Ever seen John Malkovich and Michael Stipe in the same place?

All I’m saying is if the arse falls out of the acting business for John Malkovich he could make a decent living fronting an REM cover band.

The last of their kind.

I discovered them living in a box in a shoebox in the bottom draw of the desk in the garage. The last known surviving members of the ancient ‘Cassette Tribe’ thought to have been extinct in my home for many years. When I first opened the box, fear of heat damage caused most of the tribe to run for cover. But one brave warrior remained to face me. There were obvious language barriers. The Cassette tribe speak ancient analogue, almost unheard of in this digital age, but we managed to communicate through a crude sign language made up of basic dance floor moves from the 70’s and early 80’s. He told me of his tribes glory days when his people, plentiful in numbers, lived in their traditional homelands in stereo cabinet and car glove box. But things began to change when the shiny newcomers entered the cassette’s tribal area. At first the cassettes hoped to live in peace with the CD’s but as the 80’s progressed the CD’s numbers grew and the cassettes found themselves slowly pushed out of the homes they had known. The Warrior I spoke to had long ago lost his case and his marking were faded but he told me his name was Toto’s Greatest Hits. Just before he left to rejoin his people he let me take his photo.

My new theory on the war in Iraq

Could Rumsfeld and Cheney and the other war hawks really have got it so wrong about Iraq? All we read in the paper, online and on TV is how bad the war is going. What a mess it has been. How Bush’s boys were fools to go into Iraq against the advice of the experts and how things have blown up in their faces and turned into a big mess.

But what if the brains behind the war are secretly happy. What if things have worked out pretty much how they and their other experts planned?

Lets look at the facts. The big defense and construction companies that make money out of war are raking it in because Iraq is a big country and there is plenty of war to go round. The oil companies and other big business vultures are in there carving up the spoils. I’m sure corporations take a much more long-term view than us mere mortals. Sure it might not be as cost effective to remove oil from Iraq right now and there could be the annoying fact of having to replace equipment and men who keep getting blown up the insurgents. But in the long term things will work themselves out and then the oil companies will be ready to pump. In the meantime, the war in Iraq is helping to push up oil prices around the rest of the world. Good news if you’re in oil.

And what is the cost? You wont hear the companies that supply all the equipment to the US army complaining. Or the contractors, or the politicians who rely on cash from the companies that supply all the equipment to the US Army. You wont hear a peep from the thousands and thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. And our leaders in the west know that their voters are delightfully oblivious to large-scale deaths when they are dark skinned foreigners far away.

So that leaves us with the deaths of a few thousand US troops. I heard Michael Moore say on CNN that it is estimated that 18000 Americans die a year as a result of not having life insurance. Does that put the number of US war dead in Iraq in perspective for you? If US leaders are prepared to live with 18000 innocent dead at home a year, what is three and a half thousand over 4 years. I bet the men behind the invasion of the Iraq are rapt with such a low casualty count. Unluckily for them the US public’s tolerance for the death of their own boys doing democracy’s dirty deeds on foreign shores is a lot lower than it was back in the days of Vietnam. Rumy and Cheney know that eventually public opinion will force them out of Iraq ‘officially’. The trick is to hang in there as long as they can. And that’s not hard. The beauty of American democracy is that its leaders can pretty much do what they want. For example. They invade a country using false evidence of WOMD knowing the truth will come out eventually. But so what. It was too late by then and they knew no one would be organized enough to do anything about it. Even with the public finally awake to the big con and overwhelmingly against the war, the men running the oval office know they can just box on doing what they want.

But eventually noise control will get its shit together and drive over to Bush’s place to confiscate his sound system and shut the party down. The press and the Democrats will high five because the government has listened to the will of the people and withdrawn from Iraq. Thing is Bush’s boys wont care because they know the truth. What’s left behind is the15 square mile Balad Air Base and the $592 million dollar US embassy in Baghdad. Officially the US might be out of Iraq but unofficially the men who planned it in the first place are there to stay, to reap the rewards for themselves and the men that suggested they get in there. And I think they’ll sit round the table and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Things I would do if I ruled the world. Part 1

Let me start by saying I have no major plans to take over the planet. If I had those kinds of resources I would be more inclined to put my efforts into looking for another planet somewhere else. This one is looking a bit manky and is too crowded.
BUT, if I did find myself in charge I would obviously have my own island with a hollowed out volcano and some kind of death ray device. It goes without saying that I would have a small army of men in matching jumpsuits who would drive around my island in golf carts and a personal body guard who could be an 8 foot Norwegian woman with a samurai sword or 1 Chinese midget with titanium claws that shoot poison for hands.
An island like that pretty much runs itself and despite the huge numbers of little men in lab coats you always see fussing round death rays they actually need very little maintenance. So I would turn my attention to other pursuits. First on the list would be the creation of that chemical that you put in public swimming pools that turns purple when people pee. That is an urban myth that deserves to become reality and as ruler of the world I would have the resources to get it done.

Al Qaida, Al Qa’ida, el-Qaida, al Qaeda?

No wonder they can’t find Osama Bin laden, no one knows how to spell the name of his company. George Bush probably sent him a really terse letter on September 12 telling him to hand himself in to the nearest US Embassy or KFC in Afghanistan but he never got it because they wrote Al Qida’s name wrong. If I worked for Al Queiada’s PR agency, which is probably based in Pakistan near the mountainous border with Afghanistan, because that’s where Osama is. I would be seriously looking at the branding problem. Can’t you see Osama in his cave hitting the roof each time he sees another report. Maybe that’s the cunning plan by the world’s media. To smoke him out into the open. Wait till he writes a letter of complaint to TV Guide about the consistent misspelling of one of the world’s most preeminent terrorist organisations, then track him down. While we are on the subject of tracking down Osama. Has anyone asked Readers Digest if they have his address? I moved home about 3 times and those guys always managed to find me and flood my mailbox with their crap direct mail. I don’t think Osama would fall for the old ‘This cardboard key could be the key to a real car’ but I bet the mailbox outside his cave still gets that rubbish, along with the bills for the kidney dialysis machine rental and catalogues for new AK47’s.