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All too often it was the day where I would be the person who didn’t receive a card and had to make jokes about sending cards to myself.

Which I never did, by the way.

I only ever sent one, in 1996, and I’ve received all of two valentine’s cards in my life. And one of them was a joke, I think.

But what are you supposed to DO, or BUY – I mean, MSN advises you that a nice champagne for under £40 combined with a Will Young CD will do the job, but frankly I’m not sure that’s what I’m after. Think a Will Young CD might just be insulting.

At the end of the day it’s just something else to worry about, isn’t it? Like Mother’s day. How to make your Mother love you more even when it’s no longer convenient to pop down to a newsagents and buy one of the two remaining Telegraphs.

I wish I was like Tony Blair and had other people to deal with it for me.

I’m a bit pissed, by the way, and it’s only 14.33.

Any ideas, though………

Just to prove that, despite anything I may have written or said recently, I can still take an anti-BBC view at times, have a quick look at this report on the MyDoom virus. It’s a paragon – of bad writing and slopping reporting.

Firstly, the bad writing. This is actually something that plagues BBCi: the inability of its journalists to manage paragraphs longer than a single sentence. From Elements of Style, the 1918 classic on how to write English, we learn that “as a rule, single sentences should not be written or printed as paragraphs”. Paragraphs give individual topics, and if a topic is so small it only warrants a single sentence, it really should be married to something related to make a larger topic. There’s worse, but it’s minor by comparison to the other issue.

There are two stories here: SCO vs Linux (SCO claims copyright on some parts of Linux; many people, including IBM, disagree, and SCO is busily suing various parties to make its point), and the MyDoom virus. MyDoom has infected hundreds of thousands of Windows computers recently, and was designed to attack the websites of both Microsoft and SCO. Microsoft has been unaffected (partly due to their own security measures, but mostly because the version of MyDoom set to attack them didn’t spread as widely). SCO’s website is unavailable at its normal address at present, and the company is running a website at a different address.

All well and good. The BBC article blurs these two stories together, not bothering to mention Microsoft at all, and making it sound like not only are the two stories inextricably intertwined , but also making Linux supporters out to also be supporters of creating a virus that has caused some amount of havoc, a fair amount of panic, and some financial loss. The article says “there seems little doubt that SCO was targeted because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system” which, while strictly true, gives the impression that it’s those “many people” who have created MyDoom, not (as is more likely) some loner who doesn’t get on well with other people. By stating “if anyone’s anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots”, the association is made, plain and clear. That’s getting pretty close to defamation, and if I were, say, Alan Cox – Linux advocate, British citizen, and generally honest and nice chap – I’d probably be writing to Mark Byfod right now asking what the hell they think they’re doing.

And who is stupid enough, in this day and age, to fling around phrases like “it’s hard to see how any website could withstand that kind of clever evil” when talking about a computer nerd? Evil? Has he been talking to Donald Rumsfeld again?

Oh, enough. My rant has died down. Have a good afternoon.

There is no news today. No news. I got to page 27 of Metro between King’s Cross and Baker Street – I usually get to page 7. If I’m lucky. Page 27! That’s deep into the lifestyle fluff!

The only interesting bit was on page 9, where they remember a 22,000 mile taxi journey taken by, among others, Mark Aylett. But maybe it’s just interesting to me.

Aylett watches Lark
Whilst eating calamari
Squid feeds off coral

Don’t want to write much, but I enjoyed it, so congratulations to all involved. I doubt I’ll have another opportunity to watch James chatting up Dave Gorman, so hooray for that.

Walking down the street today, hailed by someone looking vaguely familiar, so I walked over. “Is there a special women in your life?” she asked. “Does she like being pampered?” So I walked away again.

It’s not that I don’t have a special woman in my life, or even that she doesn’t like being pampered. It’s the sheer brazen cheek of assuming that I’ll trust a random (albeit vaguely familiar) stranger to help me pamper her.

People collecting for charity on the street, that I can cope with. But people trying to flog you something, especially something that really you should be doing yourself (pamper, vt: to indulge to excess) is just rude. If I ever descend to that level, please, just shoot me.

When I was younger, I was a member of a debating society. The format allowed for junior members to get some experience and test their mettle by doing somewhat throwaway debates before our seniors and betters arrived for the main event. My first such was “This House Likes Bambi”, or words to that effect; I was speaking against.

The first speaker for the motion stepped up and delivered a very credible speech, amusingly comparing the up-and-coming Tony Blair with his woodland nicknamesake, and generally providing some smug popular fluff with very little content – which was what these debates were for, so I can’t fault him on that. Then it was my turn.

