At the post office,
Lines out of the door. Everyone
wants to post cards now.

Fibwatch: Last Sunday, the US army claimed to have killed 54 guerillas attempting to steal money near Samarra. This weekend, the facts emerge: the US army killed eight civilians as they shot indiscriminately around the town.

The BBC's picked some embarrassing political moments to have a poll. Hell, it fills up THE POLITICS SHOW in the quiet week before Yule. The usual suspects: Redwood's rendition of Land of My Fathers, Kinnock's meeting with a wave, Blair's "Hand of History." No space, thankfully, for the Donald Rumsveld Soundbite Of 2002 - the whole "known unknowns" spiel cannot be the most confusing speech of this year, because it's from last year.

Sadly, no space for some other gaffes. Michael Portfolio's infamous SAS speech. Or Mrs Thatcher's Dead Parrot speech just six weeks before she was ousted. Or President Bush throwing up all over the Japanese PM, a gag THE MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE ran with for a series. "That depends on what your definition of is is." M Chretien's comments about pepper. The NI secretary singing on RTE after another IRA outrage. David Blunkett.

Anyone can see Micheal Jackson is innocent. It's as plain as the nose on his... er.

That World Cup Draw In Full - my tips for further progression are in italics. Europe: Group 1 Of Death Andorra, Macedonia, Armenia, Finland, Romania, Netherlands, Czech Republic
Group 2 Of Eastern Europe Kazakhstan, Albania, Georgia, Ukraine, Greece, Denmark, Turkey
Group 3 Of Eurovision Hopefuls Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Russia, Portugal
Group 4 Good For France Faroe Islands, Cyprus, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, France
Group 5 Of Tight For Second Place Moldova, Belarus, Norway, Scotland, Slovenia, Italy
Group 6 Of Britain Azerbaijan, Northern Ireland, Wales, Austria, Poland, England
Group 7 Of Underachievers San Marino, Lithuania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia & Montenegro, Belgium, Spain
Group 8 Of Interest Malta, Hungary, Iceland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Sweden

The eight group winners plus the two highest-scoring runners up progress automatically. Those two runners-up will logically come from groups with weak 3rd and 4th sides, so I suspect Austria and Croatia will be strongly placed. The six remaining runners up will play off head-to-head.

Africa: Group 1 Senegal, Mali, Zambia, Togo, Liberia, Congo
Group 2 South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Uganda, Cape Verde Islands
Group 3 Cameroon, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Libya, Sudan, Benin
Group 4 Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Angola, Gabon, Rwanda
Group 5 Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya, Guinea, Malawi, Botswana

Five group winners qualify.

CONCACAF
Group 1 Grenada v Guyana, winners v United States
Group 2 Bermuda v Montserrat, winners v El Salvador*
Group 3 Haiti v Turks and Caicos Islands, winners v Jamaica
Group 4 British Virgin Islands v St Lucia, winners v Panama*
Group 5 Cayman Islands v Cuba, winners v Costa Rica
Group 6 Aruba v Surinam, winners v Guatemala*
Group 7 Antigua and Barbuda v Netherlands Antilles, winners v Honduras*
Group 8 Canada v Belize
Group 9 Dominica v Bahamas, winners v Mexico
Group 10 US Virgin Islands v St Kitts and Nevis, winners v Barbados*
Group 11 Dominican Republic v Anguilla, winners v Trinidad and Tobago
Group 12 Nicaragua* v St Vincent and Grenadines

Winners of groups 1-4 play group A; winners of 5-8 make up group B; winners of 9-12 are group C; top two in A, B, C advance to finals round, three to the tournament proper plus one into a play-off with Asia. Those in italics are the final six, the six falling at the previous stage have a *.

Asia
Group 1 Iran, Qatar, Jordan, Laos
Group 2 Uzbekistan, Iraq, Palestine, Taiwan
Group 3 Japan, Oman, India, Singapore
Group 4 China, Kuwait, Malaysia, Hong Kong
Group 5 United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Yemen, North Korea
Group 6 Bahrain, Syria, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
Group 7 South Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Maldives
Group 8 Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkmenistan, Sri Lanka

Eight group winners will later be split into two groups of four: top two in each group qualify automatically, third placed sides in each group play off, winner takes on the fourth side from CONCACAF.

Oceania
Group 1 Tahiti, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Tonga, Cook Islands
Group 2 Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, American Samoa

These groups will play each other twice in two mini-tournaments: top two in each group advance. They're joined by Australia and New Zealand, and play a round robin in another mini tournament. Australia and New Zealand The top two in that league play home and away, with Australia the winner playing home and away against the fifth side in South America.

Everybody plays in one big group, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile qualify automatically, Uruguay or Paraguay or Venezuela or someone else finishes fifth and plays Australia Oceania's reps.

