That was a fantastic Saturday, certainly the best social gathering I’ve been to in a long time. Now, what does it say about me that I find talking about pipeline coatings in Azerbaijan more interesting than talking about sex and booze?

Also, I turned 23 on Saturday, along with Fiona WINOLJ, just after the Dalai Lama and just before innocent_irony. Thanks to everybody who sent me stuff.

Currently being fascinated by this book about the Jesuits – they’ve been coming at me from enough angles and for enough years now that I feel I should have some vague idea about them. And, thanks to Mike, I’m craving this one, which manages to combine religion and mnemonic techniques and China. There are advantages to having insanely smart friends who’ve read every book ever, oh yes.

and mini-meh that my ability to write things continues to decline steadily. A few more years of this, and I’ll be posting thousand-word entries written entirely in txtspeak.

Dear Livejournal, you appear to be happy. What happened?

Many bouncy sharing-in-the-joy hugs to everybody whose life is working out at the moment – which seems to be most of you right now. Yay!

Sunni parliamentary boycott in Iraq, to protest a Sunni politician being kidnapped. I don’t much care for boycotts as a tactic, and tend to underestimate their power when used right. This doesn’t seem to be using them right – the kidnappers will no doubt be overjoyed to have indirectly harmed both the Iraqi parliament and Sunni interests in the country. Juan Cole adds:

The announcement is a huge blow to the Maliki government, which had prided itself on presiding over a government of national unity that included the Sunni Arabs. The Iraqi Accord Front has 44 deputies in the 275-member parliament.

A good fortnight after everybody else, I’ve finally read through the khalilzad telegram, which makes me realise what a chaotic Mad Max world it is out there in Iraq. Not that I’ve ever seen Mad Max, but the stereotypes fit.

You keep on reading about political situations so bad they force large numbers of people to kill themselves. Here’s one about indebted Indian farmers – but there are others about [Russia](http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7257-3.cfm) and, saddest of all, [two small islands near Australia](http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,1803488,00.html).

And I don’t know what conclusions to draw. Has anybody investigated how to stop so many of these people killing themselves? Is the solution to sort out the economy, or could we get away with putting prozac in the water?