This close to Christmas, it’s hard to develop a coherent line of thought on anything. Herewith then, some fragments:

• There are those that think that I am fairly paranoid. I’m not at the stage of making my own Tin Foil Hats though. Yet.
• That pigeon has been back several times for a fair whack of our cherries. Nice to be of service!
• Gryfon worries that I’ll kill his ‘blog when I read of his, err, great admiration for the works of Sharon O’Neill. He worries too much: if I didn’t do it after the day that he turned up to work wearing a tie-dyed Yes t-shirt, I’ll never do it. And of course, there is a mitigating factor. Shaz may be crap, but she’s our crap.
• Speaking of that… how about the present for the person that has everything: some hippo shit. Ok, it’s got a nice marketing name: Endangered Faeces, and arrives odourless, heat-treated, and pressed into the shape of the animal that did it.
• Free weekends on CafeNet all through December. I only found out about this the other day, but I took advantage of it by trucking down to the public library this afternoon for some (relatively) high-speed downloading. Apparently you can win stuff too. The library’s probably the most practical place for wireless surfing with your laptop. I’ve yet to see anyone do this at a café or out in the open air.
• Finished the fourth of Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books: The Sky Road. And all I can say is… WTF? I’m definitely missing something there. It’s a turkey compared to the rest of them… and I can’t quite see how it fits into the rest of the timeline.
• for a scary moment or three I thought I was going to end up completely agreeing with one of David Farrar‘s postings: the one about Ahmed Zaoui. I do think he’s right when he says we ought to be “very very cautious”. But I’m not convinced yet that the government is right. And the seeming lack of robust and impartial oversight in intelligence matters is pretty scary. What’s the use of a rubber stamp?

That’s enough of a brain dump for now. Feels a lot better.