"The battery is 1.5V; It is full, and with the use time adding, the power display will be decrease"

Thursday

My wake up call didn't happen, so I slept blissfully on till midday. Then found my MP3 player had arrived.

The manual is lovingly translated from Chinese to English via Martian, and the player looks like a miniature red penknife - complete with belt clip.

It's slow to respond to button pushing, so navigating and changing parameters can be tiresome. But it's nice and loud, and I can get roughly 7 hours high quality MP3s on it. I've been blasting my ears with The Epoxies and Joy Division.
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I never remember when I'm due to sign on. Every second thursday, it comes as a complete surprise that I have an appointment at the jobcentre to share bafflement with my advisor that there still aren't any jobs around.
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Excellent seminar in the evening on climate change with Johnathan Neale, which I filmed and will summarise when I have the strength.
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Friday

I've taken to skimming newspapers on the web. In the news today:

* President Bush says God told him to invade the middle east. To drive out evil, bring peace and American values to all. Because Islam wants to invade the world, and force everyone to be muslim. Funny that.

* Nestle have launched a brand of Fair Trade Coffee. To give them ethical credibility. Because one of their hundreds of pruducts is less opressive than the others. They're a bit late - Fair Trade was recognised as largely fraudulent (or at best tokenistic) years ago.

* It will soon be a crime to not report suspicions of "extremism" and "indications of terrorism" to the police. It was once estimated that in stalinist albania, one in five of the population were police informers. But I don't recall it being a crime to not inform enough.

* The creationism debate is back yet again, but of course only in America. Barbarous tyranical nations with evil ideologies grasp evolution without difficulty.

You read statistics about American beliefs - 40% don't want evolution taught in schools, 20% think the sun goes round the earth, 70% believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 80% think the CIA is hiding evidence of extraterrestrials. But I wonder where all these stupid Americans are. I've met plenty of Americans on the internet or in person, and they've been reasonable, informed, and decently mistrustful of their government.

Maybe they've got polls showing Brits are paranoid about BSE, love Tony Blair and think a measles vaccine causes autism.
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Everyone's timetables are in constant flux at the moment, but the current plan for the weekend is: Spend Saturday afternoon with Paul T, checking his modem and computer, then ensuring the children of record compay executives starve by copying CDs neither of us would know about if it weren't for the other. And then get fed by him.

Then spend Sunday afternoon with Simon M, celebrating his birthday by surfing the net for daft conspiracy theories, watching a charming and even dafter movie obtained from Ebay...and then getting fed by him.