(no subject)

Numerous letters in today's SMH responding to yesterday's article defending torture at Guantanamo Bay. Amongst the points the letter writers make:

- The Chicago Tribune news report cited does not support the article's premise - that torture has saved civilian lives. (I have a copy of the news report, so more on this later.)
- Some of the prisoners were not captured on the battlefield, but "taken, unarmed, in neutral countries".
- The article understates the severity of the abuse (if Gitmo's practices were merely "mild discomfort", then the abuses at Abu Ghraib were "positively bad manners"!).

It's heartening that the responses aren't just vague handwringing about the nastiness of torture. The article is misleading (in my view, intentionally misleading), and the writer's case can be attacked solidly on facts and logic.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Avec le Colin Firth, in a completely different role to D'Arcy or Darcy. He is teh funneh omg! He wiggles his face about! He reminds me, bizarrely, of Richard Briers. Splendidly the film has broken up the long scenes so you don't get those exhausting sequences of calendar quotes. Love all the sleazy Victorian detail, too. Ta shellshear!

The day so far

With the assistance of a classic rock station online I have written 300 words of Strange Flesh. I've also heard Sign of the Gypsy Queen by April Wine, an eerily familiar song - presumably I heard it while in the US in 80-82, just the sort of thing I would have loved then too - and learned that it will be -26 in Edmonton overnight. Fahrenheit. Also housework.

ETA: That was supposed to be my "Old Fart" ikon, but I missed.

Innuendo and out the other

Well, if ZZ Top's TV Dinners is a sexual innuendo, darned if I can work it out.

Is Metallica's Enter Sandman about drugs?

Oh! I've never actually heard Cum on, Feel the Noize before.

(no subject)

I'm engaging in a very serious discussion of intersex and transgender marriage rights, and suddenly Aerosmith's Dude Looks Like a Lady comes on the Internet radio. *headdesk*