From The Morgue

Nothing has seemed real today. Back to work. It was like floating.
I’ve spent most of the evening churning through the chaos of our home to make it tidy and suitable for doing all the things I urgently need to do. There are so few spaces that are usable… I still can’t quite deal with the absence of tables. The laptop is on a small card table. There’s the coffee table. And that’s it. It doesn’t seem right.
I’ve accumulated a lot of books. Dammit. That wasn’t meant to happen.
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A new batch of Leon testimony is up at Leon’s God page. A couple of new commandments too. Get on the Leon train, it’s the hottest ticket in town…
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I won’t post the subservient chicken link, even though it amused me far too much, out of some faded determination not to participate in viral marketing. I’m sure you can find it if you don’t know what I’m talking about and care enough.
I will post this link, to a dog on a skateboard. At Frank’s place on Friday night this provided endless entertainment. Well, to me at least. He’s so cute, riding around on that skateboard! Look, he thinks he’s people!
No link to Stone and Parker’s Princess, our other main entertainment on Friday night (well, apart from Leon). Children read this blog and that little bundle of love is NOT FOR KIDS. If you think South Park is restrained, Google for it – it’s out there.
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It was great to catch up with some of the Londoners over the last few days. Sorry I missed those I missed. London is still a crazy town.

Radio silence has been due to a week spent in Israel and Palestine. Wow. More to come.
Currently in London. All is good. Back in Edin Sunday evening.
Leon-worshippers, be advised your testimonies will be added to the site as soon as I get home to do it.
Peace, everyone.

The time has come.
The stars are aligned.
Let the truth be known…
LEON IS TO BE A GOD.
(This, of course, follows on from this blog entry.)

On Friday night I gathered some folks together at Palmyra, which is a tiny Lebanese takeaway joint with some tables for eating in. We took over these tables. I love Palmyra – it’s wildly cheap and the staff are tremendously friendly. Most visitors to Edinburgh who stayed with Cal and me will have been taken there at least once. Brad – you introduced me to the place, I hope you have a smile at these photos…

Continue reading Birthday at Palmyra

I turn 28 at midday Friday April 2, New Zealand time. Slightly after, actually. After going through life convinced I was a morning baby, turns out I’m a pm kid.
So. I am asking everyone who reads this to give me a birthday gift. The gift is this: put a favourite quote in the comments.
A quote from anyone. Philosopher or heavy metal lyricist. Superhero or politician. Funny or serious, bathetic or inspirational.
This will make me a happy moose.
Happy birthday, me!

