The war on fake news

As usual about this time of year, I am sitting in a hotel room, thinking that this must be very much what it is like to be a foreign correspondent in general and a war correspondent in particular.  Except of course it’s not.  The hotel room is in central London and so unless I have undergone an unexpected and unnoticed transformation of nationality, I’m not a foreign correspondent.  Having said that, English does appear to be the minority language here in the hotel, a consequence of the continued popularity of London as a tourist destination, a weak pound making it even more popular and lots of worried Europeans getting in a visit while they can before a fucking huge fence goes up all round Britain, or something.  But as has been stated before on this blog, there is something about staying in a hotel room and having a laptop open on the desk that suggests something of the war correspondent.

Previously, I was in the happy position of exaggerating the foreignness of places when the most exotic thing about them was that they had not one but two Chinese take aways.  I was also in the happy position of inventing the ‘war’ element of the correspondent bit.  And actually, as anyone who has read this post this far will know, inventing the ‘correspondent’ element too.  Sadly, this is no longer true.

Of what war do I speak?  Certainly, the next few hundred or few thousand words could be about the war on terror, a war where the front line is on our streets, or actually on our high street.  Various nutters with pokey things have made right nuisances of themselves in 2017, but they don’t really deserve a mention here.  If you want one defining image of the war on terror, it’s that bloke fleeing from the attack at Borough market, still holding his pint.  When the little fuckers roll up in a tank, we might put our drinks down.  Until then, cheers!

Nor is it the war that is being fought over inappropriate touching, usually by celebrities, occasionally of people who wish to become celebrities.  This is not a war as such, merely a continuation of the battle of the sexes, which appears to have somewhat hotted up again.  The view from the G&P trenches (not, you will note, the view from the feminine equivalent, which I guess would be ‘Lady and Spectator’ or ‘Lady and Person Responsible For Cakes’ or something) is that that bastard Wienerstiener has ruined it for all of us.  Basically, if I call somebody ‘Love’ in the office, I’m fucked.  Not that I ever would.  I call everyone ‘chaps’.  ‘Chaps’ is a gender neutral form of address.  In all my tears of using it, I only ever had one person comment that one of those addressed was a woman, or a chappess.  The person complaining was not the lady in question, because she was a bloody good chap and would not do that sort of thing.  No, it was, I stringly suspect, the same person who complained when I brought doughnuts into the office for a treat that I had neglected to provide a fruit alternative.  FFS.

The war in question is the war on fake news, or as Fox News calls it, ‘news’.

London is, of course, the home of the BBC, a corporation with correspondents both foreign and domestic, both war and peace.  The BBC is funded not, as you might imagine, by flogging episodes of ‘Top Gear’ to China and a TARDISload of ‘Doctor Who’ merchandise, but through the license fee, which everyone is happy to pay even if the BBC only ever broadcast ‘Blue Planet II’.  That alone would be worth it and you won’t find anyone that will contradict that because nobody wants to look like an idiot in public.  Recent voting patters demonstrate that people are happy to be idiots in the privacy of a booth, but in public, unwise social media posts aside, it’s a different matter.

Because everyone pays their license fee, two mind-sets simultaneously evolve.  They can be held by the same person at the same time.  The first is that evey license fee payer feels that they have the right to criticise any aspect of the BBC.  The second is that when anyone who does not pay a license fee tries to criticise the BBC, they defend it like Horatio defends a bridge.

Case in point.  The BBC loves to cover extreme weather events by sending presenters with usually immaculate hair and make up to report live from the scene.  This usually involves wellies but it’s not unusual to see a BBC presenter in a North Face parka, screaming into a microphone held to their lips, trying to make themselves heard over the screaming wind that is driving the rain into their face.  So essentially you have a BBC reporter doing their bit from where was until yesterday a busy high street, but is now the Little Puddling Water Recreation Centre.

Then you have one of those masochistic BBC programmes where the viewer gets to make their point, usually that a presenter has been too rude, or too Tory, or too Leftie, or too female, or too black.  And the complaint in question, that the BBC reporter was giving advertising to a particular brand of anorak.

Now, the benefit of this sort of attitude is that there is no other broadcaster of news, in the world, with such rigorous oversight.

Which is why fake news does not happen on the BBC.

Admittedly, some of the correspondents and editors can give an opinion on something that is about as palatable as a Bush Tucker Trial, but that’s part of the fun and it all balances out.

The problem now is that the BBC is reporting on certain individuals, naming no names, who lie, and because the BBC has a duty to report, those lies get broadcast.  It’s like retweeting fake news.

And that’s the soft end.  The hard end is the truly terrifying boiler rooms in malign states that are pumping out fake news clickbait.

By the way, I can assure you that G&P is not written in a vast warehouse just outside of Minsk.  If it was, it would be so much more better writtener.

