Not just LOTR characters any more, it’s time for The Secret Diary of Donald Rumsfeld
Day 15: Was walking around in Pentagon basement when I found Tommy Franks inspecting our new thermo-nuclear missiles. Told him to piss off. They’re mine! MINE! MY OWN!
My preciousssssssss…
Day 19: Played Risk against Condi and Colin. Didn’t win, but had much fun with massive carnage from battles in Middle East.
(Link from Julia)
From Fanatical Apathy, the Movie in Bush’s Head. Excerpt:
ANNAN: I’m taking you off the case.
BUSH (leaping up): You can’t do that!
ANNAN: Yes, I can. Sort of. Officially, at least. Dammit, Bush, you can’t just storm in and kill an important man like Hussein. There are laws. We need proof.
BUSH: You need proof, Chief. I just need my investigatative partners.
ANNAN: Partners? Your partners have already requested reassignment.
BUSH (with a flourish): I’m talking about the only partners I ever needed - Smith and Crisco.
ANNAN: “Crisco?”
BUSH: Uh, “Wesson.” Smith and Wesson.
ANNAN: Don’t make me ask for your badge, Bush.
Go read the whole thing. (Link from Making Light)
It’s carnival time again! Your host this week is WylieBlog! Guess who got Monday and Tuesday mixed up and forgot to send in his entry in time?
Patrick Crozier considers his plans to privatise the road system, and comes up with a little problem.
I don’t want to wake up on the Thursday morning and find that there’s a bloke from ToadRoad at the end of my drive who says I can’t access the road and he’ll shoot me if I try. That is not a winner in any sort of political system. But given the policies and principles upon which they are based perfectly possible.
Of course, I just take this as a further reason why I consider Anarcho-Capitalism to be a completely silly ideology, sort of Maoism’s evil twin.
It’s not about oil. It’s not even about the prospect of Iraq getting Nucular weapons. This is the real reason! Better stock up on tinfoil hats! (Link from Stefan Jones)
Looks like war is inevitable now. All we can do is pray that it’s swift and relatively bloodless; and the aftermath isn’t as messy as many people fear it might be.
Scott is not impressed with Bush’s speech at all. Meanwhile The sometimes creepy Libertarians at Samizdata.net are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of the collapse of the United Nations and the European Union, and take great pleasure at the great defeat the believe they’ve inflicted the ‘Transnational Progressives’. Yes, for these people, the real enemy is not the terrorists that are trying to kill us, nor the tyrant the murders his own people. It’s the internationalist liberals. Where are the Black Helicopters when we need them?
Meanwhile, the tone of a lot of redneck conservatives trolling around in the comments sections on Blogcritics makes me think that some parts of the American right have descended into clinical paranoia. I wonder if the way they shout down anyone that questions the war is because of their own subconscious doubts about the justification for the war.
My fear isn’t so much the war itself; the overwhelming firepower arrayed against Saddam Hussein means the eventual outcome is in no doubt. I’m more worried about what happens next; far from reducing the threat of terrorism, there’s a danger that the attack on Iraq could be a recruiting sergeant for Al-Queda. If we manage to cause significant civilian casualties, we’ll pay for that in civilian casualties of our own through terrorist attacks. I’m also worried some of the crazier people in the Bush administration hold the same views as warblogger Steven Den Beste. This article of his is truly scary, and suggests the war on Iraq is the first part of a total ‘Clash of Civilisations’ between the west and a large part of the Islamic world. Please God don’t let this be Bush’s real stategery!
Nottingham was a good show, but the journey home wasn’t quite as good.
PT Plod (That’s the British Transport Police) decided to hold the 18:39 departure to Liverpool for 15 minutes so they could ‘get rid’ of a large number of drunken football fans who’s been chucked out of a nearby pub, and then failed to provide any visible police presence on the train itself. (Although I think some police may have boarded at the first stop and removed some people from the train). The rest of the passengers suffered a journey filled with obscene racist chanting and a thoroughly aggressive and frightening atmosphere until most of the morons got off a Chesterfield. There was evidence of vandalism on train too.
I’m not a fan of the BT Police, who perhaps should just be merged into the local police forces. They got too big for their size 15 boots immediately after privatisation, detaining innocent passengers for many hours for pointless questioning after minor derailments, and their playing ‘pass the parcel’ with a bunch of aggressive drunks, putting the rest of the travelling public at risk in the process, is not a good advert for the force.
If that wasn’t enough, we were then stuck at Chesterfield for another 35 minutes because of a broken down freight train in front of us. And the final insult was that my connecting train from Stockport to Cheadle Hulme was replaced by a bus because of engineering work between Cheadle Hulme and Crewe.
My very first blog post, almost a year ago, was a review of the Nottingham model railway exhibition. Now that a year has passed, the exhibition has come round again. If you’re into British diesel era modelling, Nottingham is one of the best shows in the country.
Centrepiece of the show was the magnificent Mostyn, a 21 foot by 14 foot monster in P4 (that’s the same scale as OO, but finescale with a track gauge accurate to a hundredth of a millimetre!) It’s an accurate model of a location in north Wales, on the main line between Chester and Holyhead, with the track layout, buildings and trains exactly as they were in 1977. It’s also one of the first large exhibition layouts to be operated by DCC.
I saw this layout at Manchester six months ago, and was impressed then. I was even more impressed this time; they’ve built a lot more stock, including a fleet of heavily modified Heljan 47s. I loved the weatherbeaten two-tone green one, representing a loco that hadn’t been repainted for ten years, and hadn’t been cleaned for about two! The layout had crowds two to three people deep around it for much of the day. Next show they’re promising a fleet of DMUS, a heterogeneous mix of 101s, 103s and 108s as allocated to Chester depot at the time.
There were plenty of other fine layouts, including Dyserth Road, a present-day DCC-operated depot layout, and Effingham South, another P4 layout set in the electrified Southern Region in the late 1980s with some lovely kit-build EMUS. Ascott-Under-Wychwood, which I saw a few months back at Southend, was another model of an actual station, this time in Oxfordshire, set in 1982. There were plenty of ‘kettle’ layouts for those that like that sort of things, including a couple of good German ones, and several American layouts too.
Shows are a good place to meet fellow modellers too, and the crowd from the ModMod mailing list were much evidence, including the likes of Alan Monk, Natalie Jones, Steve Jones, Chris Barker, Kelly the Goth and many more.
An aside: why do I seem to know more Goths though railway modelling than through RPGs? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
In A friend of freight, the Guardian interviews Philip Mengel, chief executive of EWS, Britain’s largest rail freight company.
Is there any romance left in rail? Brisk American ex-banker Philip Mengel didn’t think so until he went for a ride in the driver’s cab of one of English Welsh & Scottish Railway’s goods trains in the Scottish Highlands.
Hitching a lift from Inverness to Perth, he suddenly began to notice the sun glinting on the mountains. “It turned out to be one of the most beautiful, crystal clear days in history,” he recalls.
Naturally for mainstream journalists, they have to get the odd fact wrong. EWS’s trains are not purple, but the maroon and gold livery of it’s former US parent company, Winsconsin Central.
From Boing Boing, a proposal to equip New York Taxis with black boxes, as fitted to aircraft and trains.
If I ruled the world, I’d have these things fitted to all motor vehicles. I know there are privacy issues involved here, so they’d only have to divulge their contents to the police if the vehicle is involved in accident in which someone is killed or seriously injured. But if you were doing 50 in a 30mph limit when you knocked over that cyclist….