Hearing from The The
At home, it's nothing novel.
At work, very rare.

A slight change to the yuletide countdown: Out goes "first carollers," and in comes "first seasonal ringtone." It all amounts to the same thing: out of tune, out of tempo, performed by amateurs for their entertainment and our annoyance.

The backup tape drive
Is somehow lighter than normal.
The tape inside's snapped.

Always the first to embrace new technology, the Daily Hell has finally joined the information revolution. From early next year, the Blunkettite tabloid will use a conventional printing press, rather than the quill and ink method it currently employs.

Editor Johnny Foreignerbashing said, "It was always a question of when, not if. We've seen the way these John Bull printing sets have revolutionised the news scroll medium, and we look forward to making it even easier for people to hear scare stories about falling house prices, lawful immigrants, and Liz Hurley's legs. Oh no, that's the Torygraph."

The new printing method will allow the paper to print news within a day of it happening, instead of the current delay of anything up to forty years. However, the future is bleak for the thousands of trained scribes: they will be thrown out on the scrapheap, victims of the ultra-capitalist obsession of owner Lord Fascist.

The Daily Tabloid reports that Bert Bills won't be nominated for any BPI awards next year. They're quite correct. Bills, the former Have This loon, is not eligible for any awards because he did not release a Red Book compliant CD album between August 2002 and November 2003.

In the US magazine Nomoss, Justin Timberlanky says his tunes are "ten times better" than those of his old band Out Of Synch. We don't disagree, because that still doesn't mean they're any cop at all, and hearing nails scratched down a blackboard would be preferable. Except, actually, we do disagree, coz Bye Bye Bye is a mile above anything in Lanky's solo career.

Amtrak, the US rail company, set new passenger records last week. In the seven days to December 1, the company carried just over 600,000 people.

By comparison, the weekly Virgin to Birmingham service carries around 15,000 people; the Chiltern train carries almost 10,000. Central Trains claims 85,000 passengers per week, and the London Underground 400,000 per day.

A new human right? In Estonia, the list includes internet access. Estonians now use the Net at a higher rate than the French or Italians. To accomodate the demand, the Estonian government has worked with the UNDP to open up hundreds of free Internet access centers, from downtown Tallinn to remote islands in the Baltic.

Estonia’s President, Lennart Meri, claims to answer his own email. The state IT advisor attends cabinet meetings. Almost all state services are online, as are tax filings and the state budget. Almost everything the government does online is open to public scrutiny, and almost everything it does is done online:

"Inside Tallinn's medieval parliament and prime minister's offices, cabinet ministers and legislators have gone completely virtual, conducting meetings, votes, and document reviews on their networked flat-screen computers.

"'We're the first paperless government,' says former Prime Minister Mart Laar, from the entrance to the courtyard of his old office. 'Journalists have compared [the building] to the Starship Enterprise, and it's true.' he adds, beaming with pride."

[from Worldchanging]

Red light's gone on early
Usually on at nightfall.
Never at lunchtime.

17. That's a prime number, and a jolly good haiku icon. But it's not the biggest prime number. 19 is a bit bigger, and 23 towers over them both. Michael Shafer, a Michigan State University student, has found a jolly large prime number. The student (who already liked primes had been donating computer cycles to the GIMPS project.

This massive prime will be massively useful, as Godel's compression method (treating files as one massive number, and expressing it as the sum of powers of primes) allows for trememdous space saving. In theory, one could carry around Google's entire internet cache on a CD or two.

And, of course, coming soon to Channel P(3)-2, the great (if slightly overlong) game show P(20,996,011) KEYS, in which approximately 10e700 Richard Bacon clones ask questions to find out which of the various possible keys they should construct to open a box containing an almost infinite number of stuffed woollen monkeys hard at work on a printing press, making an amount of something that may or may not pass for money. Well, it's more interesting than Eggheads...

And so is OPTE, the project mapping the internet in real time, in colour, on one small machine.

Groups for the European World Cup draw, taking place in Frankfurt on Friday. Germany qualifies as hosts.

A: France, Portugal, Sweden, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, England, Turkey.
France, England, Spain, and Italy will be in groups of six, as will one other side. What the hell Portugal are doing in the top seeds is a mystery.

B: Netherlands, Croatia, Belgium, Denmark, Russia, Republic of Ireland, Slovenia, Poland
No real surprises there, though Denmark looks suspiciously high.

C: Bulgaria, Romania, Scotland, Serbia and Montenegro, Switzerland, Greece, Slovakia, Austria
From here will come the upsets. Romania, Scotland, Switzerland, Greece especially could be thorns in sides.

D: Ukraine, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Israel, Bosnia, Latvia, Wales
Quite how Iceland, Latvia, and Wales rank so far beneath Bulgaria and Slovakia we'll never know.

