If you scroll quickly down my iTunes you will notice that the only other band/artist with almost as many tracks as Rufus Wainwright are, embarrassingly, The Pet Shop Boys and this only because I bought the Pop Art 3 disc edition.

What makes this worrying isn’t just Rufus. There is Rufus’s father Loudon, Rufus's sister Martha (really nice album, really), Rufus’s mom and aunt (the Mc Garrigle Hour is amazing, the whole family sings together, woohoo) and even a couple of tracks by Rufus’s dad sister Sloan Wainwright and I forgot to mention Rufus’s friends Antony & the Johnsons.

All this is the fault of one GJB whose plan to get me hooked on the Wainwrights started November last year. And he probably sat down and stroked his red beard with satisfaction when he found out that I’ve bought the Edge of Reason soundtrack just because Rufus and Dido recorded one of his mom’s songs for it. Did I mention how sad this whole thing is?

Last weekend I did a one hour podcast about the Wainwrights then deleted it because I realized how pathetic that was. Instead of the Wainwright Hour you get two of my favorite songs. It just has to get out of my system.

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Gay Messiah – Rufus Wainwright
(this got the people at the Rufus Wainwright Forum all excited because of the line “Rufus the Baptist I be”. Yeah, they are all dorky Rufus geeks but before you get all judgmental try and remember your own personal geek-outs )

Oh What a World – Rufus Wainwright

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And now for something completely different…..

So I was going to slag off the Iraqi national Assembly for the number of committees they have but after googling for a couple of minutes I find out that the third US Congress had 350 ad hoc committees, yes that was around 300+ years ago but I have decided that for beginners we are not doing that bad by only having 30.

OK, so there are 275 members at the INA, each member gets to choose on which committee s/he wants to be and how many choose to be on the Youth and Sports Committee?
None, Zero, Zip.
Youth? What youth? I want to be on a committee that counts, who cares about the youth?

Oh and we still don’t have a minister for Human Rights.
If you heard the ill fated podcast No.1 you know that the appointed minister resigned on the day he was appointed since the only reason he was put there was because he's a Sunni and he refused to play the sectarian game. Anyway point is we have no minister for Human Rights.
Why do we need one? Beats me. Ask the people who invented it. I would think things are really bad if we needed a whole ministry to make sure human rights are respected.

Mr. Jaafari announced his government’s plan at the National Assembly a couple of days ago.
12 pages long which I am not going to translate partly because I totally embarrassed myself with my translation of the constitutional thingy bellow. Again I am no expert in this sort of thing but it looks like it was an experiment in political gobbledygook.
Habibi, you are a care taker government with a single task just like the Allawi government. They had to prepare for elections and you prepare for the referendum on the constitution. In the mean time you take care of us until we have a government that’s staying for more than 6 months.
What really stood out for me was a paragraph on controlling desertification! Now if you manage to do that within your 6 months I am sure this will be a world’s first. Oh and they will provide jobs and social security and housing. Phewww now I feel relieved, I was so worried about the 50% unemployment rate.

I know I know. That’s a bit harsh and you might even call the plan an exercise. You put it on paper, you discuss it, we all learn. The thing is I am getting a bit tired of all this learning thingy. Learn about Democracy, learn about self rule, learn about Human Rights, if I wanted all this learning I would go live in a university campus. Stop it already. Why can’t our politicians be a bit more realistic?

Now there is an exercise for you: you’ve got 6 months and the house is on fire how can you keep the flames under control so that all the occupants can sort their shit out?

I don’t know. Maybe the whole point of PMs announcing government plans in Parliaments is to turn the rivers to Tahini as we say.

One thing for sure, I can sleep now knowing that in the next 6 months I won’t wake up with a desert at my door.