Further miscellany

A few things of interest have caught mine over the previous few days. On Wednesday, the BBC Newsroom Southeast programme had a mistaken byline for the news presenter. Now this is a fairly common technical problem, but on this occasion it libelled the female anchor by calling her "Trevor" and describing her as a drug addict, accidentally prefacing the first item of the agenda that she was pronouncing on from behind the studio desk.
Talking of msitakes, I caught a snatch of a repeat of the sci-fi ITV series Primeval on ITV2. It reminded me how the final episode of the last series of Primeval had as a climax the destruction of the theory of evolutionary biology, by placing a Velociraptor dinosaur, a modern homo sapien and proto-homo sapiens all dead and all within a few metres of each other at the same time (hence the same geological period). And now the show has been cancelled. Intra-series cliffhangers seems to have been another feature of Primeval, something that does irritate me not just because of the time lag but for situations when the series gets cancelled. So now we'll never know what brilliant idea one of them had for finding the solution to the troubles that had occurred.
Troubles are what are in line for insects that trespass on cobwebs. Yesterday, in my granny's garden, while doing a bit of tidying up, I noticed a massive web spun across the path between bushes and a tree. The spider looked mean as it drank the blood of one of the garden's even meaner denizens - a wasp. I wondered if the venom of the wasp would affect the spider - either way it was over for the wasp. Flies ad even, if my memory serves me corrcetly, grasshoppers have been ensnared in webs, but I've never seen a wasp fall victim to that fate.
Mentioning being entangled the Obama presidency has become caught up in much of the chaos left behind by the previous administration, which thought nothing of breaking treaties signed some of which went back fifty years (Geneva Convention anyone?), but then chided states (or invaded them) when these 'rogue nations' did the same over legal agreements going back barely fifteen years. Now, Barack Obama has decided against a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic (which was overwhelmingly opposed by the populations of those countries, but whose right-wing governments rode roughshod over those concerns, basing their support on economic 'competencies'). It was supposed to be protection against long-range missiles from Iran, but Moscow took umbrage given that Iran is a long way from developing such projectiles but Russia has an ample, if ageing, stock. Moreover, the installation broke a 1999 agreement when NATO expanded to include Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary (when the Atlantic Alliance briefy had a member in the Magyars who had no sea lane or land border with another signatory). This expansion agreement, to mollify the Russians at seeing former Warsaw Pact territories, stipulated that no American or other western troops would be stationed in these three countries. Since then, NATO has massively expanded to cover most of east-central Europe, including former Soviet land, regardless of what the Kremlin thought. But the interceptor missile base in Poland and radar installation in the Czech Republic were to be manned by soley American soldiers. Barack Obama has done right by honouring the pact signed in the Clinton era. It may reap rewards in other areas.