The End Of Irony?

I've been moving house this weekend, amidst the demands of the pending PNWJ CD release, and today also turn 35. It's been a headlong rush to this point and has led to great neglect of this 'ere blog, but I guess that sometimes that's the way it goes. I always tend to begin regular diary entries with an apology for not having written for so long too. If only days were 36 or 48 hours long, then perhaps more things would get done (and maybe more people would drop dead of exhaustion too)...

American satirical pianist Tom Lehrer once famously claimed that political satire was made obsolete by the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. I was reminded of this little gem when reading this morning's Guardian to find that George Bush's summer reading list has just been made public (seemingly an annual tradition, and maybe designed to cultivate an intellectual image for a notoriously unintellectual man).

Perhaps expressing his concern at the idea of it in the picture shown above, Albert Camus's 'L’Étranger' has apparently been giving our George a little light reading pleasure in his leisure hours away from the busy task of running the world in the early 21st Century. The tale famously tells the story of an alienated man who commits a murder on an Algerian beach and waits to be exectuted for it. The murder victim in question was of Arabic descent and the novel inspired The Cure's early track 'Killing An Arab'.

What can I say? One can only really comment that the mind boggles over what went through Dubya's head as he pored over that particular tome.

Thoughts and comments invited, of course...

"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."
Excerpt from Matthew Ward's translation (of 'L’Étranger')