djm4_lj

Due to clearing out my room, I have a Boots 1200W Hairdryer surplus to requirements. It's a basic two-speed hairdryer, with a 'concentrator nozzle'. It works, but I've only ever used it to dry liquid latex, and the last time I had to do that I forgot I even had the thing.

Free to a good home.

I don't know what surprises me less, that Cherie Booth is talking sense on civil liberties, or that the Tories have adopted the 'homeland security' terminology (which they presumably did ages ago and I didn't notice).

The government plans new criminal offences of providing or receiving training in the use of hazardous substances; of acts preparatory to terrorism; and of inciting terrorism indirectly, Home Office minister Hazel Blears said.

The London bombings did not make me afraid. This does.

Charles Clarke, you are a pillock. And you just have no idea how to respond to any of this, do you?

The Muslim community has already been - very vocally - 'standing out' against the bombings. And just as you are 'shocked' that the bombers could be British, so the Muslim community is shocked that the bombers could be Muslim. Genuinely. It goes against everything they believe in. And telling them that they especially need to speak out against it is just rubbing salt into the wound.

And where, exactly are you going to 'deport' British citizens to? Australia stopped taking our home-grown criminals quite a while ago, you know.

So, in that spirit, having had my bicycle stolen last night I've gone out and bought myself a Claud Butler Urban 100 from the bike shop down the road from work.

It's lovely. My last bike - which I enjoyed riding a lot - feels like a complete tank by comparison. I am so not leaving this unlocked outside any chip shops...

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, thought to be extinct since about 1920, has been found alive in Arkansas.

That is just so cool. It was only a few months ago - when I was about to drive a big truck through Arkansas, as it happens - that I was looking at a picture of one in a book and mooching about the fact that such a magnificant-looking bird was no almost certainly no longer with us.

*sniff*

Is it too late to give up hope for the Maltese pygmy elephant?

I know the new Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie's going to be with us soon, and I am certainly looking forward to it. It seems to have got one scathing review from M J Simpson, and a number of positive ones. Based on what I've heard of it, I suspect that all I'll have to do to enjoy it is remind myself that the story already exists in about ten different, incompatible forms.

However, I'm looking forward even more to Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the Hitch Hiker radio series which starts on May 3. It's got all the original cast in it, and Sandra Dickinson and David Dixon from the TV series. Looks like Sandra Dickinson's going to be playing the alt-universe Tricia McMillan from Mosthy Harmless, which is cool. And they've got Jonathan Pryce back to do Zarniwoop, and Jane Horrocks as Fenchurch, and Geoffrey Perkins (the producer of the original radio series and one of the geniuses behind Radio Active) as Arthur's BBC boss, and it's even got Stephen Fry in it. It adapts two books I'm admittedly not that fond of, but all the indications are that they've managed to create something coherent from them, which fits with all the continuity from the second radio series. I think it's going to be something special, and I'm looking forward to as much as I was looking forward to Doctor Who earlier this year.

I vote. I've voted on every occasion I've been able to since I was 18. But then, I'm lucky, because there is at least one party that I'm pretty happy to vote for and, while I think aspects of the system stink, I don't totally hate it.
( rant beneath )

Giant tortiose 'adopts' a baby hippo.

Video report on the BBC site. Needs RealPlayer, but worth it.

Abu Grahib soldiers did not abuse prisoners. They used 'valid control techniques'. Yes, they kept them on leashes, but parents at airports do that to toddlers, so that's OK. Yes they stacked them into naked human pyramids, but cheerleaders all over America form pyramids (I admit it's news to me that the cheerleaders in question are naked and being pointed at and laughed at, but I suppose it's possible), so that's OK, too.

Context, guys, context.

If I recall correctly, they got some of the prisoners to simulate masturbation. I suspect this is going to be pronounced OK because we do it to pigs. In other news, rape is a valid control technique because married couples have sex occasionally, and sticking a prisoner's head in a bucket of freezing cold water until they're half drowning is only like baptism.

The line about "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there," doesn't surprise me as much as perhaps it should, either.