Every screen is the front line in the war on fake news.  And right now, I’m not sure who is winning.  Certainly, fake news has gained considerable ground.  It used to be that fake news was confined to the playground and the pub.  Not any more.  Thanks to malicious minds taking the innocent internet, that used to be used for such lofty pursuits as porn and bickering about Star Trek, and using it to drip poison into the ear of Joe Public, fake news is a Key Opinion Influencer.

Maybe though things will change.  Fake news is getting easier to identify.  Everyone should have the fake news equivalent of one of those aircraft spotter posters showing the silhouette of enemy aeroplanes, except that they would show the signature shapes of fake news, such as ‘anything that you really want to believe is true, probably isn’t’, or a picture of a fox.

And those that peddle fake news need to be identified too.  It’s a pity that the entire established media hate Facebook because they fear it so, and also a pity that facebook does appear to be a home for fake news.  But so what, who cares?  The Internet is the wild fucking west, there are no rules.  And really, what sort of person believes something they read on Facebook.  Unless it’s about kittles.

Trusted sources, that’s what it’s all about.  Like the BBC.  Never knowingly fake.

Finally, a note on the hotel.  It’s in the centre of London which is a big area I admit, as any area connected to the tube might make that claim, but this really is, there are more busses and cabs than cars.  The hotel is discreet but posh, and judging by the fluffyness of the towels is luxurious.  My room is on the first floor, meaning that the window, with views of a typically cosmopolitan London street, is a few fee above the windows of the top deck of the busses that stop outside at the lights.  Nobody has waved yet.  The bar looks like the sort of place a foreign correspondent might frequent in that it sells cocktails, which is hard liquor mixed with more hard liquor or, if you’re a lady, some fruit.  There was also what appeared to be a fashion shoot going on.  Rude to stare.

Brexiteers would loath this place.  It’s full of foreigners, coming over here, boosting our economy.  And that’s just the staff.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

Write on Beer II

I’m writing this in a hotel room.

It occurs to me that in my 2014 blog entry about writing on beer, I described the fiction writing process.  If I recall correctly, drinking ‘wifebeater’, as Stella is loving known, in a pub in the daytime drove me to outline a not-entirely-original idea of a series of books based on a martial family.  The idea has, ahem, never got beyond development stage.

But it did make me think that I was unjust in entirely overlooking a class of writers who drink, and drink beer.  Journalists, particularly, war correspondents.

This may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I am currently drinking warm beer from a bottle in a hotel that is in a place I have never visited before and which I arrived at after dark.  If I had arrived in a Hercules transport firing off flares to distract surface-to-air missiles and then jumped from the tailgate thingy to a dusty desert airstrip, the picture could not have been more complete.  I am even toting my laptop, an ageing Apple Powerbook G4 that weighs about as much as a fucking manual typewriter (maybe even less because although those old Imperials may have been made out of steel and gravity, they didn’t have batteries that are apparently constructed from the same stuff they make black holes out of), in an canvas camera case.

An Imperial is probably better at stopping a WWII sniper round (other ballistic armour includes a notebook, but nothing beats a Bible) but I’m betting my Powerbook could be used to swat away incoming up to an including depleted uranium rounds.

As it is, I’m in Salisbury, but can assure you I am very much on the front line of civil unrest, as the town had its Christmas festival thingie tonight and there are loads of road closures and angry motorists.  Nobody has let rip a burst of AK47 fire from the back of their Toyota pickup, yet, but I noticed some pretty serious tutting going on in at least one Range Rover, which might sound innocent enough but to those in the know is as sure an indication that things are about to kick off as that fuse opening credit sequence in Mission Impossible.

Anyway, drinking warm beer (‘Brooklyn Lager’, got hooked on the stuff in NYC), is redolent of foreign correspondents.  That and secretly despising the locals, the warm beer selling fuckers.  Not really, big shout out to Salisbury, woo hoo! love your Tesco Metro).

Bars, back in the day before wars moved to places where the combatants don’t drink alcohol (hence, you know: wars), were places where you went to speak to the generals, the gun runners, the generals selling guns to the gun runners, also freedom fighters, terrorists, and other journalists.

Especially journalists.  Especially the Wall Street Journal correspondent shagging the local consulate girl, because he had great local information and because he was always, always, C.I.A. and hence could always afford to get a round in.

Also, anyone freshly arrived off the ‘plane who had British or American cigarettes.

Of course, that was back in the days when journalists stole stories off of one another and fact checked by getting in a jeep, and thought nothing of driving three days through swamp and minefields, rather than getting their stories off Twitter and their ‘fact’ ‘check’ off of Wikipedia.