On the bottom right of my front page, where most of you will be reading this, there are some links to other people.
“Daffyd, Church of” is David Ritchie, currently fighting the good fight over digital rights control and format shifting. Also, dodgy taxi drivers. He hosts this blog, and got me doing the blogging thing. (Iona tried first, but David went one better by actually setting up the blog. I couldn’t stay away.) He is the guy you want on your team for the film questions at trivia night down the pub. He is, of course, a legend in his own time; that’s why I registered him as a Church. He has a small but vocal following on a compound in Tulsa.
Pierce is Pearce. He’s the guy you want on your team if the pub quiz film section is compiled by the guys from the Psychotronic film encyclopedia. He’s a writer and a get-down-that-thang funky dance machine, and right now he’s got a big and insightful piece about potential changes to NZ’s drug laws. If you’re a Kiwi, check it out.
A moth just landed in my glass of water. Yech.
My Cal is of course My Cal. Yay!
She’s hosted at Stonesoup, a NZ bloggers collective orchestrated by Iona. Iona sowed the seeds of my blogging, so it is ultimately All Her Fault. She’s engaged in a horrific, take-no-prisoners battle with poisonous spiders, and though she’s winning the battles, I worry about the war. Lots of nice little fiction pieces turn up on her blog, which is good, because this girl can write words.
Also at stonesoup:
Chuck, a retired fish anaesthetist nursing a fixation with trepanning and ancient egypt. Also the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet (“but sorry, girls, he’s taken!”)
Jenni, bouncy multi-subject-enthusiast/librarian, and considerably ahead of the curve on the latest cool stuff coming down the pipe for what you might call the “neopets demographic”.
Karen, centrifugal scientist who I met in the same round of introductions as Jenni, currently haunting the black-market research alleys of Palmerston North. Not blogging often enough.
Giffy, emergent superheroine with a secret identity as a schoolteacher, who now works in the same school as my mother, which amuses me and pleases me an awful lot.
Also Suraya and Carla, who are wonderful people and who I don’t know nearly as well as I would like. Although now I read their blogs, so I know them intimately! Read Suraya for: thoughtful London commentary, moody London photos, disarming tales of doomed selfaware rock-musician-lust. Read Carla for: commentary on queer issues, ethics, politics, and MAN that makes her blog sound boring, which it isn’t.
Idiot/Savant I’ve plugged a bunch of times recently. Essential reading for interpreting NZ’s socio-political life.
Nate Cull is a Christchurch-based roleplayer, peace activist and thoughtful, searching Christian and his stuff is *always* worth reading.
Andy Macdaddy, the Dadster, the Macaroon, the Andaddy Andad, is a hyper irregular blogger who uses his life in Wellington as a prism for understanding, um… well, just for yarning about basically. He also has the best url in the game.
Artefact is Jamie Norrish, but is the part of Jamie that is focussed on his Artefact Publishing endeavours, except for when it is other parts of Jamie as well. He’s eclectic and honest and quite, quite wonderful, but there are posts full of incomprehensible tech jargon mixed in with posts that any old fool (i.e. me) can easily understand. It’s the kind of blog that talks about sequence functions in PostgreSQL and Beowulf on the same page, and that is alright by me.
Morag is here in Edinburgh, and she’s great fun. She also has kind of become a meme singularity. Read her for amusing gushing over her girlfriend Bex, the latest personality-typing quizzes, and to get access to her words and art pieces on her Insomnia site.
Sweetheart Stuart is a wonderful, wonderful (bitter) man. There is no longer blog on his site, but there is wonderfully trippy music (although, sadly, Satan’s Vomit is not available for download on his site at this time). He makes music and laments stuff (lamenting is now offline-exclusive).
Jack and Heather live in Cambridge (that’s UK Cambridge) and they have just become parents to the delightful Rebecca. This whole post is designed to make you go and read their accounts of the birth, here and here. It’ll make you cry. Awwww. (Jack is, of course, renowned in blogging circles in NZ because he was namechecked in a big article the Listener did on blogging, way back when blogging was Strange And New. Read for: cycling, tattoos, piercings, and teh LOL funnay.)
And down the bottom of the list is nexus of Wellington reality Sophie, who seems to know pretty much everyone. And we all love her! Read for amusing fretting, cow orker lust, work enjoyment, and gleebouncing.
There. That should keep you going on my light blogging weeks.

This column by Guardian columnist and progressive thinker George Monbiot caught my attention today. Monbiot calls for a new UN charter allowing and regulating the use of force against a nation for human rights reasons.
Along the way there was some content that caught my eye:
“We can say without contradiction that the war should not have happened, and that it has been of benefit to the Iraqi people by ridding them of one of the world’s most abhorrent dictators.”
I agree, as anyone who read through my either/or rants of a few weeks back will know. I’d think this was self-evident if so many voices on the pro-war side weren’t still missing it completely.
But to document the lies that led to the war and the dangers that arose from it is to answer only half the question. The other half – what should have been done instead? – still hangs above our heads.
Here, I wanted to hear Monbiot say his piece about what should have been done instead of war. Unlike many commentators on the left, Monbiot is very good at outlining a practical alternative to the way things are – he doesn’t simply criticise without proposing an alternative. (Not that providing an alternative is essential to a criticism – but it does strengthen a critical position immensely.)
Sadly for me, this isn’t the point of his piece. (He instead discusses a hypothetical situation where military intervention is the only option.) In any case, it has prompted me to consider what should have been done before war.
My impression is that a military invasion of Iraq was the only option for dealing with Iraq that was seriously pursued by the US administration from soon after September 11, 2001. I have never seen anything that punctures this impression.
However, to even think about this approach to the problem of Iraq, we need to know why Iraq was a problem. The public narrative was three-pronged:
* Iraq was supporting terrorists that threatened the West (links to Al Qaeda were strongly implied)
* Iraq itself possessed weapons of mass destruction and was a direct threat to the West
* Iraq was a tyranny where innocent Iraqis were trapped under a ruthless and vicious leader
As the fabricated nature of the first reason became clearer, emphasis shifted to the second, and likewise to the third when the second became threadbare. The third is, of course, entirely true – but is it a justification for war?
One of the problems when considering what should have been done before war, is figuring out which of the 3 justifications for action is being addressed. Steps prior to a war to strike down terrorist networks would be different to steps prior to a war to eliminate a gathering threat, which in turn would be different to steps prior to a war on humanitarian grounds.
Seeing as the third justification is the one that stuck, I’m going to focus on that. We all agree that Iraq was a tyranny, and Saddam was as close to the dictionary definition of evil as you’re going to find. The Iraqi people were suffering under Saddam.
Invasion was the response taken in March last year. For the decade previous, the response was trade sanctions in the hope that the people would be motivated to revolt.
The sanctions caused terrible, incomprehensible suffering for no real gain.
The invasion caused great suffering for a concrete gain, the ousting of Saddam – but with a further cost that has yet to be entirely played out.
Is that it? Are these the only two approaches that the civilised and powerful West can come up with to remove a tyrant? Is this really the best we can do?
There were other approaches that could and should have been explored. It is damning that there was no exploration of alternatives. It is damning that the invasion was sold as the only way to deal with the situation without any case being made discounting alternatives.
That is why the people of the world marched a year ago. That is why opposition to the war remains strong. We were rushed into war under false pretences, and war has a horrible cost. Those costs were never shown to be necessary.
I don’t believe the costs of the war in Iraq were necessary in order to oust Saddam Hussein. If they had been necessary, the US administration would have made it clear.
They didn’t make it clear that it was necessary. Their story is bogus. I’m not buying it.
Oh, and Tony? Poor Tony, afflicted with the delusion that we believe his intentions were malicious or dishonest. No. His intentions were good. He believed in the war. He’s just a man who made a foolish evaluation and stuck to it ever since. That’s all.
He got sold. Don’t you be sold too.

