Corruption [Spiny]

This says it all.

Kember reunited with his friends [Beej]

The British military announced they had air-dropped former hostages Norman Kember, James Loony and Harmeet Singh Sooden into the Iraqi desert, two weeks after their rescue from a house west of Baghdad. The men had been held by insurgents for four months.
Since their release, the three Christian men had spoken with deep admiration and respect for their captors, while not offering any degree of gratitude to the British commandos who saved them.
"We realised we made a huge mistake," said Captain Ian Coates of the British Army, "and it was time to return these men to the people they love and respect."
Coates wistfully related the story of how the former hostages were told of the decision to reunite them with their Iraqi brethren.
"To keep it a surprise, we gathered the men in the middle of the night. They were so surprised and excited, we needed to duct tape their mouths and tie them up. But there was no doubt they were overjoyed to be returning to Iraq. Their eyes were as big as saucers, and Kember even wet his jammies!"
The men were flown by helicopter into Iraq at dawn. Coates struggled to keep his composure as he described the reunion.
"The air drop was a remarkable moment, something I was honoured to see," he said. "The men were writhing around, screaming and crying with joy. There wasn't a dry eye in the helicopter as we rolled them out."
The British military was concerned that the men would not be picked up quickly, leaving them to wander in the desert. So each man was given a bright red parachute emblazoned with one of the famed Danish Mohammed cartoons.
"The cartoons really did the trick," said Coates. "You could see insurgents gathering to welcome them. Some even set fires to guide them as they landed. We could hear chants of welcome even over the whir of the rotors. Did you ever see Born Free? It was like that, but better."
Coates would not comment on reports that the three men were wearing "Jesus Rules, Mohammed Drools" T-shirts.

up up upgrade and away! [shedir]

Oblivion. quite a game by all accounts, when I fired it up though it laughed at my pc.
I suppose 3 years out of a 9600pro is pretty good going in the gaming world. So I tapped into the crosshatches knowledge of all things techy. Slim and lurk agreed that the at x800GTO was my best bang for buck solution.
Main bugbear is that my creaking system wasn't PCI-E compliant of course, so it had to be an AGP card. Kelkoo etc.. wasn't flinging up much in the way of bargains, but overclockers.co.uk had an AGP model which was spot on.
Was a bit surprised when the card needed hooked directly into the PSU mind you, but the 400w thing manages to handle OK.
£140 well spent.
My old 3dmark03 score was 3252 so tried the 3dmark06 and got 1395. But the thing was crawling, 9fps on first set of tests and last one didn't even register FPS's!
Still this score seems OK by the entered scores of other x800 owners, so I'm quite happy.
Nice to see oblivion noticed the new card and recommended "High" for all the settings. WoW looks much nicer too, but I'm looking forward to Ut2004/BF2 with it. The 9600pro really struggled on bf2 so I didn't really bother with it.
All in all chuffed to bits, big ta to Slim/Lurk on the advice. Sterling as always.

Does anyone find Billox entertaining [tehcollective]

Topic says it all, Jimmy Page. Once useful armour/quad whore, now PITA in IRC.
vote.

Heroes [Am]

I'm a misanthrope. I'm a miserable fucking bastard. I fucking hate all cunts, almost always and quite simply can't get excited about the human race which I think is a fucking disgrace.
Oh ok well it's not that bad.
Who's got whom down as a hero? I'm basically up for Tesla because he was just off the planet and it seems to me weirdo's deserve heroism. Churchill because he held it all together. Thirdly, bizarrely as a muso, I am a big fan of Stuart Copeland the drummer from the Police and later composer of film and tv music. The bloke could do things with a drum kit which were just off the planet which no other drummer has done for the last 25 years in a commercial setting. Genius.
Heroes. Spill.

The Blind Watchmaker [DrDave]

I was recently inspired by the excellent Channel 4 documentary The Root Of All Evil to pick up some Richard Dawkins books. Naturally, I had to pick up The Selfish Gene, but also went for The Blind Watchmaker as well.
The Selfish Gene, though very well written, turned out to be a little turgid and self involved. It is definitely required reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in the field of Darwinism, but reads more like a science textbook than a piece of popular prose.
The Blind Watchmaker, on the other hand, is simply magnificent! In the decade or so between writing these books, Dawkins really seems to have mastered the art of popular science (that Hawkings and Bryson have also managed to great effect). His descriptions of the mechanisms involved are fueled by such passion and conviction that you can't help but read on. His demolition of popular anti-Darwinism arguments is so utterly watertight that you wonder why there is even any debate about this issue at all.
He describes endless cases of supposed "irreducible complexity" (the cornerstone of Intelligent Design) then calmly explains their existence in a way that is laughably simple and retrospectively obvious. Read his explanation of the eye's existence in Chapter 4 and I challenge you to find flaws in it or claim that the eye has any element of design in it!
Seriously, before I read this book, I was sold on evolution by natural selection, though I'm not entirely sure I grasped how self-evident it was. After reading it, however, I see it with a clarity that I never experienced before. Evolution by natural selection is one of those exceptionally rare theories that doesn't require formulae or maths to depict. It is so simple, so ridiculously straight forward, that you can describe it in the most elementary language. True, we may call it a theory, and technically in the true scientific sense of the word, it is, but I would place as much faith in it being fact as I would in the idea that objects fall down when dropped.
I used the word faith... silly me. This usually causes theists to frothingly claim that science is really a religion, with no more proof than the claim that God sits on a cloud and smites wrong doers. Well rubbish. This book shows how truly correct science can be, how some theories can be as close to fact as they can possibly ever get.

