of downtrodden Englishman lived in the late twentieth century, and an equally vivid picture of life on the remarkable and wonderful planet of Chnas — which is a figment of George's imagination, but refuses to stay that way.
In a sense, this is a minor book; but it's a great minor book. I come out of it with much sympathy for poor George and a wistful regret that I'll see no more of Chnas and the Chnassians.
I also feel much sympathy for Richard Cowper, who wrote this lovely book and probably earned next to nothing from it.
I've rather belatedly got around to buying and reading The salmon of doubt (2002), an assortment of writings found on Douglas Adams's computer after his unfortunately early death in 2001. There are eleven chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel and a considerable collection of short non-fiction articles on various subjects.
For anyone who likes Adams it's well worth reading. The extra fragments of Dirk Gently's life are sometimes funny, while the non-fiction articles are pleasantly readable and tell you more about Adams than you can get from his fiction.
I'm glad to have the book. But it's a pity he's dead. He wasn't very prolific, as authors go, but he was a memorable character and a nice guy. And only a couple of years older than me.
The world mostly thinks that his best work was The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. He thought his best work was Last chance to see, a non-fiction book about endangered species. I think his best work was Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency.
As a Spanish taxpayer, I have no personal interest in preserving the "British rebate", but I think the British government is right in principle to refuse to give it up until EU budget contributions are calculated using a fairer system.
I'm surprised that the German government doesn't agree with this: it seems to be the biggest net contributor, so it would have the most to gain from a fairer system.
Chirac's hypocritical posturings merely confirm that he's a cretin who represents France at its worst.
All subsidies are foolish and wasteful, and the Common Agricultural Policy in particular should have been terminated a long time ago. Any countries that want to subsidize their own farmers (or any other industry) should pay the cost themselves.
Recently a young Australian woman (Schapelle Corby) entered Bali with marijuana in her luggage and was sentenced to 20 years in jail. She said it was planted there without her knowledge. Maybe, maybe not. Whether she's innocent or guilty isn't really the point as far as I'm concerned. Consider instead:
Seems to me it's quite rational to avoid taking holidays in places like Indonesia because of this kind of story. Sure, it probably won't happen to you; but if it does happen to you, you'll regret it powerfully.
Speaking as a libertarian, I don't believe that buying, selling, or using drugs should be illegal in any case. It's your life: what you do with it should be up to you. It should be illegal to force people to take addictive drugs, and it should be illegal to give them to children. That's all.
As The Economist has repeatedly pointed out, criminalizing the drugs trade has been a disaster, just as criminalizing alcohol was a disaster when it was tried in the USA. It just becomes a tremendous boost for organized crime.
When I bought a new computer last year it came with Symantec's Norton Antivirus, which I've continued to use since then. However, as it's now coming up for renewal, and as reviews suggest that I could do better, I decided to try the ZoneAlarm Security Suite, which CNET is quite enthusiastic about.
So far ZoneAlarm seems to be working fine, and I suppose I'll pay for it when the 15-day free trial runs out.
As with Norton Antivirus, it offers the (recommended) option of scanning files whenever they're run or opened, but this seems excessive to me and I always turn it off. I scan incoming e-mail and every now and then I scan the whole hard disk. That should be enough, and so far it has been enough.
ZoneAlarm's junk mail filter works only with Outlook or Outlook Express, but I use Eudora and it has its own junk mail filter, so that's OK.
Not long ago I attended a wedding, in a nice little white-painted church on a wooded hilltop. The sun shone from a clear sky, and far below, sailing boats moved slowly over the blue sea. A perfect day for a wedding, and all went well.
Inside, the church was cosy, but as I looked around I saw one thing that didn't seem right for the occasion. Here we were celebrating a happy event, and all around the walls were paintings and carvings of someone being tortured to death.
Doesn't it seem odd to you that Christians are so obsessed with The Crucifixion that they need to remind themselves (and the rest of us) of it constantly? There was nothing unusual about it in that time and place: many other people must have died in the same way.
If Jesus returned today, wouldn't he be disconcerted that his modern-day followers remain fixated on the manner of his execution? "Hey, folks, there was nothing special about it, really. Why don't you focus on the positive things I did and said during life? Why surround yourselves with images of pain and death?"
Fortunately I don't often have occasion to go into a church. When I do, I must say that the decoration strikes me as bizarre. What would you think if you went into someone's house and found it all clean and neat but decorated with paintings of people dying in pain?
Recently I've been having trouble with my computer's on button. I started having to press it about six times to get a reaction. This increased to more than twenty times.
The computer is in warranty. I called Dell, and yesterday someone came to fix it. He replaced the power supply unit. All seems well now.
So, just in case it happens to you: it's the power supply.
