Our worldwide rallying cry...

Considerable upside potential

Lovely weather we're having

Great balls of fire

Stelios is a busy man

Work makes me free

Radio silence recently due to the fact that I have a pile of work to do, dammit. Service to be resumed soon, I hope.

Wa-hey

Today's posting is unashamedly sexist...

23 inches satisfied me

I'm referring of course to the frame size of my new, XXL bike, which is up and running, or perhaps wheeling, like a dream. And this time, it's double locked to the bull bar of a partner's SUV in the double locked basement senior management car park, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, bike thieves.

Lots of macho talk of the Marathon des Sables in the office today. Let's face it, the most exercise most of us get is running out of the office at 6.30pm. Luckily, chat has now moved on to the SBH, an abbreviation which deserves to brought back into common usage.

So a bunch of junior New Labour lickspittles who no-one has ever heard of have resigned in protest at Tony Blair. You'd never catch me resigning just because I don't like the way the boss runs the place. Talk about a futile gesture.

College Green was buzzing with activity this morning as a result - half a dozen TV crews milling around, trying to get someone to comment on whether today will be the day on which a date on which the date will be announced will be announced. Or something.

As ever, Jack Straw has clarified the situation, telling a grateful nation on Radio 4 this morning that "we're not clear what the counterfactual is", and referring obliquely to "coalitions of uncertainty." Give that man a knighthood.

Saw a poster pasted to the back of a bus (that nearly killed me - the bus, not the poster) saying 'Cancel Israel' this morning. How does one go about cancelling an entire country? Is there a call centre? Does a Customer Retention team then call you to try and persuade you to change your mind?

On the subject of death, deathtimer.com has calculated my EDD (estimated death of demise) to be 7 March 2039, at the tender age of 66, which is distressing, since my life reached its halfway point on 13 February this year without my even noticing.

Better get a move on if my half-formed plans for world domination are ever to come to anything. Looks as if my working assumption that I'm gonna live forever may need to be revised downwards. Note to self: ensure that you light up the sky like a flame before dying.

Remaining characteristically gloomy, what's your favourite synonym for death? The Dead Parrot Sketch still contains the longest list, although my own personal favourite is 'to hand in one's dinner plate', which comes from my wife's family, and is one of the few things on earth that Google doesn't know a thing about…

Time is not an unlimited commodity

Today's graph of the day shows the temporal distribution of the contents of my iPod - for some reason 2001 was a vintage year. The arrival of my fourth decade closely followed by babies has decimated my music buying.

So instead of figuring out how to stop our involvement in the Middle East turning into an even bigger catastrophe, growing the economy and generally making life better for we poor serfs, the good people at Chateau Blair have spent the last few months working out how to make Tony's departure so unforgettable that we'll all wish he stayed (which of course we will once GB takes over GB).

The "always leave them wanting more" strategy would have worked fine until about five years ago, but I fear it may turn into a disaster. Highlights will include:

• Appearances on Blue Peter, Songs of Praise and Radio 2
• Visits to the 20 buildings opened or redeveloped since 1997
• Overnight trips to half a dozen cities across the country
• High-profile tours of schools and hospitals
• Visits to Wales and Scotland to argue devolution is a success ahead of next spring's elections
• Monthly set-piece interviews to foreign newspapers to boost international standing
  

Sounds too much like a beauty parade for his next job. Still, the poor fellow needs to scrape together 15 grand a month for the mortgage, and money doesn't grow on trees.

Taking a leaf out of TB's book, I am currently planning my own farewell tour ahead of the sorry day when I leave my current employer. Highlights will include the following:

• Appearances on the Corporate Social Responsibility intranet site and on posters by the coffee machine
• Visits to the meeting rooms downstairs that still smell of sewage, despite having been opened or redeveloped since 2005
• Overnight trips to a couple of depressing provincial cities to add up numbers in a spreadsheet
• High-profile tours of the 8th floor canteen and partners' car park in the basement
• Visits to a couple of gloomy regional offices to remind myself that it's not so bad in London after all
• A slightly awkward interview with someone from HR who has no idea what I do, to explain why I'm leaving

In the absence of any natural intelligence in the area, some guy called Rollo in Norfolk has been beavering away for years on artificial intelligence, and has come up with something called "George the chatbot" (depicted above), who is apparently rude and non-sensical in 40 languages.

George's lack of warmth and empathy with real humans has got banks and cable companies across the realm very excited thinking of all the call centre operatives that could be replaced by a computer that gives even less of a shit about being yelled at by frustrated customers than an underpaid single mum.

I wonder whether he'll be programmed to respond to customers using his native Norfolk dialect?

George: He'yer fa'got a dickey, bor?
Customer: What? Hello? My bastard broadband has packed up, and I've been waiting in a queue for 45 minutes
George: Arr, there be no need to mob a'rum'un
Customer: What?
George: You's may be suffin'savidge, but oi jez be doin' me jarb
Customer: Look, are you going to fix my broadband, or will I have to come round and rip you a new throat?
George: You'llm be needin' a ding o' the lug
Customer: Argh! etc

Wikipedia will today enlighten us about German humour. Here is an example:

Two thick feet are crossing the street. Says one thick foot to the other thick
foot: "Hello!"

Absolutely bleedin' hilarious.

A even worse example of "Vorsprung durch Slapstick" is to be found at German Joke of the Day, which is rendered even less funny by the fact that they're trying so hard.

