Telling it like it is

This is a blinder of a news story which I've archived off because it's likely to be removed shortly: It seems that 10 of the 19 pages of the latest evaluation of Iraq were copied, verbatim (typos and spelling mistakes included) from a paper written by a postgraduate in 1991. Jeez. They can't even make shit up any more - they have to plagiarise everyone else's work to scare the public now. Here's the link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2735031.stm

GWB has raised the US alert level to 'orange' today. Looks like the government are preparing to stage a "terrorist" attack to rile the US public into supporting the impending (and unneccesary) war with Iraq. Given the increased news coverage of bio weapons, I reckon the Whitehouse is going to sneak some smallpox into some sleepy suburban community somewhere to get everyone's heckles up. CNN can then ply us with images of kids in distress and Wolf Blitzer can whip the nation into a frenzy about nothing.

And to top it all, the temperature is expected to drop to -12 degrees tonight :-)

Things are hotting up in Iraq. Seems Bush has forgotten all about that annoying Bin Laden character now. Colon Powell continues to manufacture evidence of weaponsofmassdestruction (all one word, note), and he's getting quite creative with it now. So I guess we're going to war despite the lack of support from just about anyone.

The head-scratching goes on at NASA. As I predicted, they've ruled out the foam-on-takeoff theory. It happens all the time and this time was no different. The foam is low-density styrene and it blew apart into a vapour when it hit the wing - you could hit someone over the head with a slab of that stuff and they'd hardly feel it. Current investigation now shows the autopilot trying so hard to keep the Shuttle's trajectory correct that it was firing the maneuvering engines as well as running all the flaps and rudder controls. Something definitely was causing drag on the left wing. My pet theory is that the undercarriage door failed - probably the worst-case-scenario was that it was hit by space debris on the way down and failed - came off. Heat started to build up in the wheel well destroying the sensors in there. The pyrotechnic bolts went off when the heat level got too high and deployed the left landing gear. It got burned off but left a stump exposed, causing drag. The l...

Here's to learning a very important lesson : you know those Kleenex you can get with the lotion in the hankie? Don't use them for cleaning your computer monitor. Really. Seriously - don't do it.

Colon Powell has just finished delivering his newly-fabricated evidence to the UN. It was quite entertaining. They could have come up with something more substantial given how long they've had to make it all up. Not very creative at all, really.

Well my personal crisis has come to a satisfying conclusion. Seems I pretty badly misjudged a couple of people I know and was tarring them with the same brush. That'll teach me. We got more house news too - we went around a couple of nights ago and the seller has fixed all the things we were going to ask for already. I've also had a crash course in water softeners from a chap here in the office, and discovered it's amazing what you can find on the internet. I found the techincal manual for the pretty old water softener in the new house, online. Sweet. I'm now the foremost expert on Fleck water softener valves....

At least it's snowing again. Has been all day. On and off. It finally looks like winter outside. That's lifted my spirits somewhat. I also managed to recover from a potentially disastrous failure over in IT where the backups failed and the drive with all our data on went down in the same day.

I feel physically ill. Well done Chris. Way to bollock up your life.

I'm restarting my blog again today. All previous posts have disappeared on to my hard drive :-)