A lazily rotating ceiling fan, so much like the rotor blades of a Huey, curling cigarette smoke (Christ, those were the days), cigar smoke, pipe smoke (Telegraph correspondent) and booze, and sweat.  Because the great thing about war in the tropics is that you sweat the stuff out as fast as you can drink it.  You could sit in the bar at the Choi Choi Mai from lunchtime to deadline and never have to go to the loo, thanks to the climate.

Not like now, tweeting ‘being shot at, LOL’ from the front while running like hell for the rear.

If being shot at in a war zone is an occupational hazard, but you are not a soldier and are hence allowed to booze, then who wouldn’t reach for a beer or two with lunch?

Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?

Kindles can't stop a bullet!

Books, famously, furnish a room, and arguably a soul.  They also furnish a handbag, a backpack, a messenger bag and a pocket.  Especially a pocket.  It has been suggested that, back in the days when Penguin were publishing what are now described as design classics fit to feature on mugs and deckchairs, but back then were, you know, books, artful seducers used to carefully select just which book would be just visible jutting jauntily from their (tweed) jacket pocket, ensuring that any impressionable young woman might note that the dashing chap at the end of the bar was familiar with Lady Chatterly, and opening up the possibility that she might play ‘Mrs Mellors’ for a short time.

Books are also something of a comfort.  There’s a reason why the ‘YA’ section of your average high street book store is enormous, it’s because the only thing that teenagers consume more of than fiction about misunderstood young people is haribo and zit cream.  If, as a teenager, you are so confused that you don’t even understand yourself (except for your feelings about Lizzy Feathergrew who sits across from you in double chemistry, your feelings for her are very, very clear, but you wonder if she’s into girls) then it’s good to read about teenagers struggling with being teenagers.  If they also have to struggle with vampires, alien invasions or oppressive regimes, then so much the better.  Just read that shit up and wait until you’re twenty six, sitting at your desk or standing at your lathe or slinging latte or assisting at lambing time or whatever, and you go bolt upright (very much like you used to do at the thought of Lizzy Feathergrew) and say, out loud, ‘Fuck.  Allegory!’.  Then move on.

We take books into uncertain environments.  There are rightly celebrated relics of the battlefield, books that have stopped bullets because the soldier in question was either clever or fortunate enough to have a book, for instance The Bible, in a pocket that covered an important organ (not The Mighty Wurlitzer).  That The Bible has saved the lives of so many Tommies because of its ballistic blocking abilities is less to do with its miraculous heritage and more, I would suggest, to do with the fact it records everything from the creation to Armageddon.

Ironically, if our gallant soldier was carrying a slim volume of verse by a poet reflecting on the horrors of war, he’d be fucked.

The moral of the story, if you are going into battle, read Stephen King.

Sadly, there are still too many battlefields.  There are also many uncertain environments.  And no environment is more uncertain than ‘abroad’.  That is why the choice of holiday reading is so important.

If it’s a beach holiday, then the prime directive is this; you must not be precious about the bottom of your book absorbing around a litre of perspiration from the tummy you rest it on (hopefully yours, if you rest your book on somebody else’s tummy whilst on holiday, you are reading the wrong blog) and being forever impregnated with the scent of suncream.

As an arch bibliophile (look it up before calling the police) I find the notion of giving away a book about as disturbing as the notion of trying to track down Lizzy Featherstone on social media years after she left school.  Without saying goodbye.

Anyway, despite requiring counselling if I lend somebody a book, I am tremendously impressed by the libraries that spring up in resorts, where tourists drop off one book and pick up another.  Like literary STDs.

There should be a military imprint of bestsellers, with Kevlar front and back covers.  If nothing else, this would enable some squaddie somewhere to proudly show off his copy of ‘Fuck the French’ with a bullet embedded in the front cover (a picture of Jeremy Clarkson, in leather jacket and jeans, looking incredulous).

Bullet position?  Head or crotch.  You choose.

As might the enemy.  As with ‘Mrs Mellors’, might your attention be drawn to a cheeky cover poking out of a pocket and, if you were a foreigner might you think ‘Ah, Clarkson’?

Books, you see, are the best defence.  Ask a teenager.

Rolling bad news

If I’d committed a war-crime, I’d probably want to hide the evidence too.

A couple of weeks ago, special scientific instruments in remote observatories in Orkney, Peru and Western Australia measured a surge in British national pride.  The epicentre was Scotland, but it was felt throughout the United Kingdom and her dominions.  Queen Elizabeth (II) named a ship ‘the Queen Elizabeth’ and, unlike many quite lovely ships that have borne that name and are intended to transport the sort of people who really, really like buffets from port to port, this one is the very last thing in the world you want to see steaming in your direction after you have committed an act of aggression – an aircraft carrier.  Of course, there are smaller warships that carry racks of cruise missiles that can flatten cities, but fuck it, ‘Top Gun’ is not a film about clever chaps in white coats who programme guidance systems.  Aircraft carriers rule, the waves.

