“They would have been happier having someone closer to president Bush's policies.”

The quote in the title is from this article, about al-Qa'ida getting worried about Obama's popularity.

Now that's funny isn't it? I thought they would "pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats." Could John Howard have been wrong?

Los Angeles Forest Fires

Look at this guy. He's all decked out, with all the equipment he'll need to survive this emergency. The only thing he forgot is how not to be a wanker.

Columbus

I'm reading a book about Christopher Columbus. Let's put ourselves in his head for a moment, and believe that in sailing west from Europe across the Atlantic, he had reached India, rather than the New World. Why then, did he call it the West Indies? That doesn't make any kind of sense. He had clearly reached the most easterly point of India. Anybody who thinks that that sounds reasonable, and that it makes sense to speak of "India in the West" is either trying to make me angry, or has not properly understood the concept of the spherical Earth with it's arbitrary meridians.

Update: Geoff falls into at least one of the above categories. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

I'd forgotten how messy it is eating a mango with a beard.

That's it. That's the whole post