Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show, Sunday evening; the old fellow's looking very frail, but still managed to entertain with his comments. I can't think what Melvyn Bragg was up to, defending christianity and showing resentment at Vidal's remarks about all the evil christians have perpetrated throughout history.Was he playing devil's advocate or has he found God, the christian version of course?
Something Vidal said surprised me - only three American writers came out in opposition to the Iraq war; Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and himself, "the three old men". Of the three only Vidal is left standing. What a sorry state of affairs. Has the whole of the USA's community of letters moved to the far right? Or have the neo-cons created such a climate of fear that only those with nothing to lose dare express dissent?

I watched "Fergie and ITV do Hull" last night. That was an hour wasted. One hour (minus ads) of self-promotion trying, and failing, to pass itself off as altruism. "I live to give" says she. Well it's full marks for chutzpah, but fail in every other category.
It seems that local people are already up in arms about this representation of the town and its denizens. I'm all for it if it puts off the chancers, carpet-baggers, developers, and all those looking for a business opportunity.

A quote from "Technology Guardian" of Thusday May 8 (I will catch up), "... a senior policeman said that only 3% of street robberies are solved using CCTV". Still the cops have a nice little earner flogging the footage to the makers of crappy television programmes, so the cameras are here to stay.
Then there are the more sinister purposes, but most people are not too concerned. Today Big Brother is just another piece of piss-poor television which could just as well be entitled "Voyeurism for All". The name no longer connotes the menace of such surveillance methods when they were presented to us as the monopoly of the Soviet "Evil Empire". Strange how totalitarian surveillance became respectable after the Soviet system collapsed. Just as we found we could no longer afford a welfare system as soon as the self-styled "socialist" state disappeared; the same welfare system that began to come into existence following the Russian Revolution with it's Marxist and collectivist rhetoric.
Another quote from the same article (I love this):
"If you keep within the law, and the government keeps within the law, and its employees keep within the law, and the computer holding the database doesn't screw up, and the system is carefully designed according to well-understood software engineering principles and maintained properly, and the government doesn't scrimp on the outlay and all the data are entered carefully and the police are adequately trained to use the system and the system isn't hacked into, and your identity isn't stolen, and the local hardware functions, well, you have nothing to fear."
That's from Nigel Shadbolt, author, with Kieron O'Hara, of "The Spy in the Coffee Machine: the End of Privacy As We Know It".
So bring on the ID cards and the National Database.