2005

The website of a man who can see in ultraviolet light, unlike the rest of us. The reason is that he had an artificial lens inserted into one of his eyes to treat a cataract – our lenses filter out UV, but the replacement doesn’t. He experiments with cameras, in order to show us something…

I didn’t say anything at all about the death of Arthur Miller, or the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, or even the row around Ken Livingstone. On Miller, I remember vividly studying The Crucible at school: our class was assigned parts to read, and I got Governor Danforth, the menacing state authority who appears towards to…

God, the stats log’s been entertaining in the last few days. After the folk who were looking for porno pictures of the president of Yemen, and the crazed FreeRepublic.com trolls, now we have someone at the Elysée Palace. At 0816 hours, Thursday 17th February 2005, IP address 62.160.71.179 searched French Google for “KH-55” and hit…

My referral log informs me that several people have come this way from a thread on FreeRepublic.com, the web’s home of rabidly rightwing trolls. Will I give them the dignity of a link? Pah, it can’t do any harm. You can go and read, here. Obviously, I wouldn’t want anyone to take that as encouragement…

Lib Dem blogger-MP Richard Allan has sounded the alarm on a serious possibility that might get the ID Cards Bill into law without a full debate through the Lords. The government has already demonstrated its willingness to push through the Bill by applying a guillotine to all the Commons stages, shortening the available time for…

What can I say? I made a crude attempt to forecast the turnout in the Iraqi election on the basis of partial figures, here, and I got it wrong. Badly wrong. At least the key meaning – that only the Shia and Kurds would get in – got through, but then that was the easy…

Le Monde has an excellent article on the death of Alfred Sirven. There’s more coverage here. If you read French, read’em before they vanish into subscription hell.

The Washington Post reports on a lawsuit that has resulted in the publication of extensive allegations by former Coalition Provisional Authority staff that the organisation was corrupt, incompetent, and spectacularly hopeless with money. Interestingly, much of the dirtstorm centres around the security contractor CusterBattles, who Ranters will remember from this story from January. If you…

Pavel Felgenhauer of the Moscow Times follows up the discovery, as blogged on the 3rd of February, that a number of Kh55 (Nato name AS-15 KENT) strategic cruise missiles had been sold on the black market by Ukrainian officials at the time when the remaining 578 Kents in the Ukraine were returned to Russia. The…

Right… Admin! Enetation are still down, lying in a pool of their own credibility, for the third day. Blogger comments should be available today. Stuff! The French press is reacting to the death of Alfred Sirven…The Moscow Times has a story on those AS15 Kents mentioned below….there’s a major revelation on corruption at the CPA…