Verbal

Well, we'll never know, will we. There was an interesting book about Eichmann written a couple of years ago by David Cesarani, called 'Becoming Eichmann', which substantially revised the received view that senior Nazis were in essence evil, and from disturbed backgrounds. Nazis like Eichmann were actually disturbingly ordinary - rather like the disturbingly ordinary people who offer their sheeplike support and votes to neo-Nazi parties like the BNP and the many, similarly violent far-Right parties across Europe. Eichmann is a hero to the more vociferous of these idiots. He would be less so if he had renounced his savage past. But as I say, we'll never know...

As someone who's against the death penalty, I'd have to say that not even his crimes (if he's found guilty) should lead to a death sentence. I'd also have wanted Eichmann not to have been executed by the Israelis, nor Goering and the others by the Nuremburg Trials. In my opinion, they would have had far greater deterrent value alive than dead, and could have reflected on their crimes in ways that would really have had impact outside of their prison walls. Demjanjuk is shamming. He's done it before.

I know who you're thinking of - that sensible chap in Dr Strangelove who rides an atom bomb from his B-52, yee-hawing to oblivion.

That's true - which means you have to try playing Pachinko in the arcades (utterly pointless but addictive), and watching Japanese take Karaoke way too seriously. If you want to eat cheaply, stick to noodle shops (and learn to live with the slurping), or if you go to a fancy restaurant, make sure it's one that has plastic versions of the meals in the front windows, because there won't be any English translations on the menu. You could also try whale meat, to annoy your beanbag friends back home, and breakfast at Tsukiji fish market - the biggest and most exotic in the world - is brilliant. The 'fun' neighbourhood is Shinjuku - but watch out for (among other things!) the price of beer in those hostess bars. (Better anyway to drink hot saki, which better than anywhere, naturally) And if you're serious about drinking, it's amazingly easy to get your own beerglass behind the counter at surprisingly friendly neighbourhood bars. The subways are completely unintelligible. Make sure you're with a Japanese speaker - although there's no need to be sober, because the subways stations employ people especially to catch drunk salarymen falling on to the track.

Verbal's Iron Law will apply, which states: We'll be underwhelmed by the draw.

So the police arrive and find Tiger lying on the ground next to his damaged 4x4, with his wife hovering over him with a golf club...after reports he had 'met' someone in a nightclub. Possibly not a regular kind of accident at all.

He hasn't got any flats. Just a pile of brochures.

I was having a general moan. Your post was just in the line of fire.

Next time the Saints Forum first Eleven Spelling Bee swings into action, can someone please have the bloody courtesy to PM me? I hate missing these events.

I preferred the old, exploding delldays. Whatever happened to him?

I'm stumped. Apple doesn't make other mp3 players.

I don't think they'll need anything like 40 points to be safe. But they won't get 30 either, so no need to get the calculator out again.

But did Hammond get a kick up the colon?

Sadly untrue. Third World people getting killed for profit and otherwise being treated like medieval serfs does not make the biggest news story. It rarely does. If you want an example less close to your home, think of Bhopal. It's estimated that something like 25,000 people have been killed or suffered horrific injury as a direct result of Bhopal. But does it make the headlines? Often enough that Union Carbide, the American company that caused the accident, have been able to walk away from their obligations to the victims scott free.

That you were wrong?

Yep, that's as good as it's ever going to get this season.

...when what you really want is the complete songbook of West Side Story?

No, I don't. But what a very odd conclusion to come to! Why on earth would you think that?

Eric, I would be only too happy to hear that this is a single journalist's fantasy. Unfortunately, it's extremely well documented by a number of reliable sources, many of whom have had to dodge harassment and threats from the Dubai authorities, who have tried desperately to keep this all under wraps, and certainly away from people in Dubai itself. When Panorama produced a a piece detailing the appalling abuses, the BBC was threatened with all kinds of legal action by the Dubai government. What actually happened? Nothing, of course.

No, Nick, it isn't comparable at all. Here's a pretty good description of how it really works: "In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised. They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police. I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone. Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain." http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-morally-bankrupt-dictatorship-built-by-slave-labour-1828754.html

Interesting Phil. No disrespect, but does this mean that Dubai might become a vaguely pleasant place to be? And that there might be fewer trapped and enslaved construction workers from South Asia? Because whenever I've passed through, the place always seemed like the gilded gates of hell. I couldn't imagine anyone with a conscience voluntarily buying up there for their place in the sun. As for the westerners losing their shirts on get-rich-quick schemes, I suspect that they aren't in sufficient numbers in themselves to spark a crisis on the scale of the sub-prime disaster in the US. And they will bear a great deal of the loss themselves - even with hyped up bank loans. The bigger losses for banks will surely be the absurd property schemes themselves - the kind that our chairman friend down the road used to buy his Ferraris. I can well imagine what you mean about Iran, by the way. I remember what Jordan was like during the years of the Iraq sanctions. A lot of people got obscenely rich, and the border was like the wild west.

West.

That's quite a nasty sentence you've got. Don't know many who've been able to recover from death.

If you really feel like being freaked out, check this out: http://www.lhcfacts.org/ I epecially like this bit of Yoda-ese, which means we'll all have to downsize a bit: “miniblack holes as are expected to be produced soon at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.” “To publicize the danger because time is running out is a big decision.” “ …after 50 months the earth to a centimeter would have shrunk. It would be nothing more there, not only no more life, there but also the earth would be… a small black hole.”