In fact it’s baffling that the Government is even considering not bringing the Queen Elizabeth’s sister (or more properly son) ship, the ‘Prince of Wales’ into service, as quickly as possible, because the last time I Googled ‘is the world getting safer?’, the answer still failed to come back ‘yes’.

This week, the news has made pretty grim viewing.  Rolling news has barely been able to keep up with rolling tanks, as the Israelis appear to be on something of a spree targeting, as far as I can work out, families and pharmacies.  The way they are going, they will have levelled the only kitten sanctuary in Gaza before the weekend is out.

Obviously, things are complicated.  Hammas are firing rockets into Israel, Israel are firing rockets, rolling tanks and undertaking air-strikes in Gaza.  The problem is that none of the fuckers appear to have gone to fucking school and learned how to fucking programme a fucking guidance system.  On Bonfire Night I occasionally light the blue touch paper on a rocket and hope for the best, but I’m not aiming the rocket at downtown Tel Aviv and the effect I’m hoping for is a pop and a colourful bloom of shimmering sparkles, not carnage.  When you are in charge of a weapons platform, you have to do rather more than hope for the best.

Which brings us to the arseholes who shot down an airliner this week.  The only thing that appears to be up for debate is whether the people that did it are actually evil, or just incompetent.

Now, I don’t know much about warplanes, but I do know this.  First, they don’t fly at 33,000 feet (they fly low, fast, unload everything and then back to base for tea and medals).  Secondly, they don’t fly along recognised commercial routes.  Thirdly, those inside warplanes do not watch in-flight movies and eat peanuts.  Those three things would make that dot in the sky a passenger jet and if you don’t know if it’s a warplane or a passenger jet, here’s an idea, don’t just hope for the best and press the red button.

In the absence of information, one can theorise to the point of conspiracy nutter.  Who stands to gain most and lose most (apart from the victims) as a result of this atrocity?  Was it a genuine accident?  A Ukrainian separatist militiaman is, after all, unlikely to be a professor of mechanical engineering on sabbatical and more likely to be some sheep-fucker attracted to military life by the prospect of a free balaclava, so it may have been a genuine accident.

But that looks less likely.  Barring access to the crash site is inhumane, but perfectly sensible if you want to dispose of any evidence.

Between Gaza and the Ukraine, it can seem as if the world is teetering a little.  At times like this, what you need is a counterweight.  65,000 tonnes of aircraft carrier should just about do it.  Actually, better be safe, make that 130,000 tonnes.

Of course, it could just be that the arseholes are denying access to the crash site so that they can loot iPods.  And I hope every single one has Toby Keith’s greatest hits on it.  You fuckers.

My alternative life

Nobody chooses administrative mediocrity as a career, people don’t even have it thrust upon them, that would be too dramatic. I don’t think people even drift into it. Careers involving being stuck in an office just settle on people, like dust or dandruff.

When I was a teen and it was time to start to make choices about what I wanted as a career, I seriously considered the Army. The fact that I was not disciplined, had no interest in sports or, indeed fighting did not seem an issue, either for me, or, more frightening, others. I remember a careers conference with the head of the sixth form, a committed pacifist who hated the military. On the suggestion that I was considering the Army he looked at me and acknowledged that ‘yes, that would be a good fit’. At the time I thought he simply hated me, now I realise that he thought that my being in the Army would deal it the greatest blow since Dunkirk.

As it turned out, I opted for a shirt, tie and suit rather than DPM and have, in general, been quite happy about my choice – I have no doubt that with my luck I’d pull duty testing some sort of new chemical warfare agent at Portland Down. When you find yourself on parade with three rabbits and a smoking beagle, you know you’re in deep shit.

Recent events (growing older combined with what can only be described as something of a dissatisfying time in the office) have made me reconsider these decisions though. I reckon I could, just, have made a successful career out of the Army. Join as a private, rise through the ranks and eventually command tanks and so on before being awarded that ultimate accolade – being accused of war crimes. Without a doubt, I should have joined the Catering Corps. Now called the Royal Logistics Corps or something, and probably due to be outsourced to Burger King, this is the army of the Army that makes sure the troops eat.

Now THAT sounds like soldiering. How on earth is one supposed to make a hot meal for a few dozen hungry, tired and knackered men when you are behind enemy lines and the supplies have not come through? I’d like to see those tossers on ‘masterchef’ try and cook a soufflé under fire. No, really, I would, never mind the rest of this blog entry, I’d just like to see those pretentious sods shot at.

Of course, when it comes to sourcing fresh produce, nothing helps quite so much as having a heavily armed infantry battalion to call on. If you check the background of those teevee reports from the middle east, there’s always a goat in the background or, as I like to call it, mains.