Day: 28 July 2006

I really can’t stand Ann Coulter.

I mean, her book, “Godless: The Church Of Liberalism” (somebody sent me an e-copy, which saved me from the bad feeling I’d associate with helping shower her with royalties) was bad enough, but this…

She’s appeared on TV recently (video clip) to talk about the former US president, Clinton. Her claim? That the 42nd president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky is evidence that Bill Clinton is homosexual.

Whoah, whoah… let’s roll that one back and hear it again, Ann.

Apparently his latent homosexuality is evidenced by his promiscuity. This is a fascinating turnaround of the old stereotype that “all homosexual people are promiscuous”: even it it were true, you can’t just invert causality to fit your arguments… unless you’re Ann Coulter. The argument works both ways for her – not only are all homosexual people promiscuous, but all promiscuous people are homsexual! One is left wondering, then, whether homosexuality is self-perpetuating – in her mind – as it’s promiscuity leads to greater homosexuality leads to further promiscuity. Oh wait: she only seems to see the world in black and white anyway.

If you watch the video right to the end, there’s another classic quote. Homosexuality isn’t actually a sexuality at all, claims Ann: it’s just narcissism to be attracted to somebody of the same gender: essentially masturbation. So, you homosexuals: be told – you’re not actually attracted to other men or other women – you’re merely attracted to yourself too much to appreciate people of the opposite sex.
[sighs]

Suppose I’d better stop ranting so much and get on with some work.

• The power keeps going off. It’s awfully hard to build software in the dark.
• I have a shedload of work to do and I’ve spent most of my day so far either cursing the aforementioned power cut or in meetings about how much more productive we could be (if, for example, we weren’t in meetings when I was busiest…).
• Our customers can’t tell the different between our mail server going down (which it hasn’t) and a power spike bricking their router. “Can you get to any websites? No: then might the problem be at your end?”

On the other hand, a good moment was when our visiting sales consultant dude gave me a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? and I responded by summarising the story in about 60 words, then providing an analysis of the virtues and the faults of the book. In hindsight, it might have been cooler to flick through the pages of the book, pretending to read it stupidly fast (Johnny Five-style), and then summarised it for him.

Better save this before the power goes again. Grr.