Far be it for me to ignore one of the most fascinating über-forwards to be seen in a while. It was written by Laurie Garrett, a respected author who is usually more concerned about covering AIDS in Africa. She is none too pleased that this e-mail is now everywhere. The content is verbatim, as far as I know, with some headers containing her personal details removed. All emphasis is mine. It doesn't get interesting until the bullet points begin; skip the first four or five paragraphs and read them afterwards.

Hi Guys.

OK, hard to believe, but true. Yours truely has been hobnobbing with the
ruling class.

I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was
awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the
entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the
head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry
countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important
NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on,
unfettered, class A hobnobbing.

Davos, I discovered, is a breathtakingly beautiful spot, unlike anything
I'd ever experienced. Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, it's a three hours
train ride from Zurich that finds you climbing steadily through
snow-laden mountains that bring to mind Heidi and Audrey Hepburn (as in
the opening scenes of "Charade"). The EXTREMELY powerful arrive by
helicopter. The moderately powerful take the first class train. The NGOs
and we mere mortals reach heaven via coach train or a conference bus.
Once in Europe's bit of heaven conferees are scattered in hotels that
range from B&B to ultra luxury 5-stars, all of which are located along
one of only three streets that bisect the idyllic village of some 13,000
permanent residents.

Local Davos folks are fanatic about skiing, and the slopes are literally
a 5-15 minute bus ride away, depending on which astounding downhill you
care to try. I don't know how, so rather than come home in a full body
cast I merely watched.

This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about
3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss
soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls
of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered
hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national
security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there.
Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special
electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad,
produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along
with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by
soldiers and police every few minutes -- any time one passed through a
door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless
communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got
one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did
frequently. These devices supplied every imagineable piece of
information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates,
Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices --- all
emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.

Antiglobalization folks didn't stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After
all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world
would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class
POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal
detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards,
etc.

Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:

- I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the
foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism -- the
rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200
are dead or in jail.

- But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily
franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been
spawned since 9/11.

- The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but
recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of
the dollar". All of this is without war.

- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a
quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were
all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot
market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with
resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries
whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about
everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and
humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or
ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic
funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

- Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about
a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit
Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry
anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This
year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be
an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich -- whether they are
French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq
crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial
fortunes.

- Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. I
learned a great deal. It goes FAR beyond the sorts of questions one
hears raised by demonstrators and in UN debates. For example:

- If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a
handful of wannabe franchises, what's all the fuss?

- The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a
settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The
energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all
sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise,
the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from
that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan's Queen Rania spoke
of the "desperate search for hope".

- Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime
Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic
world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means
finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places
of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means
freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and
support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there
were also several Middle East respresentatives who argued precisely the
opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the
Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab
Islam.)

- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S.
cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially the Europeans
-- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well. Company
leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US
government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate
change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) -- it's easier
to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And
it's cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory envornments match.
War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.

- For a minority of the participants there was another layer of
AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard
delegates complain that the US "opposes the rights of children", because
we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education
and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as
a "right". Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about
Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with
Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian
fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating.
The rest of the world's elite finds this American Christian behavior at
least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist
behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to
"faith-based" programs. It's different from how it makes non-Christian
Americans feel -- these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.

- When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win
over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came
not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came
from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!

I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is
China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002.
But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth
could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem.
Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is
16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must
urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!

I learned that the US economy is the primary drag on the global economy,
and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive
when the US is stagnating.

The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism,
computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability
dominating almost every discussion.

I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need
to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but
preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a
campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
[What the fuck? Wait 'til the anti-war movement get their mits on
this little gem - Seldo]

The mood was very grim. Almost no parties, little fun. If it hadn't been
for the South Africans -- party animals every one of them -- I'd never
have danced. Thankfully, the South Africans staged a helluva party, with
Jimmy Dludlu's band rocking until 3am and Stellenbosch wines pouring
freely, glass after glass after glass....

