The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialled into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 0000000.

Well, I certainly feel safer. It reminds me a little of the probably apocryphal story that, during the Nixon administration, the SAC had a standing order to ignore any requests to launch missiles if they came from The Oval Office after 6:30pm, as Nixon liked to get drunk and plunge us all into ash.

Sleep tight.

Chandler: Neat. I'm gonna die alone.

Rachel: Ok, you win.

Monica: Chandler, you're not gonna die alone.

Chandler: Janice was my safety net, ok? And now I have to get a snake.

Phoebe: Uh huh. Why is that?

Chandler: If I'm gonna be an old, lonely man, I'm gonna need a thing, you know, a hook, like that guy on the subway who eats his own face. So I figure I'll be Crazy Man with a Snake, y’know. Crazy Snake Man. And I'll get more snakes, call them my babies, kids will walk past my place, they will run. "Run away from Crazy Snake Man," they'll shout!

"After tea?"

Bitmap fonts!

iTunes Europe next month?

Can you countersign a UK passport? (Section 10)

A map of Springfield. Hurrah for people with a little too much time on their hands!

They also have the dubious distinction of being the first band I saw live at Manchester. Long queues and people dressed in army surplus jackets outside the Academy. They looked so cool and scary to a person who had only been in Manchester for a few weeks and hadn't managed to find anybody who wanted to go with him to a concert. This was a long-running story in Manchester — I went to a lot of concerts, but had problems finding people with similar tastes. There was one concert in the first year that I could have gone with someone, but the band got rather popular in the week between me finding this out and actually going to the ticket office. I then spent another week kicking myself in the head, but I learnt my lesson and, after that, I got to the ticket office well in advance of a concert (I was secretly proud when, for my final Manchester concert, seeing Black Box Recorder, I got ticket 00001. However, the concert was only two weeks away, and I was a little worried that I'd be the only one turning up).

Anyway, Mansun. Still hate Taxloss with a burning passion. But this, this is good:

Mansun — Mansun's Only Love Song

Normal service will resume shortly.

(Although, I don't believe for a second that these bills will pass, as it would almost guarantee Bush's defeat in November…)

Yeah, well, some people think that the position of President shouldn't be decided by a few activist judges either…

Oh, and if you're using a fancy newsreader to read this, you can subscribe to the photolog's individual feed (RSS 2.0 at the moment).

I would promise less boring stuff tomorrow, but I'm heading off to London for the STAND meeting, so there's a good chance tomorrow will be full of talk of identity cards. You might get some new pictures, though.

Hmm. Have a song as recompense for making it this far (contains Wilco).

(do you like my new photolog thingy?)

No, really, it isn't.

Scala On The Rocks — Creep

Because every song sounds better when it's covered by choir-girls, especially when it has swearing for juvenile giggles. Although you do run the risk of ending up with a song that sounds like St. Winifred's School Choir singing "Grandma" (for all Americans - it's exactly as sickly-sweet as it sounds). However, this cover manages to sound rather menacing in parts, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Roy Vedas — Fragments of Life (Latin Version)

Ah, the vocoder. Who knew that one day it would breathe new life into Cher's career? We can thank Homer Dudley for that, although it also helped to encrypt phone calls between FDR and Churchill during WWII, so I suppose "Believe" was an acceptable sacrifice for the defeat of Nazi Germany. Mostly. Anyway, from 1998! The world of yesteryear and the world of tomorrow combine to create a sonic masterpiece that troubled the chart for all of one week!

Next week! Obscure tracks from an album that never existed, trapped in a world it never made!

But technology is never wrong!

