Memo from KPMG to George W. Bush concerning their audit of his political capital account. Excerpt:

1. We’re having trouble reconciling assets and liabilities (we ran the numbers three times and still couldn’t come up with the positive balance you reported). Do you have a single person responsible for managing this account we might talk to? Is it still Mr. Rove?

2. We think you may have overstated earnings in November 2004. While assets may be depressed due to “market panic,” it seems unlikely they will recover to 2004 levels. And frankly, it’s time to write off some, such as Social Security reform, that have been “under water” for a while now.

3. Anticipated income from specific investments can no longer be reported before it has been fully realized (so called “mark-to-market” accounting). Can you clarify whether the earnings you claimed in 2003 and 2004 from your Iraq holdings—”Spreading democracy in the Middle East” and “Restoring U.S. prestige”— actually occurred? If not, can they be reasonably anticipated before 2009? (Please note, after that date they cannot accrue to this account.)

4. We have moved some assets to the liability column (Mr. Claude Allen, Ms. H. Meirs). Others appear highly troubled (e.g., the Medicare Drug Benefit, Donald Rumsfeld) and may need to be revalued or reorganized…

Nice spoof, by David Atkins.

One of the few good things about tidying up on a Sunday morning is that it gives one an excuse to read old newspapers before they go for recycling. I’ve just come on this gem that I’d missed — Annie Proulx’s acute account of what the Oscars hoopla is like from the inside. (She wrote the story on which Brokeback Montain is based.) Sample:

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver….

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Now there’s a woman who knows her Winnie the Pooh.

And while we’re on that subject, tech publisher Tim O’Reilly runs wonderful conferences called “FOO camps” (FOO = “Friends of O’Reilly”). Someone from Disney heard about them, and organised an analogous one for Disney staff. They called it a “POOH camp”, naturally.

Nice rant in today’s New York Times…

There is a decision pending within the bowels of the federal government that may be the single most incomprehensibly wrongheaded decision of the century.

It’s small when compared with Iraq, but it’s still maddening. It involves allowing passengers to talk on their cellphones while they are in flight. Now, as everyone who has the misfortune to fly commercially knows, air travel today is mind-bogglingly uncomfortable. The seats are small. The flights are nearly always full to overflowing. The food is unspeakable. The air is fetid and filled with germs. Many a time I board an airliner hale and hearty, only to emerge with a raging pneumonia.

But there is one saving grace. Unless you are seated behind or next to really rude people — which happens surprisingly rarely — air travel is fairly quiet. Yes, the flight attendants stand around and talk. Yes, before the plane takes off people scream into their cellphones, but along about three hours into the flight from, say, Kennedy to LAX, it’s pretty peaceful.

That’s solely because passengers can’t use cellphones aloft. That prohibition was one of the great decisions ever. Now, in a fit of idiocy, some airlines are suggesting that they be allowed to sell the use of cellphones in the air at nominal prices. This will mean yelling and screaming and boasting and complaining for almost all the time you’re sealed in that sardine can. The government is apparently planning to allow this anarchy.

This is Quentin’s new friend. He met him yesterday at the summit of Table Mountain in South Africa — from where he (naturally) sent me an email.

A photograph of Quentin, who is in South Africa installing Ndiyo systems. Cape Town’s in the background. I do not recall any order for a marine installation (he said, enviously). Humph!

This is interesting — as significant in its way as the original Demon Internet precedent. From Guardian Unlimited…

A landmark legal ruling ordering a woman to pay £10,000 in damages for defamatory comments posted on an internet chatroom site could trigger a rush of similar lawsuits, a leading libel lawyer warned today.

Michael Smith, a Ukip activist who stood for the Portsmouth North seat last year, became the first person to win damages yesterday after being accused of being a “sex offender” and “racist blogger” on a Yahoo! discussion site.

Mr Smith, 53, from Fareham in Hampshire, sued Tracy Williams, of Oldham, for comments posted after she joined a rightwing online forum in 2002.

Judge Alistair MacDuff said in the high court that Ms Williams was “particularly abusive” and “her statements demonstrated that … she had no intention of stopping her libellous and defamatory behaviour”.

The judge ordered Ms Williams never again to repeat the “unfounded” defamatory remarks, which included calling Mr Smith a “nonce” and accusing him of sexual harassment.

Although ISPs have paid out for hosting defamatory comments, this case is thought to be the first time an individual has been found to have committed libel on a internet chat site.

I loathe and abominate PowerPoint, but sometimes am obliged to use it because the conference organisers go bananas with anxiety if you don’t give them a presentation in advance.

For those who are obliged to use the infernal tool, here’s a great rule invented by Guy Kawasaki, a Venture Capitalist.

Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s [disease] in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business…

Thanks to Quentin for the link.

My Observer fellow-columnist, Henry Porter, has been conducting a valiant campaign to stir people’s interest in the ID Cards Bill that the Blair regime is trying to force through Parliament. He’s written another excellent piece this morning…

I would feel a bore and an obsessive if I hadn’t pored over the ID card bill last week and read Hansard’s account of the exchanges in both houses.

One of the most chilling passages in the bill is section 13 which deals with the ‘invalidity and surrender’ of ID cards, which, in effect, describes the withdrawal of a person’s identity by the state. For, without this card, it will be almost impossible to function, to exist as a citizen in the UK. Despite the cost to you, this card will not be your property.

My only quibble is that, technically, UK inhabitants are not ‘citizens’; they’re subjects of the Crown.