E: Hungary, Georgia, Belarus, Cyprus, Estonia, Northern Ireland, Lithuania, Macedonia
We're into the sides that won't compete for the major prizes, but might cause a few awkward games.

F: Albania, Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Faroe Isles, Malta, San Marino, Liechtenstein
G: Andorra, Luxemburg, Kazakhstan
No one will relish trips to these places (well, apart from Malta) but their chances of qualifying are nil. As is Kazakhstan's qualification record: the side competed as part of Asia until this contest, and would probably be best placed in D or E.

The Group Of Death: Turkey, Russia, S&M, Latvia, Georgia, Albania, Kazakhstan.
The Group Of Trivia: Portugal, Belguim, Switzerland, Wales, Belarus, Liechtenstein, Andorra.
The Group Of Really Nice Holidays: France, Croatia, Austria, Finland, Cyprus, Malta.

Many folk are dumb.
People ask real daft questions.
Sneering's not so good.

NFL Tables You Can Use!

AFC East                  W L Div Com
New England Flying Elvii 10 2 2-1 6-1
Miami Marine Mammals      8 4 2-1 4-3
Buffalo Peelers           5 7 1-2 3-4
New Jersey / B            5 7 1-2 4-4

AFC North                  W L Div Com
Cincinnati Bungles         7 5 3-1 3-2
Baltimore Quoths           7 5 1-2 5-2
Pittsburgh Iron Pyrites    4 8 3-2 1-5
Cleveland Browns v2.11b    4 8 1-3 3-3

AFC South                 W L Div Com
Indianapolis Lucky Charms 9 3 3-1 5-2
Flaming Thumbtacks        9 3 3-1 4-2
Houston Moo Cows          5 7 1-2 3-3
x-Jacksonville Inkspots   3 9 1-4 1-4

AFC West                  W L  Div Com
Kansas City Chiefs       11 1  5-0 4-1
Denver Cursors            7 5  4-1 3-3
x-Oakland Ramraiders      3 9  1-4 2-3
x-San Diego Flats         2 10 0-5 2-3

**-Division champions
*-Qualified for playoffs
x-Cannot make playoffs

Kansas is now within a gnat's crotchet of clinching the West division. The defending AFL champs, Oakland, crashed out of post-season contention this week. So did Jacksonville, in spite of their spirited win at City of Tampa. The Flats also dropped out of the playoffs this week, to no-one's surprise.

Upcoming: the North division title match, between the Quoths and the Bungles.

NFC East                                  W L Div Com
Philadelphia Lovers                       9 3 3-1 5-2
Dallas Cowpersons                         8 4 3-0 3-4
New Jersey / A                            4 8 1-3 0-5
Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons 4 8 0-3 3-5

NFC North                  W L Div Com
Minnesota Norsemen         7 5 4-1 2-3
Bay of Green               6 6 3-2 2-2
Chicago Hibernaters        5 7 1-3 4-3
Detroit Peugeots           4 8 2-4 1-3

NFC South                  W L Div Com
Carolina Fatcats           8 4 5-0 3-4
New Orleans Boy Scouts     6 6 3-2 2-3
City of Tampa              5 7 1-3 4-2
x-Atlanta Typos            2 10 0-4 2-4

NFC West                   W L Div Com
St Louis Mouflons          9 3 3-2 5-0
Seattle Blue Men Group     8 4 3-0 4-3
San Fransisco 44-9ers      5 7 1-3 3-4
x-Arizona Cautions         3 9 1-3 2-5

No surprise to see the Arizona (CAUTION! MAY CONTAIN FOOTBALL-LIKE SUBSTANCE)s (to give them their full title) leave the play-off picture. Detroit's win against Bay of Green keeps alive their remote hopes of winning the division, and that's the only way the Peugeots will progress. NJA and the PDBIPs are surviving by the skin of their teeth, and losses will spell Game Over for the Iron Pyrites and Browns.

About time, too. In the NFT, Paul Krugman writes about how computerised election software is unreliable and may pervert democracy. The US has already seen the damage a stolen election can cause.

Hmm. A little challenge for myself. A haiku a day for the month.

Rain falls into rain
Chill wind blowing on my face
Small streams down the drain.

100 Guantanamo Bay prisoners to be released soon? We'll believe it when we see it, and of course the US junta will pay huge amounts in compensation for their wrongful detention. It's what civilised people do when they've got it wrong.

The BBC was due to unveil its new look Comedy 24 channel today. The round-the-clock live laughs service, set as a fictional news channel, features such side-splitting turns as John Terret's Business News, Simon Vigar at the Sports Desk, and Peter Sissons' Comedy Ties. However, thanks to a power cut last Friday (?), the launch has been delayed a week.