These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war,
and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and
it's heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack
would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to
the "second hit" effect -- a second hit that would prove all the world's
post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what
this, or that, war scenario
Would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued that "failed
nations" were spawning terrorists --- code for saying, "we hate
Chechnya". Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the
greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my
conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and
remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and
snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual
attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is
sufficiently
Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel
room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed
circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy
from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates
turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin
hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS.
Vicente Fox -- who I had breakfast with -- proved sexy and smart like a
--- well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a
hug.

The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000
bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who
are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal
power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive --
especially about science and technology. All of them are financially
wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock
investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy
if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for
the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to
nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis
to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They
have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS

pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are
comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white
caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech
gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

Ciao,
Laurie

Oooh, retro futurism at its best.

The Glitter Ball 2003 was a great success, thanks to my friends, who are way cooler than anyone you know. Thanks to Will Abson for the video, although I'm pretty sure he's unaware that he's given it to me as of this posting...

[For those of you in Trinidad who've never met them, and who almost certainly won't be reading this until after Carnival, people in the vid are: initially, Bob, Kim and Moz, left to right, then pan to James, and a final shift to Matt, who is taking the piss, with Danny in the background. I'm so glad this moment was caught on video...]

Some random linkage for you, my all-time favourite random websurfer. First off, from a few days ago, there's this controversy over the Atkins diet. Now, apart from pointing out the obvious flaw in the diet, there's the following little tidbit:

The amount of fat consumed [by Americans] has been steadily climbing, as has consumption of all calories. Individual caloric consumption jumped from 3,300 calories per day in 1970–79 to 3,900 in 1997, an 18 percent increase. Per-person consumption of fat grams increased from 149 to 156, a 4.5 percent increase.

And so, the "mystery" behind America's continuing weight gain (two thirds overweight, nearly one third clinically obese) is solved: hey, dumbasses! You eat too much! Hang back on the supersized tub of lard! Does it worry anyone else that the world is currently dominated by a nation of people who, goldfish-like, are unable to stop nibbling at the food around them even though it's killing them?

More briefly:

A complete waste of time does everything it says on the tin, and well.

The Political Compass is an online test that sorts out your viewpoints on various issues and places you on a graph of political views, next to semi-famous political leaders. My lib-dem status was confirmed by landing me just a few spots to the left of Charles Kennedy (the British one).

Fred Durst claims he had wild sex with Britney. This wouldn't be noteworthy except that he refers to himself as "the limp man". Hurhurhur. I'm twelve years old, I know.

Finally, I finished my Artificial Intelligence essay. Before the deadline! Woot!

Ghastly but funny.

Bringing new meaning to serving web pages on the fly.

And finally, I bring you this report that Kodak has brought out a new camera with an OLED display. OLEDs are Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. This is not amazing news, except that the impending release of these devices was the subject of my first real post to this weblog. Seldo.Weblog's second birthday is March 27th. I will doubtless forget about it entirely :-)

So, USA Today has an article about how Americans travelling abroad at the moment can avoid being hassled about American foreign policy. This includes the following wonderful list of "tips to blend in" and avoid anti-Americanism:

Avoid American fast-food restaurants and chains.

Keep discussions of politics to private places, not rowdy bars.

Take a rain check on wearing clothes featuring American flags or sports team logos.

Keep your passport out of sight.

Keep cameras, video equipment and maps tucked away.

Soften your speech; Americans typically overshadow their hosts in the volume department.

Now, a few things strike me about these tips: firstly, is this stuff really non-obvious? Before this article, were Americans under the impression that going into rowdy bars, talking loudly about bombing Iraq while wearing a stars and stripes t-shirt with a camera slung around their neck and their passport poking out their breast pocket was okay? (Thinking about London in July, this may actually be the case). Maybe if they followed these tips all the time we wouldn't find them so annoying in the first place? And finally, doesn't this advice apply to all sane people, not just americans? Especially the bit about not wearing flag-based clothing: newsflash guys, it was sort of cute on September 12th, but immediately after that it went back to being just bad taste.

