The year of the absurd goes on

In a rare moment of sanity (rare for the world at the moment, not necessarily for the court in question) a British court sentenced Abu Hamza Al-Masri for incitement to murder and other lovely things. Now everyone is asking why they haven't done it a while ago, especially since police has asked the prosecutors twice to bring charges. After he does his time, he might be extradited to the US to stand trial for conspiracy in Yemeni kidnappings. If convicted and put in Colorado Supermax prison, he will surely be glad to find parts of his former congregation there.

Taliban have offered a reward of 100 kilograms of gold to anyone who kills the Danish cartoonists. Yeah, right. Like they have the gold. OTOH, they claim to have enlisted 100 suicide bombers for the mission, so I suppose they figure that they won't have to pay up afterwards.

Iran is a lot more realistic with money: they offer an about 117 euro award to the 12 best Holocaust cartoonists. No way I am signing up for so little money. Too bad. I could probably think up some very offensive cartoons on the topic of "the Holocaust story: read before pissing Europeans off". Probably would make me a hunted woman in all the civilized and uncivilized world.

Putin has invited Hamas leaders to Russia. Inquiring minds want to know how exactly this fits in with his earlier promise to kill terrorists in a shithouse. Cynical minds have a pretty good idea already.

Every time I feel bad about my work or customer, I think about that poor bugger out there who is the Hamas image consultant. How is that for a nightmare job? OTOH, he got 100000 pounds for the job, does not have to fix broken XMLs or run benchmarks at some ungodly hour, and all he said to Hamas is that they should talk less about killing people and change the beard color if it is red, because people are laughing (this is addressed to Mohammed Abu Tir's beard). Anu could probably have told them the same for half the money. I would have probably missed the beard point, of account of more urgent PR problems, such as being on everyone's list of terrorist groups (Hamas being on the list, obviously, and not me).