I fundamentally disagree with the commentariat's view that News 24 should be solely a rolling news channel. Leave that to ITV, CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN Headline, and whatever other fly-by-night operations there might be. Equally, its domestic service shouldn't go down the route of mechanised bulletins and inflexible reports as seen on DW and Star News. Instead, the BBC can and perhaps should concentrate on analysing the news, delving behind the stories, standing above the spin machine and dodging PR puffery.

On that basis, here's my draft lineup for weekday evenings:

1800 - World news. From BBC World. Provide something palpably different from BBC1.
1830 - A brief roundup of news, concentrating on the domestic agenda.
1845 - Business report.
1900 - Full news bulletin. Catch the people who missed the Six and don't want to watch 4 or 5.
1930 - World sport roundup. The BBC doesn't use its sports reach to anything like its full potential.
2000 - News roundup. There's a full bulletin on BBC4.
2010 - Around the regions - some of the best reports from the regional services.
2030 - Headlines, followed by two 10 minute mini-documentaries, or a parliament report.
2100 - Full bulletin.
2130 - Talking Heads, in which a panel of three or four discusses the day's hot topics. Think Old Mayo's Almanack, only on the telly.
2200 - Europe Today. News from around Europe, again clearly different from BBC1.
2230 - Business late.
2245 - World sport update. Yes, wait until this time to report the football results. That's what the interactive service is there for.
2300 - Full bulletin.
2330 - Hard Talk, as at present.

With the exception of the documentaries between 2030 and 2100, everything is live, and if something happens, break into the format and report it. That schedule, I suggest, would make a varied evening's viewing, far more interesting than the same hour's television every hour.

As for graphics, take a leaf out of Bloomberg and CNN: black on beige. And steer away from red for emphasis: there's far too much red on all the other main news channels, perhaps try a dignified dark green.

The occasional review of the music charts in the UK.

On the albums chart, Pestside depose Micheal Jackson from the #1 slot. Dildo's non-album is #3, while the boys from Busted hold Alex Parks' Introduction to a #5 entry. Hits collections from the RHCP and REM are in the lower half of the ten, along with heavily-promoted Hayley Westenra (a child soprano who appears in every other break on Classy FM) and the heavily-discounted Black Eyed Peas (selling for just eight quid, against a regular price of £13.) Boyband Blue's latest set completes the ten.

Lower, Enrique struggles slightly, his third UK release creeps in at #13, while Star Academy I graduate Lemar bows at #17. He's uncomfortably sandwiched between R Kelly and Cliff Richard. The heavily-promoted Michael Bublé (a light opera singer who appears in every other break on Classy FM) returns to the top 20. Amongst those he replaces: the Beatles Let It Be Stripped, that slumps 7-23 second week and is their smallest hit album in a very long time indeed.

Hits collections by the Pet Shop Boys (30) and Simon & Garfunkel (33) both outperform Birtney's newie - second week out, she slumps 14-37. That Playbeing centrefold never looked less unattractive. Discarding hits collections, live albums and other such rubbish, the second highest Proper New Entry (behind Sparky) is Missy Elliott's This Is Not A Test, landing at 49, just ahead of Korn at 53. Katie Melua will top next week's 6 Music chart, I think, her Call Off The Search climbs to 55, seven ahead of Nelly Furtardo's Folklore

Over on the singles side, Will Young is big. Leave Right Now holds off Shane "Turn and face the legend" Richie's pisspoor cover of I'm Your Man to be best seller in stores. Jacko's One More Chance anchors the top 5, and Ja Rule has something at #9. Iron Maiden annoy Wes Butters once more, Rainmaker is a #13 hit. Blink 182, Limp Biscuit and No Doubt all have top 20 entries, Meat Loaf and the Coral just miss that stage. Dizzy Rascal makes #30.

Trouble at Room 5; their last hit is still one of the year's biggest, but Music And You can only make #38. Mary J Blige anchors the 40, and the Thrills have gone one single too far, landing at 45.

No change in the top 10 best sellers of the year, but Jamelia has moved past Busted for the fifth biggest new single by a British act. The list is: White Flag (#8), Stop Living The Lie (12), Sweet Dreams My LA Ex (15), Pretty Green Eyes (17) and Superstar (20). It's been a huge sales week: Willy Young enters the chart of the year at #40, the first record to crash straight into the upper echelon since September. Shane Richie is five places behind, and both have sold more in six days than last week's bestseller from Pestside has in 13. Watch out, Will Young is really, really big.

It's a bit too soon to be putting up Christmas decorations, as I saw some people doing this morning. At least they weren't trying to put them up in this afternoon's rainstorms. Cards will go from here on Saturday, and it'll be a race to see if they beat decorations going up at work.