Even more interesting from the article is that quote that "a declining number of Americans (54% today vs. 79% a year ago) believes that the USA enjoys a favorable image abroad". What? Some of you still believe the world isn't pissed off with you? Hellooo-ooo! Europe is pissed off with you! The middle east is pissed off with you! All of Asia is pissed off with you for a variety of generally good reasons! That's like 90% of the world population!

But now, the clincher, from Vince Vaughn (I've never heard of him either...):

"Man, it was bad," says the Rat Pack-y star of Swingers. "These girls saw us and were kind of flirting, and they kept asking us if we were American. Finally we said, 'Yes,' and they just took off.

"One girl turns and says, 'We were hoping you were Canadian.' Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?"

"When it comes to our security, we really don't need anybody's permission."
In other news, the UN and NATO both disbanded, citing irrelevance.

Everyone should read the Borowitz Report, even if he is a self-satisfied dickhead.

Everybody else is doing it: 100 short things about me
Finally, a meme that involves the creation of original content instead of just copying a link. I think I kinda blew the "short" requirement though.

1. I'm doing this because I saw other people doing it first. It annoys me that I didn't think of doing it before then. That says lots about me.
2. My full name is Laurie James Voss. I'm fine with James and like Voss, but hate Laurie because it's a girl's name. And I have enough trouble with people mistaking my gender as it is.
3. I use the name Seldo instead. I spend far too much time thinking about my names, and the motivations behind them.
4. There is a web page explaining where I came up with "Seldo". My website also has an unbelievable amount of information about me
5. There's also a page explaining why I don't think this is too vain or egotistical. I spend far too much time thinking about, designing and writing stuff for my website
6. Somewhere out there there's an e-commerce website that gives people order reference numbers the first 3 and last 2 digits of which, when punched into a phone, spell "seldo". This is because I programmed it that way.
7. The "o" at the end of "Seldo" suggests masculinity, if you speak spanish. I can speak spanish to GCSE level, but am out of practice.
8. I'm currently learning to speak french. I love the idea of speaking in other languages, and the subtle ways language warps thought.
9. I am intensely transcontinental.
10. The five adjectives I use too much are intensely, unbelievably, completely, extremely and ridiculously.
11. I have a bad habit of exaggerating my stories to make them sound more interesting. I'm not as bad as I was.
12. I often express opinions or concepts as quoted speech. "What does that mean?" "I think he's giving us an example." "That's clever."
13. I find my quoted-speech habit a useful IQ test -- it confuses slow people. But that's not why I do it.
14. Above all things, I hate being misunderstood. People misunderstand me, all the time. I think it's my fault, but can't fix it.
15. People who have met me, but don't know me, tend to think I'm arrogant.
16. When I am sure of my knowledge on a subject, I'm arrogant as all hell. Sometimes I'm sure, but am still wrong.
17. I am very open to having my opinions changed and my beliefs modified. I'm proud of that.
18. I am an intellectual elitist. I worship and envy people smarter than me, and I am arrogant and condescending to those who aren't.
19. If I have ever insulted you or made you feel slighted, I'm sorry, and it was probably unintentional. If I dislike and/or want to insult someone, I am not subtle about it.
20. I absolutely detest having to hang around with or talk to people I dislike or find boring. I don't do it.
21. I like nearly everyone I have ever met, but some more than others.
22. I am self-centered to the point of being pathological.
23. I am from Trinidad. I am very proud of being Trinidadian.
24. I like being from a small and unimportant country as it gives me free licence to criticise all the big ones.
25. I am an athiest. At my primary school, the religious education period catered for six different religions, including Ba'hai. I have participated in religious ceremonies for every major world religion, and prayed -- sincerely -- to all their gods.
26. My favourite religious holiday when I was a child was Divali, because you got to eat great food and light hundreds of deyas.
27. I am a pyromaniac, as is every male in my family.
28. I have two brothers, who are 6 and 8 years older than me. I appreciate them more and more every day.
29. I once accidentally stepped into a pile of ash that was still hot. My blood flash-boiled. The scar covered half my left foot, but my feet are bigger now.
30. I wear European size 42 shoes. I never have any idea what my size is in US or UK measurements.
31. Once I was at home alone watching TV, and had it so loud I didn't hear my dogs killing a cat in the garden outside. I felt terrible about that for days.
