1. Why is Russophobia so prevalent in the UK at the moment?
a) "Cui bono" in this case would be me; I occasionally buy sushi from that branch of Itsu and am *really* *quite* *pissed* *off* about this polonium thing. They keep on finding it in all sorts of different people and places in this city - for a supposedly "rare" element, it appears to be fucking everywhere when you start looking for it. Putin is number one suspect in this business and I for one wish he would knock it off.
b) other reasons; we have a burgeoning expat Russian community (of all social classes from brickies to oligarchs) who don't, in general, like Putin. Our friendly EU-accession Central Europeans are also temperamentally rather Russophobic, and the oligarchs are nowhere near as unpopular as they used to be since they started buying football clubs (I swear that Robert Mugabe would be greeted with open arms over here if he showed up at Spurs with an open checkbook). There certainly is a measurable amount of anti-Putin propaganda in the British newspapers and I would guess that a material proportion of it is bought and paid for by Beresovsky.
c) but the main reason why Putin is unpopular across Europe is that we have seen the silly games that he plays with the Ukraine's supply of natural gas and we are uncomfortably aware that there is no particular technical reason why he couldn't do the same to us.
2: Iran:
I have a pet theory of international politics which is that you can tell how important someone is in the world by having a look at how much effort the BBC newsreaders put into pronouncing his name properly. You could certainly measure the trajectory of "Mikhail Gorbachev/Mik-eye-yeel Gorbachov / Mick-hi-YEEL Gorrrrrrba-CHOV" during the 1980s in this way (presumably these days he would be referred to as Michael Gobbychev if he showed up again - certainly nobody is bothering with "Burris Yelt-ZEEN" any more).
On this basis, the Prime Minister of Iran is certainly on the way up; having been pronounced for the last year with his first name as Mamood and his second as basically "I'm-a-dinner-jacket", I noticed last week that Paxman was having a go at an Arabic h in MaCHMOOD, and the Guardian has occasionally taken to dropping a hyphen into Ahmadi-Nejad, which means that people will try to start pronouncing it this way to. I suppose that Putin is also in the ascendant on this metric; certainly the French media have more or less given up on calling him Vladimir Prostitute
But Ahmadi-nejad is the wrong horse to be backing in Iranian politics. He is unpopular, authoritarian, not very competent and committed to stupidity in foreign policy. He is kind of like the George Bush of the Middle East. He has managed to not be invaded for five years, but that is setting the bar pretty low.
3. Those Apple Macs
you guys realise that in a surprisingly short length of time, they are going to look horribly dated, don't you? Whereas my PC will look like a box, which is what it is.
I currently have no opinions on Paris and Nicky Hilton.
best dd
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