Beginning of the week [Am]

So. Sat there, a little anesthetised from the bar on a Monday night in Hong Kong. Time; midnight. From my bedroom window, curtains cast open to a single marvellous piece of glass as wide as the entire frontage of the first flat I ever owned, I can see the black water of Hong Kong’s Victoria harbour lain out before me for all the world like the runoff of the global squid convention’s annual whack-off. There is a forest of narrow stalagmite flats and towers left right and behind us in a way that could blow your mind if you chose to focus on them but the water’s currently the thing.
A few moments ago, as near as damnit to midnight as makes a party, a multinational cruise ship went past lights a blazing and port holes a peepin with the decks clearly frugging to the assembled throng partying their way into Hong Kong. You couldn’t actually see the faces but the movement was plain to see. Much like observing the side of a plastic bait box at the beginning of a full day’s fishing.
Was it cheesy? Who can say? I only stared out from a window. Was it fun? Certainly it looked like a lot of fun was what was happening from my windowed observation. And we’re not talking the Stenna Anglesey ferry here. This was the sort of intercontinental ballistic nuclear cruise liner that bristles with decks, points, promenades, radar spikes, quoits platforms, multi-decatonne displacement sprouty bits, verandas, sun-lounge-runs, swimming pools, outdoor aerotoria and a general decking arrangement of such pointed angularity and oi-ness that it’s like was last seen in certain shoulder-pads circa UT2k4. Decked with Christmas lights.
I would like to think that Copa Cabana was playing. Perhaps a couple of teenagers were copping off for the first time ever.
A bit before I had been in “JJ’s” a very expensive adjunct to the hotel in Hong Kong which had been done out in a variety of bizarre Harry Potterish twisty heavy oak panelled staircases and mirrors on the ground floor. A heavy set ebony bird of prey sat on a pointless plinth looking down at my Gin and Tonic - ten US dollars – as I ate a plate of amazing chilli spiced rare beef salad for nine dollars. No I don’t understand it. On the second floor (and I’m not even going into the pe0n lined pointless elevator lobby thing “Hello Mr Jonson, ell o Mester Jawnsen”) was a decent enough elliptical bar and seating all focused on a small stage where an all-American semi-stars group was bashing out R&B tunes. You could tell they had been hand-picked because they all took turns at singing the tunes. As anyone who’s ever played in a band will tell you, that sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident.
But on two of the tables in front of the band was a little tableau that held me fascinated for about an hour. On one, a Chinese or Hong Kongese in his late forties / early fifties was sat with a blond western girl, age no more than 23 to 25 who was pretty much ignoring him but drinking the Krug that sat in front of them with a huge bowl of iced strawberries which were dunked in the Krug. I pulled a drinks list. About four hundred dollars a bottle.
On the second table was another local, probably in his thirties but with three asian girls who had all come in at different times and been introduced to each other but were now collectively, enthusiastically smashing their way through the iced strawberries and in this instance, Moet & Chandon. About 200 hundred dollars a bottle. The bloke in his thirties and the bloke in his forties clocked each other for a couple of seconds. The unspoken conversation was so clear you could have telegraphed it above the hammered out riff of Midnight Hour the band were lurching into now. My champagne’s better than yours. Yeah but I’ve got three birds. Yeah but my bird is blond and young western fluff. She don’t look all that and I’ve got *three*. Hrm. Hrm. Which one’s better? Fucked if I know. Me neither.
After about thirty more minutes the white girl went off to the loos for about fifteen minutes, wearing the bloke’s pringle yellow sweater over her shoulders. She had a fit enough body but the face had only barely made it out of average into attractive. The bloke drank his Krug and patted his hand out of time to Mustang Sally.
After fifteen minutes she came back. Energetic, interested in him and quite literally dusting off her nose. She pulled him by the arm and took him off in the direction of the door. As she left she had a face on that I will never forget. She had to walk through a corridor of westerners and easterners who were each trying not to clock them too obviously, thereby only emphasising the noticeability of their passage. She jutted her chin out and stared with cold eyes ahead with a face that said “Yes I know you think I’m a whore and get this, I don’t give a shit what you think”. I looked at her face and the look was about as convincing as a tale of a snowball on the face of the sun. Suddenly I didn’t feel like staying to hear Stand By Me.
Real life should not command real life. Perhaps, the staff of cruise ships should command real life at least for the sense of occasion, a little grandeur but most of all having just some plain fun with no-one getting fucked up on a Monday night.
There’s some funny shit that goes down around midnight on a Monday night in Hong Kong town.