The Yay/Feh View of Today's News

After 30 years of bloodshed, the IRA are formally ending its campaign of violence in favour of democratic and peaceful means to achieve their objective.

The optimist in me says, "Yay! Rationality prevails!"

The skeptic in me says, "Feh. Even the IRA realise they have become irrelevant."

After all, what have they done lately? Robbed a bank, bashed some guy in a pub... Yeah, real nation-building stuff. Deeds to tell the grandkiddies about. They want to be treated like responsible adults capable of running their own country, then they have to start behaving like statesmen, not thugs. A noble cause can only be properly served by noble means.

Bombing civilians, for example, is by no stretch of anyone's dogma a noble means.

First the British Muslim clerics pulled their fingers out and issued a fatwa against suicide bombings. Now the North Americans have jumped onboard. Yay!

But why haven't we heard from the Middle East, or Pakistan, or Indonesia, on any of the other major Muslim nations on this issue? Hello? Feh.

Maybe they'd like to, but their channels are being flooded by the US Government. Telesur is a new pan-Latin-American TV channel being broadcast from Venezuela that seeks to promote South American intergration and basically tell the news from a South American perspective. The US Government has taken this is a direct threat to its dominance of South American airwaves, and claiming anti-US bias, the US House of Representatives has voted to allow the US administration to broadcast its own TV signals to Venezuela to counter Telesur's broadcasts. Big Feh!

I thought it was difficult enough getting local content on Access 31 here in Perth, but imagine having a foreign power putting their shows on your televsion set... um. Never mind.

In Big Yay news, the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest has been announced:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
-- Dan McKay, Fargo, ND