32. The house I grew up in was huge, and had an enormous garden ( 3/4 of an acre ). It had dozens of fruiting and flowering trees, separate cricket and football pitches, and an ornamental garden. I grew up thinking everyone's gardens were small and boring.
33. My childhood was full of fun, adventure and excitement, and I realised it at the time. I'm very lucky.
34. My family and I spent a lot of my childhood weekends in an ancient colonial-era house on a tiny island off the north-west coast.
35. I am extremely surefooted in boats, and love water and the sea especially.
36. My father owns a medium-sized power boat. They are much easier to drive than you'd think.
37. I learned to swim before I can remember. Swimming deep underwater in clear water is like flying.
38. I achieved white sail 1, which basically means I know how to capsize a small sailing boat and hang around waiting for help.
39. When I was learning to sail, I got caught in a freak storm that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. We capsized instantly and waited for help, while our more competent peers stayed up and smashed into other boats at high speed, causing lots of damage.
40. When I look back at my childhood, there were lots of clues that I was gay, and I formed lots of male crushes.
41. I was completely unaware that I was gay until I got Internet access and found porn.
42. I was extremely gay-friendly when I thought I was straight.
43. I used to look forward to being a rich straight white male who could fight for the rights of the poor, gays, non-whites and women without being accused of doing it out of self-interest.
44. I am an ethnic minority. I hate it when people mis-use that term when what they really mean is "non-whites".
45. I abhor racism. I also hate calling african people "black"; their skin is various shades of brown, not black. "African descent" is no good either; in evolutionary terms *everyone* is "of African descent".
46. I think it's insane that people from Pakistan and people from China are both described as "Asian". I think "indian" (little i) and "oriental" describe the two sets of racial characteristics much better.
47. I hate the hypocrisy of people who can tell the difference between a German and an Italian but claim that Chinese, Japanese and Korean people all look the same.
48. I have a really huge forehead, and really big lips. People often take my lips as a sign that I have african blood. I have always wished I was a little bit african, so I could have some credibility.
49. By standard measures I am 1/4 German and 3/4 English. I am however 100% Trinidadian.
50. Secondary school was the low-point of my life, and I hate my school for doing that to me.
51. I am very seldom hungry, because I snack all the time. I was gratified when I found out this was healthier than eating big meals.
52. I once skipped 3 days' worth of meals and didn't notice until my body became weak from malnutrition.
53. I don't like eating for the sake of eating. I consider it a boring refuelling exercise, and wish I could pop an anti-hunger pill once a day and never have to eat again.
54. I resent the time that eating and preparing food takes out of my life.
55. Today, I have eaten half a bowl of cereal, a chocolate bar and a packet of wine gums. My stomach is growling. I am ignoring it.
56. I have a terrible sweet tooth. I have dozens of fillings and my teeth are a mess, generally.
57. I intend to be rich enough to afford dental surgery to fix these problems.
58. I always eat the separate portions of my meal separately (all the meat, all the potato, all the greens...) in the order of my preference for them.
59. I almost never completely finish a meal which has been served to me by someone else, because the portions are always too big.
60. I have very slight myopia (+1.25) but I hate it. I used to think television was unnaturally detailed until I got glasses and realised people were seeing the world in much higher resolution than I was.
61. I never watch TV anymore. I dislike having to arrange my schedule around TV times. I download TV shows and watch them when I want.
62. I read nothing but science fiction. There's a page about that on my website, too.
63. I don't drink alcohol, ever. My reasons for doing so are varied and unclear, but boil down to it being bad for me, in a number of ways.
64. When I was 8, I had a series of fairly intense homosexual experimentations with a friend. We called it "pretending to be a man and a woman", with no further explanation.
65. We alternated sexes, strictly. And we were wearing speedos. We had no idea what we were doing.
66. We have never discussed it since; he is apparently straight now. And I have never mentioned it to anybody before now. I only remembered it a couple of years ago.
67. I love computers, programming, writing and graphical design, but don't consider myself particularly good at any those things.
68. I grew up alone, but not lonely, with few friends my own age. I was frequently alone in the house for long stretches, and I did an enormous amount of reading during that time.
69. I love solitude. Few things make me happier than being completely alone, with nothing to do, in an empty building, knowing that nobody is going to show up, or call and disturb me. It gives me time to be.
