The Null Device
2003/12/22
I've been listening to Styrofoam's The Point Misser a bit lately; IMHO, Styrofoam can be described as being to (Amber-era) Autechre what Coldplay are to Radiohead (in the sense of being something for fans of the latter's sound before they went weird).
New research shows that men who get married are more likely to suffer mental health problems, whilst men who remain single are most likely to suffer depression, with simply shacking up with a partner being the optimum solution. For men, that is; for women, unmarried cohabitation is, according to the Queen Mary University study, the worst of all options, with celibacy being best, followed by marriage. More ammunition for the claim that heterosexuality is an inherently adversarial zero-sum proposition.
The results of The Reg's JenniCam poetry competition. The version of the Beatles' All The Lonely People at the bottom is priceless.
According to this article, the Kurds, not the US, captured Saddam Hussein; members of the al-Jabour tribe, one of whose daughters had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, betrayd him to the Kurdish Patriotic Front, who drugged him and left him in the famous "spider hole", which had been sealed to prevent his escape, and called the US to pick him up. In other words, he had no more chance of escaping from the US forces than one of the cage-raised birds Dick Cheney enjoys gunning down.
What is truly interesting is not just the US claim of capturing Saddam Hussein, but the claiming of an elaborate operation that ended successfully (much like the scripting of the rescue of Jessica Lynch). Not only did that elaborate operation not work (if it existed at all), but the Kurds had him trapped in a hole while the US got the media apparatus together for the "dramatic" events.
What is also worrisome, but not unexpected, is the virtual silence of the US and British press. ABC News Online was the only US-based news I found, and it was a copy of the Agence French Press report.
(via jwz)