Author: Gareth

(Seen in ‘s LJ.)

This is so well done. They could’ve gone for “cheap laughs”, but went for “clever” instead:

Click on screen to see the video, and marvel at its brilliant-ness.

Finished reading Cell by Stephen King.

I really enjoyed it — This is King’s tribute to zombie apocalypse stuff: the book is dedicated to Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead). The basic premise is that a signal gets carried through cell phones (called The Pulse), which essentially “wipes the hard drive” of the human mind, leaving nothing behind but base animal aggression. So, the zombies aren’t exactly dead, but they’re not human any longer. Given the widespread use of cell phones (and the habit of people to immediately try to contact loved ones when an emergency strikes), civilization pretty much collapses near-instantaneously.

King has written about the end of the world before, most famously in The Stand, but this one has the fingerprints of 9/11 all over it. Gone is the typical King method of introducing characters, getting us comfortable with them, getting to know then and then injecting something strange into their world. Nope….in this one, the apocalypse hits with 24-hour-news suddenness, on a bright Fall day, 3 pages into the narrative. He’s definitely tapped into the feelings experienced in 2001…and manages to convey them so well that I found myself hit with a familiar sense of trip-hammer panic as I was reading.

In short: Stephen King. Zombies. ‘Nuff Said.

Another British Memo has surfaced, and will be ignored by the American media, just like the other. The memo of a two-hour meeting between Bush and Blair at the White House on January 31 2003 – nearly two months before the invasion – reveals that Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons program.

Even more damning, it shows that Bush was prepared to create another USS Maine or Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for invasion.

A quote from the Memo:

President Bush to Tony Blair: “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach”

Just to wrap this post up in truly depressing fashion: It’s been 274 days since the congressional request for investigation on the first Downing Street Memo.

Nothing has been done.