70. I only ever had two or three good friends at a time, until I was about 16.
71. People tell me I make friends easily, but I don't understand how I do it, or why other people can't. I just try to be friendly.
72. In primary school an ugly girl called Sonya had a crush on me and would chase me around the school trying to kiss me. Annoyed, I retaliated by inventing "Sonya germs". This got totally out of hand, alienating her from the entire student body and making her miserable. Sorry about that. She grew up to be tall, slim and beautiful.
73. I can't believe how long this is, how long it's taken, or how much you can learn about someone in 81 bullet points.
74. I have a surprisingly large number of visible bodily scars. I once fell from a height and bit through my tongue, which had to be sewed back together.
75. I can go cross-eyed, and move my eyes independently of each other in a variety of other ways. This was my neat trick in primary school.
76. Boxers. And I don't care what you wear. Uncut. Likewise.
77. I have extremely good memory for song lyrics, and almost nothing else. I memorise important things by setting them to music.
78. I enjoy dancing a great deal more than I enjoy sex. I'm not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing.
79. I occasionally have heterosexual dreams and impulses, and am just as unbalanced by them now as I was by gay feelings when I thought I was straight. I'd like to try straight sex, at least once. Just in case.
80. I worry that if I came "in" as bisexual, none of my gay friends would understand. And I do not relish explaining it to my family, either, because my parents will say "I told you it was a phase".
81. I almost didn't include that last point.
82. It is not a phase. It is not a choice. It is not a lifestyle. There is no community. There is no right way. I can't tell you how to do it.
83. I'm no expert, but I think both the pleasures and problems of anal sex are greatly overrated.
84. I am a terrible procrastinator. I did this instead of working on my project.
85. I think the X-men are all pretty sexy, especially Nightcrawler. I have fantasies involving his prehensile tail. There are stories on the web written by people who share this opinion. Go read them.
86. My favourite colour is sky blue, and I love blue hair. See: nightcrawler fixation.
87. My wardrobe: 4 belts, 12 pairs of trousers, more than 70 tops, 6 jackets, 35+ misc white t-shirts, 14 pairs of boxers, over 40 necklaces and 8 bracelets. I have complex rules that ensure that I take 5 minutes to get dressed and seldom have trouble deciding what to wear.
88. I consider the Internet to be one of the major influences on the course of my life, having so far been a determining factor in my place of education, my career, a great deal of my social life and my sexuality. I love the Internet and everything it makes possible, even the illegal stuff, because freedom is more important than morality.
89. I have never had a Trinidadian accent, and I cannot even imitate one accurately. A teacher once accused me of deliberately attempting to sound British as an arrogant posture. My accent is a mixture of my mother's English-Trinidadian, my father's Trinidadian-English-German-Barbadian, and television's American. So no wonder nobody can work out where I come from.
90. My sense of humour comes from the books I read and stand-up comedy. If you read Terry Pratchett, watch Monty Python and listen to Eddie Izzard, you will recognize 90% of my jokes.
91. I often cannot draw a clear distinction in my memory between chatting to people in real life and online, because when I chat to people online I am picturing them in front of me.
92. My mind is extremely visual; I cannot solve problems until I can visualize them. I am almost incapable of solving problems involving more than three dimensions.
93. My spine is curved laterally (front to back). This makes my belly and butt stick out prominently, gives me an odd stance and makes me walk funny. I constantly try to hide all of these things. On the plus side, it makes it possible to do dance moves that a straight back can't do.
94. He must be smart, sexy, we must have interests in common. Sexy can be almost anything, but being overweight, having bad skin, and any kind of drug addiction (nicotine counts) are all big negatives.
95. I was a caesarean section, which gives my strict darwinist (bordering on eugenic) principles some difficulty. But then I'm gay, so it's not like I would breed anyway.
96. I would like to have kids some day. I will adopt, but I'd like some of my own genes around as well.
97. I love to visualize (non-sexual) fantasies, especially to music. I frequently come up with videos for songs that I'm listening to.
98. I usually dance in time to the lyrics, not to the beat. I have an informal "library" of dance moves that correspond to certain words or phrases. I will usually dance pretty much in the same way to a song every time.
99. I frequently fantasize about having super-abilities, especially teleportation. See: nightcrawler fixation.
100. I ran out of space before I ran out of things to say.

