Chances are, if you’re reading, well, any mainstream media anywhere in the world, you won’t have heard about Stephen Colbert’s half-hour monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, in which he systematically lambasted, lampooned and destroyed both the US President and the fawning media circus that surrounds him. The man is a legend; he said this, stood not 10ft away from Bush:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

And he said this, in front of the assembled news media of America:

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

Daily Kos has a full transcript as well as links to the full video (also available on YouTube).

And whilst you’re at it, don’t forget to thank Stephen for his efforts.

So, on Saturday I got tricked into evangelism.

Okay, that’s not quite true. But basically a “gig in Stockport” turned into “an open air gig in Stockport” and thence into “an open air envangelistic event in the centre of Stockport, complete with visiting guest evangelists imploring passers by to repent of their sins and follow Jesus and all that”. We got things thrown at us, and I spent quite a lot of time sort of staring at my feet. We had to carry all our gear – including the PA that we’d had to bring with us – down several flights of stairs through a shopping centre. And then afterwards, only one of the ten or twenty organisers/helpers helped us to derig and carry the stuff back to our cars; I put my back out carrying some heavy gear and spent most of Sunday in agony. I’m sure they all meant well, but I left the whole thing with a rather bitter taste in my mouth – that said, we did sound great and when we weren’t bashing people over the head with the Bible, we had a decent size of audience, and we did get paid (a nominal sum) so it’s not all bad.

So, Sunday was kind of a writeoff in terms of doing anything, but it did mean I got to spend the afternoon setting up a second character in WoW. If you see FightyDude the Human Warrior running around on Bloodhoof, say hi and give him any spare leather you might have – he’s basically just there to harvest for my main character 🙂

And then today was the first windsurfing day of the year – having bored Naomi to tears on saturday evening looking at weather forecasts and banging on about things like occluded fronts and the beaufort scale, I established that being on the water at about 12pm today was going to be a good thing – and indeed it was. Nice, high and fairly consistent force 4 winds; the odd white horse – great planing conditions for a 6m sail. Of course, I’m not used to having these sort of conditions so spent a good deal of the time in the water, but whilst I was blasting up and down it was great fun; I only came in when the wind died and I could no longer feel my fingers (hey, it’s not that warm yet…)

So, what did you do?

I am crying into my Mario-shaped pillows right now.

And worse, I’m still going to buy one. Although I might have to order it online because I don’t know if I can face going into a shop and asking for a “Wii”.

Edit

This news has only been public for, like 4 hours or so, 3 of which I spent in the pub, and I’m already completely fscking sick of all the retarded “OMGLOLZ0R!!!111 IT IS LIKE WEE LIKE OUT OF UR N0B!!!!11111eleven” jokes. STOP IT. NOW. If this goes on for the next five years I’m actually going to kill someone. Seriously.

Or at least, so Israel claim. And Israel have absolutely no reason to exaggerate the threat from Iran, so I’m sure this is totally unbiased and reliable information. Yes.

Not only did I get a nice personal email from Brent Lee hisself when I asked if they could ship the CDs to the UK, but when it turned up today I even got a nice personalised thank you card with it. It’s now taking pride of place on my desk atop a big pile of documents and coffee shop loyalty cards.

Your search returned no documents.

gcc just kicked out this code:

 804877f:       83 c4 10                add    $0x10,%esp
 8048782:       83 ec 08                sub    $0x8,%esp

Brilliant.

Hmm.

Do you think they… know?