I hate computers

Currently I use Windows, like most people, and my experience of this is certainly like the picture on the left. No wonder there are so many Bill Gates jokes, e.g. "The president of Lotus walks into an elevator with a gun in his hand. In the elevator are: Saddam Hussein, Timothy McVeigh, and Bill Gates, but there are only two bullets in the gun! Who does he shoot? A: Gates, twice, to be sure."

I also have an ASUS laptop that has a nervous breakdown when I ask it to connect to the Internet and my printer at the same time. In fact, it's now objecting to my mouse as well. I half-suspect the power management system is compromised by some ASUS virus that informs Peking of my every keystroke; put that down to paranoia if you like, but we'll see what the history books say one day.

But is the Mac really as simple and reliable as the middle picture suggests? And is Linux really so powerful and jazzy? Before I throw this computer from some carefully-selected high place, I'd appreciate guidance on its replacement.

By the way, here's Daniel Bozet's original cartoon; I thought the one above looked unbalanced.

And here's some techno comment on BoingBoing, that obviously I don't quite understand.

If telephones were like this, I'd be using liveried runners.

Check memes with Snopes.com

My American brother and his wife put me on to Snopes.com, a service that sources and corrects rumours that spread through the Internet. One example is a very sharp, funny diatribe on the Middle East, allegedly by Dennis Miller, but actually adapted from this 2002 article by Larry Miller.

What have I learned?

• Meme alterations tend to add spite - compare the original with its viral successor
• I should include Snopes and Larry Miller in my blogroll

In the piece concerned, I particularly liked the imagined reversal of position between Jews and Arabs. I'm always grateful for a mental flip that lends me a new perspective.

USA $800 billion subsidy to Asian investors

Read Karl Denninger on how the Fed has been forced to prop up shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to please foreign equity holders such as China.

Further comment from Mish.

The taxpayer pays all - and presumably we're looking to do something similar here, to keep the banking show on the road.

This may be the time when those predictions about the Dow hitting 9,000 and gold breaking through $1,200 start to come true.

Gold

Gold now below $900, heading perhaps for the $875 forecast by "Jesse" a couple of weeks ago. Will the second part of the prediction be proved correct, also?

Logical consistency

Also in today's Guardian's G2 section is an article titled "I became a Zen Buddhist nun," at the end of which is the invitation: "Do you have a story to tell about your life? Email it (no attachments, please)..."

Reading the Guardian

It's been years since I tried to read the Guardian. My favourite memory of it is Posy Simmonds' "Silent Three" cartoon strip, which I admire for the artist's control of her line, more than for its social comment.

This morning, on the paper run while the kettle was boiling, I caught sight of its trailer on the front page: "How the wealthy lost touch with the rest of us/Polly Toynbee" (actually, it's also by David Walker, though it doesn't say so there).

I thought, I'll grit my teeth and have a go. There must be some reason why teachers like me read this stuff. Here (in the G2 section) it is.

Fisk it yourself. Note the sly references to (ugh!) the Daily Mail and (ahhh!) how hard teachers work. Then note what isn't said, for example about Toynbee's own high income and wealth, foreign property etc.

And look at the unexamined implicit assumptions in statements like "...others deserve a share of that, too." Unless you are religious (and I include in that category anyone who talks about Man with a capital M), why should anyone care about anybody who's not a blood relation (and the ever-logical Mao didn't even do that)?

So I guess my gripe is that here we have a coldly commercial product pretending to morality; which perhaps I should admire for the artist's control of her line, more than for its social comment.

David Cameron: a flaw?

There was a moment - a minor incident - and I can't track it down. It was either Matthew Parris or Quentin Letts, watching Tony Blair perform in Parliament some years ago. The PM reacted scornfully to something he appeared to have heard from the Opposition benches, yet when the journalist asked his colleagues in the Press Gallery, nobody had heard that something. It seemed that Blair was simply indulging in brazen invention. A tiny incident, but revealing a character trait that has cost the country dearly.

In this week's Spectator, Charles Moore publishes an SMS text from a businesswoman friend, giving her immediate impressions of meeting David Cameron, and although she is clearly struck by the man's looks and personality, one little sentence jumped out at me: "Doesn't really listen." I think I know what she means, because it gels with how I read his body language every time I see him on the news: he is tightly focused on maintaining his grip on the Protean figure of Success, and will not be distracted. That has its dangers.