3.5 hours in hair salon getting blue hair: £50
Blue lipstick, mascara, eyeshadow, eyeliner: £9.35
Blue meta8 official dancer's t-shirt, ticket and backstage pass: free
( Time spent not working on project: not yet determined )

Huge props to Steve and the gang (inc. Giles), as well as Rik for the orgasmically good set. A totally selfish thank-you to TSG for clearing the stage for half an hour around 11 to give us dancers a little extra time to strut, even if it did piss off absolutely everyone. And finally a big, special thank-you to whoever thought of the idea of an 8-foot podium. I love you. I want to bear your children.

Update 10.33pm Some pictures now available, courtesy PinkPieShop. The blue streaky shots are me waving glowsticks around, apparently.

The sweetest, sickest, most disturbing thing I have read in a while: the Gashlycrumb Tinies. God bless those twisted, twisted victorians.

An insightful and worrying article about the new McCarthyism talks about America's growing habit of self-censorship in the name of patriotism, and the backlash faced by celebrities who attempt to speak out to compensate for the void of coverage anti-war protests have been getting. It claims that Americans have a reverence for their President, and that in times of war it just simply is not done to question the motives of the oval office. Is this true? What is the real explanation for America's enthusiasm for this war, given their more usual lack of enthusiasm for sending their troops out to be killed in foreign lands?

More and more -- especially if Blix's new drone turns out to be real -- I believe that yes, we should probably attack Iraq and get rid of Saddam and his weapons. I wish we could sort out North Korea first, but dealing with Saddam before he has nukes is a lot easier than dealing with North Korea after it already has them. I worry about how Iraq will rule itself after the war, and whether the people of Iraq will really welcome democracy, or if we are just imposing an external culture on them. I think it's ridiculous to suggest that Iraq poses a threat to America or even Europe now, any more than Hitler posed a threat to America just before invading Poland. But Saddam clearly would attack both Europe and the US if he thought he would win, so it's in everyone's interests to make sure he doesn't invade his Poland. And we will incidentally stop a whole lot of Poles getting clobbered, which is all to the good.

And yes, I don't think these reasons are the same ones the Bush administration has for attacking Iraq: I think this war is all about oil for them, and that disgusts me, but doing the right thing for the wrong reason is fine by me; when they take control of the oilfields and start shipping it tax-free to Texas, I'll start complaining again. And again yes, we will end up killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocents to prevent a harm which is not yet inevitable. But if you could have killed a hundred thousand people to stop the holocaust, would you have done it? In world war 2, we waited until the threat was obvious. That turned out to be a bad idea. This time, let's try it the other way around.

