Euphemism of the week this week goes to Hilary Clinton for: “extending a defence umbrella over the [Gulf] region”, meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
The close runner up is: “Extended Deterrents”, meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
Before you get irritated about the “Hero’s Welcome” received by Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in Libya please remember the one fact that no news network is happy to report:
This will probably be news to most people because The News(TM) would never dare report the rigorous, accurate, investigations undertaken by serious journalists at the time. Yes, at the time, serious journalists did exist.
Regardless, the guy didn’t do it. Even Nelson Mandela believes the Libyans were set-up… maybe because he was one of the few that bothered to examine the evidence.
Buy Private Eye’s “Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice”, read it, and then get angry. If you can’t afford £5 then let me know and I’ll let you borrow my copy.
Obama’s outrage about Megrahi’s “hero’s welcome” is either ignorance, or lies. Neither option is a comfort.
The reaction from the Republicans is not of interest to anyone with a brain.
One of the problems with watching downloaded media from overseas TV is that the ends of the recordings inevitably include the continuity announcer describing the enticing wares available immediately to those lucky enough to be watching it live. It really feels like having our noses rubbed in it.
“Next on BBC Four, a programme about all of the things you like, presented by someone cool like Stephen Fry or Alexei Sayle. Meanwhile on BBC3 more comedy with Something Excellent by Sean Lock.”
We’ve pretty much given up on TV over here; even though there are potentially good programmes, the sheer weight of commercials renders them unwatchable. I’d like to say that the commercials are far worse over here, but apart from the quantity of pharmaceuticals being hawked, they’re equally as irritating as the ones in the UK. And that doesn’t even include the crazy fucking frog, which amazingly never made it over here. I’d watch 50 commercials for Viagra if it could spare me from watching one more Jamster ad.
I was off work today with some form of gutrot and the cable box was powered up for a total of two minutes: enough time to look at the schedules, check out the on-demand content and resolve to go back to watching Tron and Outnumbered.
Tomorrow I’ll probably be well enough to go back to work; a single day off has built-up a healthy list of stuff to do, so I won’t get bored by any stretch of the imagination. Just tired.
Pity the poor people in England who are suffering with a heat wave that may reach 90F. For the love of god please discover air-conditioning. It’s been permanently hotter than that here for weeks. Sucks doesn’t it ? I’m so glad not to have to use TfL. At least SEPTA is air conditioned.
And so to bed. Ask your doctor about Veghead’s Old Farts Almanac(TM).
If after reading this blog you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours, seek medical attention. This blog may cause a variety of disgusting and potentially life threatening conditions including oozing and flaking. Do not read this blog if you are in any way normal.
Recent weeks have been busy work-wise, domestically and emotionally. The main downer being the catastrophically stupid behaviour of the mental minority of masochists who think they are libertarian visionaries over here…you know what I’m talking about: healthcare. The anger is still too raw for me to construct syntactically correct sentences.
So – back to the quotidian.
A week or two ago, a friend at work donated one of his ex-projects to me: a dead MythTV box. So, I bought a new motherboard and embarked on a mission to bring it back to life as a useful DVR.
Once the motherboard I’d ordered had arrived I set to work installing it in the attractive case my mate had donated. It didn’t take too long to realise my new motherboard didn’t fit…it was too small. But, being a bloody-minded idiot, I decided that it will fit and got the hack-saw out.
It took me a week to make it fit, but it did fit!
Sort of. And then I discovered that the connector from the front panel (i.e. the power switch, light, hard drive light etc) didn’t fit the motherboard connector and in bloody-minded-move-the-mountain mode I rewired, forced, and glued the connectors until they fitted.
The end result is that we now have a cool multi-media player attached to our TV that plays anything we give it, including our audio and video collection. It is also supposed to work as a DVR but it needs some hand-holding until that particular task is understood fully by all concerned.
I’m mid-way through soldering together a bunch of stuff harvested from broken DVD players, radios, and power-supplies to make an infrared remote control adapter. After this, we will not need the mortal TV service as everything of worth can be viewed via teh internets.
On a less geeky note, we had a wicked time at our neighbours’ “cook-out” last night. To the uninitiated, a “cook-out” appears to be an outdoor party with high quality food and drink. And a barbecue. We met a bunch of excellent people, saw a wasps nest, and consumed way too much. We also got bitten to buggery by little mosquitoes, which is a small price to pay.