Cultural cringe

What on earth does…

…"quintessentially Australian circumstances" mean? In the case of London-based Aussies, it more or less means stooping over a spreadsheet from 8 until 6, chasing a ball around the park for a couple of hours then going to the Walkabout to moan about how crap London and Londoners are.

I was lucky enough to be listening (whilst chock full of Chablis) to a cockney geeza on cabbie FM in the small hours of this morning, discussing the recent demise of Steve Irwin. He started his sentence "I don't want to speak ill of the dead but…" (similar to "I'm not a racist but…"), before spending the following ten minutes calling the unfortunate croc guy a waste of space who had it coming. Shame on him. In a similar spirit, the kind hearted Grauniad is doing more or less the same.

Today's lesson according to St Wikipedia is a list of, um, private practices between consenting adults, that I'd never, ever, heard of until today. Note that this section should be regarded as having a Parental Advisory warning:

• Outercourse
• Interfemoral (or intercrural) activity
• Bagpiping
• Chinese fingercuffs
• Teabagging and/or Windmilling
• Bukkake, and finally
• Snowballing

As Hugh Grant once said to the awful Andie McDowell, "Christ…I don't know what the f*ck l've been doing with my time. Work, probably. Yeah, work. I have been working late a lot."

How can a man if a man can't can?

Today's gloomy Monday column (delivered late due to IT problems) is dedicated to Andre Agassi - you cried like a girl when you lost yesterday, you need to put some weight on, and when you had any, you always had questionable barnet, but we'll miss you nevertheless.

So in addition to giving every reader a free glossy poster of garden birds, the bloody Indie has published a 'Good List' of bloody do-gooders doing bloody good.

Without wishing to sound too much like Heinrich Himmler, the graph shows a strong correlation between what the Indie deems to be 'good' and the left wing causes that millionaires in North London worry about from behind their security fences.

No less than 70% of the people on the list are "committed" to "causes", with the gold medal going by a country mile to John Bell, who as well as being religious is concerned with poverty, debt relief, race relations, environmentalism, disarmament, and gender / sexuality issues. Does this man find time to sleep?

Second and third places in the right-on parade are held by Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis, whose combined net personal worth is in the tens of millions.

Don't get me wrong, these guys have undoubtedly made the world a better place, but they don't have the monopoly on 'good', do they?

No sign of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, who together have donated countless billions to charitable causes. The fact that they're white, American, global capitalists places them well beyond the Indie's pale.

One of the gents on the list, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, runs the Muslim Council of Britain, and said in a recent interview with the Torygraph that,
"Modesty is very attractive…arranged marriages are a good idea… pre-marital sex is wrong, cohabitation is wrong… Britain would definitely be better off without alcohol."

This presents a dilemma to the average Telegraph reader - they would instinctively want to agree with these sentiments, which closely mirror traditional Christian values. Yet they're expressed by a representative of 'the enemy'. At the same time, the average liberal Indie reader would rather run over foxes in SUVs than support something as old fashioned as 'modesty'.

Today's wikipedia lesson is from Robert Macnamara, and is entitled "11 Lessons from Vietnam"

1. We misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

I don't hold any strong views about whatever the hell it is that's going on in Iraq, but one could argue that we're doomed to repeat history as things stand.

By the way, the "season of mists" season discussed in last week's blog is well under way, with the good old Indie top of the list...

Tomorrow's blog will be much more lighthearted.

Making lemons into lemonade

Today's jolly Friday column is brought to you in association with David Hasselhof, living proof that you can make a fortune from people laughing at you rather than with you, and still be a boozing wife beater. Hoff, I salute you.

So, it's September - I would like to take the opportunity to be the first to use the phrase "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", which will appear in every third story in the UK press over the next six weeks or so. More prosaically, six months of commuting in the dark beckons.

Nevertheless, most serious journalists are still dozing in Cornwall, Tuscany or Barbados, releasing column inches for such earth-shattering stories as the bunch of firefighters (didn't they used to be called 'firemen'?) getting into trouble for refusing to dole out fire safety leaflets at Pride Scotia 2006. They now have Archbishop Mario Conti weighing in to support them. I'm not sure whether refusing to hand out leaflets anywhere should result in disciplinary action, but given that the alternative is mandatory diversity training, maybe it's better to stand there for a couple of hours and take the verbal beating.

I wonder what the Gay & Lesbian committee of the Fire Brigades Union makes of it all?

On the subject of diversity, I'm struggling to see how a government clipboard nazi can determine whether I'm 'welcoming' rather than merely 'accepting' diversity. Is there some sort of test? A great time to be a lawyer, I should think.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have decided that aeroplanes are bad, and are busy advocating 'painful tax rises'. Good to see that they are still determined not to win an election. Even the Great Gordo wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'painful', except perhaps in the context of his awful public grinning these days.

Apparently the way to spend our way out of environmental disaster is to build a MagLev train line to Glasgow, at a cost of £30billion and a couple of million gardens, fields, meadows, copses, lakes and woodlands churned up and cemented over. Good work boys.

The ongoing dressing down I'm receiving at the hands of my over-achieving 16 year old cousin continues. She looked decidedly underwhelmed when I explained to her what my job entails this morning (Q: "So do you just count things all day?" A:"er, not really, I'm kind of like a surveyor, but of companies not houses"), then suggested in rather strong terms that A-Level Business Studies (yes, I've got one of those) is a complete waste of time, "like psychology". Also, aeroplanes are evil, as are the Conservatives. Sounds like Cameron's boys still have some work to do on the youth vote.