Music Globalisation? (it's not an article I agree with, but it is thought-provoking)

London's hidden Underground

NOOOOO! NOT GEORGE! *sob*

More comics should have cigar-smoking dolphins…

The Spinners — I'll Be Around

Formed as a reaction to being refused entry to Studio 54, the shadowy CHIC Organisation was a constant thorn in the side of people who hate fun. Groups that were funded by these members of the New Order include Sister Sledge (sadly, not a real nun), Sheila and B. Devotion, ABC, Madonna, David Bowie, and The Power Station. They remain sorry about The Power Station. CHIC currently resides in the fifth sub-basement of the MI6 building in London, waiting for the day that London is attacked and the building transforms into London's final line of defence; a 200-foot-high killer concrete robot.

Chic — What About Me?

Incidentally, does anybody else feel uneasy about the choice of song for Euro 2004? I appreciate the sentiment, I suppose; it's about a period when two opposing sides of Europe came together for a game of football. But it's still about the First World War; aren't we past that sort of jingoistic image by now?

Worth visiting so you can check out Guest House Kabul and Guest House Baghdad.

"Hi! We're hired killers! But doesn't our site look professional?"

All these companies are listed in a US State Dep. document about the Security companies currently doing business in Iraq. Amusing/Dull-horror-causing note at the top of the document:

The U.S. government assumes no responsibility for the professional ability or integrity of the persons or firms whose names appear on the list.

Also: the most tasteless job ad in history?

(And it's not like this will stop a US release. When the same thing happened to Kevin Smith's Dogma, the film was quickly snapped up by another distributor. So I don't think it's quite as bad as the article sounds, although it is discouraging, if not surprising, that Disney are blocking the film)

"When Margaret Thatcher dies, I hope that they install a disco dance floor on top of her grave. It'll make things easier."

So, I suppose the big comic-related news from the weekend is Micah Wright's confession. The writer of Stormwatch: Team Achilles and a WWII-propaganda remix book made much of his Army Ranger past, talking about his secret missions in Panama and other parts of South America, and using it when debating people who held views contrary to his own. He was featured in the Guardian, Fox News, and the Washington Post, his book has introductions by none other than Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, and he is currently working on another book of remixed propaganda posters, this time featuring Greg Palast. He's a military man who turned against the current government after seeing some of the horrors carried out in its name.

Except, on Saturday, he admitted that he never was a Ranger. It was a lie he made up eleven years ago, and he never got around to telling the truth. Until a group of Rangers, suspicious about his background, got in contact with the Washington Post, which led to a Freedom of Information Act request against his name. The truth took several months to come out, but yesterday, the Post published the truth, a few hours after Micah's confession on his forum. As you can imagine, the comic community has spent the last 48 hours talking about it (to be honest, it's something of a welcome diversion; previously, the most interesting thing people were talking about was whether Snapper Carr will be killed in Identity Crisis. And yes, that's as geeky as it sounds).

I'd like to say I wasn't taken in, but I was; he did sound fairly convincing when he talked about his past, although whenever he talked about military technology or tactics, he tended to be corrected by other forum members, which I found a little strange. His recent obsession with Skull & Bones conspiracy theories lead to me tuning him out in the same way that I did with Warren Ellis during his "Stalin" period. I'm not really shocked, or angry, or supportive, like some on his forum. The only thing that keeps coming back to me is this bit from Quiz Show:

I'm happy that you've made the statement. But I cannot agree with most of my colleagues. See, I don't think an adult of your intellegence should be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.

Stormwatch has already been already cancelled, so this won't affect that in any way, but Micah's second book has just been pulled by his publishers, and his new comic series, Vigilante, supposedly launching in November, looks like it may not appear (DC is refusing to comment at the moment). Plus, he's got a bunch of Rangers annoyed with him. And I hear they're not the forgiving sort.

What?

While tens of thousands of U.S. men and women serve their country in the Battle of Iraq, 60 Minutes II has the audacity to violate their character by showing the disgusting actions of "several" of their comrades to foreign prisoners.

Not only do you "report" the incident, you distastefully show the pictures that only serve to brand all our loved ones in uniform. You leave little doubt, both past and present, of your liberal agenda and desire to taint this military action. --Raymond E. O'Neill