“Ladies and gentlemen”, I confessed, “I only just found out that this debate is about Tony Blair. My speech is useless.” At which point I ripped it up, a very dramatic gesture that made me appear completely in control. And then I panicked. I knew who Blair was, but I didn’t know anything about him; he had only recently become leader of Labour (in a non-thrilling leadership contest I had missed, incidentally, because I was too busy worrying about my A-level results), and in any case Labour hadn’t been important in Britain for almost as long as I’d been alive. I remember concern at school when John Smith died, because some people thought he was the Bishop of Salisbury – the point is that I didn’t have any useful facts about Blair whatsoever. If only I’d read a paper that morning, I might have been able to discourse wittily for five minutes or so and survive unscathed. Instead, I went to pieces, trying to crowbar in phrases from my planned speech, descending to personal attacks, and finally rambling into incoherence. I sat back down in humiliation.

Something similar happened in the House of Commons on Wednesday, after the publication of the Hutton Report. Say what you like about Tony Blair (and I will: he was boring, pompous and arrogantly played to the media and the country for ages when he should have graciously accepted his complete exoneration, and then shut up), the speeches immediately after Lord Hutton’s findings made Michael Howard the loser. Left speaking at a debate whose shape he apparently wasn’t anticipating, he made the expected prepared noise of thanking people he’d rather not thank, before trying desperately to find something to attack Blair over. True, there were one or two – relatively minor – issues he could drone on about, but this hardly seems proper behaviour from someone trying to champion positive rather than negative politics – to say nothing of being insufficiently dignified, robust or moral for such a serious issue. In Labour MP Ann Taylor’s words, he wriggled.

He lashed out at Blair, at Hoon, and at Alastair Campbell, and might have gone further if he hadn’t sputtered out of steam in the face of rising dissent from the floor of the house, and the look of wide-eyed, gaping-mouthed incredulity from the Prime Minister.

After my own disastrous performance, it fell to my debating partner to try to salvage our side of the argument. As it happened, he hadn’t read up on Bambi-Blair either, so he was reduced to apologising for my behaviour, hoping that people might vote against the motion in sympathy. Perhaps I was ill, or fundamentally stupid? Surely I hadn’t just failed to prepare properly for this debate? As it happened, neither of our performances made any real difference to the vote – the debate was not well-attended, and those that were there had opinions on Blair that weren’t going to be changed, no matter what we did. I doubt anyone else remembers it now.

Michael Howard wasn’t so lucky. No one stood up to take his side, no one supported him, and a good number of people attacked him, both directly and indirectly. No chance to walk away from this debating chamber; in a few short, interminable, minutes, Michael Howard threw away his mask of political sanity and revealed an ugly visage of malice and pride. “That is what he says” as Labour MPs fantasised about smothering him. “That is what he says” as if a few short passages of mild criticism could bring down the Government. Like a bad comedian begging the audience when his jokes aren’t as funny as he thinks they are: “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” “That is what he says.”

When an encounter with Tony Blair torpedoed my debating career, I turned away and found something else to do with my life. Somehow I doubt Michael Howard will have the grace to do the same.

As I was cycling into work this morning along a dangerously ice-encrusted cycle path, I observed coming in the opposite direction a gnarled old man wearing a filthy coat and hat and struggling along the same cycle path on a wobbly bicycle from the 1850s. On the same side of the road as me.

i.e. From his point of view, the wrong side of the road.

As this rather disturbing Ealing-comedy-inspired character neared me, he clambered down from his machine and proceeded to push it past me, muttering with a distinctly Scottish accent, “Stupid fucking lunatic”.

I have a feeling that at least one of us was confused.

I was bored of news stories about the BBC by midday. By late afternoon I was bored of the BBC itself. At this rate I’ll be bored of all media outlets by breakfast tomorrow, and of the whole of existence by sometime Saturday.

Yes, the BBC did some bad things. Smack wrist, go to bed early, the Government will dock some pocket money. Auntie will get a new nanny soon, and it’ll all be better.

There are more important news stories out there. International stories of horror and mystery. Local stories of … well, ice, mostly. Apparently a battleship somewhere is now captained by a woman. If I see Greg Dyke’s face once more I’ll arrange a pile-up between it, Alastair Campbell, and a steam iron.

Today I spent some time stuck in a lift. This is honestly something that I thought didn’t actually happen outside contrived narratives (where either a personal relationship difficulty is resolved, such as the two aliens who want to kill each other in Babylon 5; or everyone has sex). And yet there we were, five of us stuck in a lift in a refurbished jam factory.

Of course, everyone there was very nice, but next time I’m going to be stuck in a small lift with that number of people, I’d probably go for all the others being models, or a girl band or something. And it being a contrived narrative of the second sort, of course.