Since he's very kindly gone and plugged Gay Geeks.org, I feel compelled to point out Moz's new site, Meaningless Artichoke, which I'm sure you'll agree is one of the better names for a website, even if it is rather agressively magenta at the moment.

Meanwhile, in a move that echoes the renaming of sauerkraut to liberty cabbage during World War 2, french toast and french fries are now to be known as freedom toast and freedom fries in the House of Congress. But hey, at least they haven't actually declared war on France yet, right?

And now, your quote of the day (thanks to Evil Dan).

There is a drug that stops HIV completely. Really. It prevents the HIV virus getting into white blood cells. HIV levels in people taking the drug drop below detectable levels. The catch? It costs US$20,000 annually -- it costs several hundred dollars per gram to produce, far less recouping the approximately $600m that it cost to develop and test the drug.

I recently got a Very Clever™ friend of mine who works with networks to answer this question for me, and I thought since it was a very good explanation that I might as well post it here, so other people can find it, and gosh, maybe in some small way I'll actually have increased the information content of the Web. This text is an edited copy of a chat log.

Firstly, "passive mode" is actually an FTP term really. One of the features of FTP is the fact that there are different ports used for control and data by default. This is so that clever things can be done. It is, for example, possible to use an ftp client to connect to a server and tell that server to transfer something from another server. When stateful firewalls were introduced - the kind that record outgoing sessions and allow the response traffic to come back in without needing rules to deal with it in both directions - they didn't start off terribly smart. These days, firewalls can look at the commands going over the FTP control port and open up, dynamically, the incoming data ports that the server wants to use when it talks back to the client.

Then NAT arrived. This hosed things slightly, but only for a short while. The problem with NAT was that even if the firewall/NAT device inspected the control port and opened up the ports, if the machine had a private IP address then the server at the other end wouldn't be able to connect back into it. Again, as a problem, this was eventually solved - using dynamic reverse-mapping and translation of ports on the public address range back to private addresses. However, this was all a bit of a shag basically. And for what most people wanted to do with FTP (download or upload files) there was a simple solution. The simply solution is to have the client initiate all of the connections to the server. This meant that firewalls that were stateful coped, because the client inside the firewall had opened the connection. If NAT was en-route, again it didn't matter - the session was open from the inside. This is what "passive mode" is.

The downside with this of course, is that you can't have the three way dialog (in which the client tells server to talk to another server). Now, what no-one ever ran into with FTP was a situation such as the one which can arise with peer to peer filesharing applications. If you are running an FTP server, then it needs to have some form of public address - if it is behind a NAT firewall, then it needs a bunch of ports mapping to a public address anyway. With Peer to Peer though, you can have a situation where people can be behind a firewall and not have a public address or have the control over the port mapping. The way that searches tend to work - taking gnutella as an example - is that the client sends the query to a set of peers it has connections to. Those peers then forward the query on to all their peers. And so on. This goes on until the TTL on the query expires, at which point somewhere along the way the query stops being forwarded.

The problem is that there are no sessions beyond the first-hop peers, so there's no way to get back to the first machine. The original client hasn't actually established connections to probably 95% of the other machines. Those queries have flowed along existing TCP connections which were already open. So, let's say our search succeeds. We have a rare file we want to download. Problem is that the file is only on one machine, and that machine is behind a NAT firewall with no static port mapping. If we have a public IP address, no problem, because that machine can find us: we send a message -- along the same route we used to send the query, the web of machines -- to tell that machine to connect to us and 'push' the file to us. When passive mode works, that's what happens.

But, if we are also behind a NAT firewall, we have a problem. The only way we can get traffic between the two machines is over the web of peers. Neither of us can make that initial connection to deal with the NAT/firewall issue. And it would be terribly inefficient to use P2P bandwidth for anything other than queries, since that traffic would be flowing over all sort of links like dial-ups. So although the two machines can talk to each other, they can't start the efficient, direct connection they need to transfer files.