Lovely engine - where's your petrol?

How Ringtastic is this?

I am probably one of the most pro-Israel people I know. So when even I think Ariel Sharon is acting the tw@t, it's really not good. Last night's Channel 4 news had a former Israeli ambassador to France on, playing the Holocaust card for all it was worth - I believe he said there were "echoes of the 1930s". Well, possibly, but only if you also accept the press of every sorry-ass disco house night which claims to 'recapture the atmosphere of Studio 54'. These are the sort of resonances Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd are allowed to play with, but politicians and PRs are not.
Then I look at the blatant unfitness to rule of the Palestinian Authority and remember a key lesson the anti-Americans et al never seemed to grasp in the run-up to war: just because one side are w@nkers, doesn't preclude their opponents being worse.

At the Quad last night, I am foiled in my usual policy of nipping upstairs for cool, crisp, cheap pints of cider because there's a building site where the other bar should be, so instead I plump for a vodders and orange and grab a seat where, when Coco Electrik come on, I need only close my book to have a perfect view. They're one of those infuriating bands who are very nearly very good. They just need something else, perhaps an extra member who'll make all the songs sound less like each other in some way. The Soho Dolls have a similar problem, but the convergence of a large bass guitar and the Bosom Fairy's handiwork mean I'm entertained nonetheless. And Client, for whom I'm really here...I liked the first album. Didn't love it, but liked it. Tonight there's little from that album. The new stuff is many things I'd normally like - relentless, noli me tangere, slightly inhuman - but tonight I find myself thinking these are criticisms. Perhaps it's just that with singer Sarah's past in the eminently human (and inexplicably named) Dubstar, I can't quite acclimatise to seeing her as an electro diva.

(no subject)

On the way back from a lunch at which we resisted the lure of cool, crisp pints through our astounding willpower, angelv and I saw a white van man whose van proclaimed his name to be WARD.

I bet that politically, he's actually to the left of jamesward.