Respite in murder and the mafia

I’m feeling really fucking angry about this whole war thing at the moment, and I don’t like that. Angry doesn’t suit me. And with an absence of senior British and American policy-makers in the room, there’s not a great deal I can do to vent my rage right now. So rather than spending an hour or two keeping up with interesting/depressing current affairs articles online (and raising by blood pressure in the process — don’t want to take the express service to Strokeville like my mum), I decided to have a war-free evening (well, I couldn’t resist checking out the result of the vote in the Commons). Endulged myself in some back-to-back quality telly: Boomtown (which no-one else seems to have discovered… sort of well-done US cop show with a twist — the same story told from 5 or 6 viewpoints: uniformed cop, detective, victim, paramedic etc), the Sopranos (series 4) and NYPD Blue. It’s certainly good to know that if I ever become a fat, sweaty, bigoted, balding wearer of short-sleeved shirts like Sipowicz (the super Denis Franz — whose best role ever was playing Homer Simpson — here’s a good link if you want to stalk Dennis Franz), I’ll still be able to bed some rather gorgeous-looking women. (I realise that assumes (a) I’m not already fat, sweaty and bigoted, and (b) I currently bed gorgeous-looking women…) Darn this Interweb contraption! Just had a look at an NYPD Blue site to see which series is currently showing on Channel 4 (it’s number 8, two behind the US) and discovered that one of the major characters is soon to be murdered, and that two other regulars are also written out. Bugger.

Anyway, after successfully avoiding the war for three hours, I thought I’d have a quick Iraq-free browse of the web. Visited Loobylu for the first time in a while, and saw that Claire’s given it a bit of a makeover (still the nicest looking blog on the web). Then the geek in me kicked in, and I popped over to Search Engine Blog, a site all about search engine marketing and optimisation — mind-numbingly boring to 99.99999999999% of people, but actually rather useful and interesting. And certainly about as far removed from any attack on Iraq stuff and politics as you can get. Or so I thought. But in fact, the latest entry on the site reads:

It’s interesting to note that Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator with curious hygiene habits, has shown himself to be a rather adept strategist and diplomat. Bush, on the other hand, has succeeded in alienating many long-term U.S. allies, forged a massive rift in the UN alliance, and appears to have set the U.S. on the path of self-isolationism.

God, there really is no getting away from the war, is there? Well, strictly speaking, for me there is — I can just turn off the computer, TV and radio. Sadly for a lot of people in the middle-East right now, escaping the war is going to be much harder.

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