Weird vibe of living in the future these past few days (which was at least part of the impetus for the vignette of the previous entry). One example – bad 80s television is turning up in DVD collections – A-Team and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon recently announced.
I’ve been talking for several years how DVD is going to be the breakthrough for TV collecting. A lot of genre stuff has been available for well over a decade, but nothing much mainstream until a few years ago. Now the dam has burst. It’s cool. The Freaks and Geeks DVD is being released soon, as is Homicide season 3. That warms my heart. These are shows that deserve extended appreciation.
It’s all part of the seachange in the medium. When digital delivery a la Tivo becomes as mainstream as the VCR, which isn’t far away (look at the takeup of DVD to see how quick this turnaround works now), then we’ll have gone into an entirely new realm from the world of commercial TV in the 80s.
And that’s good. Because, by and large, commercial TV in the 80s sucked.
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Chris Eccleston is the new Doctor Who. This is brilliant news. The man is the business. This is gonna be a good thing. My prediction: sales to US cable television will ensure it will last at least 3 seasons, each about 13 episodes long. That’s about all I reckon Eccleston will stay for, though, and then we’ll have to see.
I like Doctor Who.

No-one else in the room again, noisy night, and hot. City sounds, like artwork. I flip the switch and cycle through the options. Rest the cell against my thigh, settle in. Scanner clips my retina and ID’s me to open up the full allotment, got to knock at that credit somehow. Remind myself not to blink too much. Scanner bug sometimes decides I’m not watching if I blink too much and shuts off the ads. Screw it. Now I just want to blink.

It isn’t so bad before sleep, the adfeed. When sleeping alone at least. So easy to sleep alone these days. The agencies love it too, when your brain’s slopping out sleep chemicals and your defences are down, impressions count fivefold when the head’s in that shape.

Woman onscreen, naked breasts, they’ll read my pupil dilate and deliver it back again. Every freaking time. Every night it delivers the sex hit at a slightly different time, iterating towards perfect receptivity. Treating me like all I am is meat and gaze and the consuming instinct. Not worth getting worked up over it, they’ll just pick it up and add it to my profile. Their log is my life. Turning in at midnight on a Friday, sitting on my bed and my cell making commerce at me. What went wrong?

A series for delivery food. Too late for that, man, too much crazy chemicals. Uppers and downers and even-me-outers, some of them even prescription, even legal. My stomach couldn’t even handle it if someone paid me to swallow.

So many beautiful people in these ads. Smiling and all the same colour, same as me, side by side. No sign of the gang bang that wiped out three kids last night and got the whole city up in arms crying racism and revelation. So much more palatable on the screen and me with neon scratching at my windows, bed shaping itself to me. Christ, I’m alone again and every single one of these ads has a couple in it. Every one has a couple. What was that about? They tailor the skin colour to me but they’re selling me on falling in love? What’s the angle on that?

Not tired. And if I go out, then the ads win, because clearly I want to go out because I’m lonely thanks to this. And if I don’t go out it wins anyway. Let my credit float me while it can.

Same choice every night.

Neon flash in my eye, but nothing on the wall, the walls around me, and why do I still have no posters? Why do I still have nothing?

I’m not tired.

My cell is beeping at me. I’ve missed some ads and its turned off the feed. Waiting for me to settle back in.

But there’s something happening outside.