MY COMMITMENT TO BE A BETTER BLOGGER (updated)

I've become an infrequent and slight-post blogger. I've been wondering why this is and have come up with three reasons:

1) I've stopped reading newspapers.
2) My eyes are too tired after a day staring at a computer screen to come home and stare at another computer screen.
3) Broadband has so many goddamn wires that even though laptops are supposed to be portable, this one is tied to this desk, which means that when I use this laptop I have to come and sit at this desk, and as I've been sitting at a desk all day, I don't want to do it at night too.

You will no doubt however be very relieved to know that I have been plotting solutions to these problems. I list them, for your benefit, below:

1) I will get newspapers delivered to my house.
2) I will get a wireless laptop. This will have the dual benefit of meaning that I don't have to sit at a desk, nor constantly stare at a screen, to use my laptop at night. I can lounge on my settee, watch TV, and have my laptop on for occasional perusal and usage.

Buying myself a laptop will also be something of a way of treating myself, because dear reader I am most chuffed to announce that I have been offered a permanent job by my boss. By permanent, of course, we mean until he loses the next election or retires. But that's permanent enough for me.

It is a peeve to me that I don't get around to all the blogs I love as often as I would like, and I hope to be more active and interactive once I'm wireless.

UPDATE:

I have, dear readers, bought a new laptop which is wireless enabled with Vista Premium. I thought I had a good deal, but saw the same laptop advertsied a couple days later for £100 less. Such is life. I still await, however, my wireless hub on order from BT. Until then I am still bound up with the wires of Broadband.

I promise you though, I have a blog post in the pipeline, probably to be written this Easter weekend, that is going to make up for all my slackness. You will never guess who I met this week......

HOW IS YOUR POLITICAL AND MORAL COMPASS TODAY?

"Only someone whose political and moral compass is totally disorientated by hostility to American and British policy could dare to suggest that this act of shameless, lying, cross-border piracy is justified or excusable."

Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian regarding the Iranian kidnapping of British navy personnel.

IRAN TAKING THE PISS

"Iranian forces seized the British personnel on Friday in the mouth of the waterway that separates Iran and Iraq, triggering a diplomatic crisis at a time of heightened tension over Tehran's nuclear ambitions."

Outrageous.

Give them back you fuckers.

THE BUDGET

According to this BBC Budget Calculator I will now be £51.50 better off a year.

However, if I had two children I would be £416.10 better off. If I had four kids I'd be £1,621 better off. And if I had six kids I'd be £12,245 better off.

Don't think I can afford not to have children.

TRIDENT: PART TWO

I said I might write a post that was anti-pro-Trident, but I don't seem to have the heart.

Here though is Simon Jenkins in the Guardian who doesn't seem to want Britain to renew its Trident system. He thinks that any MP voting for it tonight can only do so for one of two reasons:

One: Labour MPs want a job under Gordon Brown.

Two: Conservative MPs love whizzbangs and want to embarrass Tony Blair by keeping him in power, for reasons that pass comprehension.

Well, I'm sure we can all agree that is a thorough and well-balanced view of matters.

TV NOSES IN THE PIGGY TROUGH

A while ago I went through many agonising months of insomnia. It is a miserable experience to be both exhausted and unable sleep at the same time, and with me it often meant many hours of moping around the house, wandering from room to room, begging for dawn to break because that seemed the only time when I could fall asleep and stay asleep for at least two blissful hours.

TV in the dead of night is shit. You might occasionally catch an Open University program on something like the devastating affects of logging in North Oregon, but other than it's deadly dull. A mix of weird teletext stuff and nothingness.

Then one night there was a quiz show on. The prettily dressed young woman presenter stood over the question being asked at the bottom of the screen and strained to keep the program going. I knew the answer to the question. It was Miami Vice. I watched for many torturous minutes. The woman babbled on. No one was phoning in to answer the question. Thousands of pounds were being offered for this quiz, but no one was phoning in to answer it.

Several more minutes passed and the woman's desperation for someone to phone in and answer the question became thoroughly distressing to watch. I was begging for some late night caller, perhaps an insomniac like me, to take pity and phone up to relieve this woman of the terror of having to talk to a lonely studio camera all night.

Then it occurred to me in a sudden flash. I could actually phone up and answer the question and win myself thousands of pounds myself. In fact, it seemed ridiculous not to.

I hurriedly took down the phone number of the quiz and ran to the phone lest someone just pipped me to the post.

My heart thudded as an ansamachine message picked up my call. How great this was. Soon I would be live on telly. In the morning, just as I was going to bed and my husband was getting up for work, I could tell him that I had solved all of our money worries by winning several thousands of pounds on a late night quiz.

But something puzzling happened. The phone message told me that my call had not been "selected" and cut me off. I stood puzzled. Not selected? But clearly no one else was phoning into this quiz because the lady presenter was nearly fainting with the stress of keeping the program going with no callers.

Applying some logic to the situation, I phoned again. I was told the same thing. I put the phone down in disgust.

In the morning when I told my husband what I had done, he said to me - after picking himself up off the floor where he had been paralysed for several minutes with laughter - that these things were a con. Thousands of people would phoning that quiz. The quiz show just didn't want me to know that.

Since then I've noticed the proliferation of these phone quizzes, with high rate phone lines being attached to just about every program slung into my TV set. I always felt slightly sick at the greediness of it all. And who were all these silly people even more gullible than me who felt the need to do the phoning? At least I thought I was going to win some money. Other people wasted good money voting for some no-mark to win some low-rent TV event. Well, I thought to myself reasonably, no one forces these people to do such a thing. It is sickening, but ultimately harmless.

But we now know that in fact it is far worse than that. I thought the people phoning these quizzes and talent shows were gullible and silly, but the producers of the quizzes thought that they were idiots who deserved no less than to be robbed and cheated.

The extent to which viewers have been duped and ripped-off is dizzyingly horrible. At least seven of these voting thing at least are now under investigation for deceiving member of the viewing public, including Blue Peter which allegedly used a child to lie to it's audience in a fake contest. For God's sake.

Images of little TV producer piggies running around the TV farmyard snuffling frantically in all the troughs. Time to serve the bacon, methinks*.

*hard words from a veggie such as me, I'm sure you'll agree

TRIDENT: PART ONE

It's the parliamentary debate this week on whether or not to spend squillions of pounds replacing Trident, our creaky old nuclear Ballistic Missile system.

I've been struggling to declare either way on this one, but certain sentiments from the anti-nuclear lobby make me want to stock the sea so full of submarines with nuclear warheads that there won't be room for any fish.

For instance, in this Guardian article, Greenpeace activist, Cat Dorey:

"Trident is a cold war relic designed to destroy Russian cities. If MPs buckle under pressure from Tony Blair and vote to renew it, the repercussions will be felt around the world. We can't oppose proliferation of WMD if we're building them at home."

It's just tosh. One, if Trident missile can destroy a Russian city, then I'm guessing it could destroy most other cities in the world, so she's being disingenuous about the versitility of such a weapon. We could crater almost anywhere, I would reckon.

Two, I seriously doubt the world is waiting with anything more than a conspicuous interest in what Britain chooses to do here, which is a lot different to there being "repercussions". It's not like we're going to be punished for deciding to keep Trident going. I'm sure the voting for Eurovision Song Contest will not suffer.

And as for the old "We can't oppose proliferation of WMD if we're building them at home." I think we need to forget the idea that this world will ever be nuclear weapon free ever again. It never will be. We can't go back. There will be no global nuclear disarmament.

And whilst it is true that Britain having nuclear weapons has not stopped the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it is equally true that Britain not having nuclear weapons will not stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons either.

Do we therefore want to lose Trident just so that we can have a good moral stand-point for telling others not to have their own nuclear weapons - even though they will go ahead and do exactly as they like anyway? Pretty shaky and exposed moral stand-point ripe for aiming a nuclear warhead at I would have thought.

Then she adds:

"The real threat is climate change and the billions earmarked for Trident could help make Britain the world's first low-carbon economy."

Well, Ms Dorey, I know a Councillor in Birmingham who wants the money not yet spent on Trident to be spent on housing and welfare. So before you trot out the "money will be better spent on something else" argument against replacing Trident, you'd better be sure what that something else will be.

Still, Ms Dorey is not as bad as the pacifistic sentiments I heard at a recent meeting of local Labour members to discuss this very issue. One lady - lovely lady, green slacks and a kaftan - said that we should not try to gain respect as a country through something as horrible as nuclear weapons. She had spent some time in Korea and found the Korean people respect Britain because of things like Milton. Something to bear in mind if ever north Korea lobs a ballistic missile this way. Shove a book of poetry over your head.

Anyway, such rantings make me sound like a raving pro-Trident replacer, which i am not sure that I am. So, the intention is to do a pro-anti-Trident post if I get the chance later. We'll see.