Thursday Thirteen, with some redaction

1. Notebooks: It was fellow blogger Nikki-Ann who re-inforced that it's a good idea to keep notes for blog entries.
2. Evernote: I usually keep my notes in Evernote, which runs on just about everything. I can even talk to it via my watch and it seems to know what I'm saying. All a roundabout way to get to this rather random Thursday Thirteen.
3. Leaked memos and emails: Kind of ties in with the note-taking theme, although for a single politician to have two plausibly deniable leaks when trying for a leadership position, both aimed unerringly at opponents. Well. Too much co-incidence?

4. Knife tricks: I'll admit that I almost believed Penfold Gove when he was dispatching Boris.
5. Gone Gopher: But at least we won't have to listen to him trying to be a leader now, although there's new clouds around one of the remaining two candidates
6. Tax specialists: Why is it so difficult to find people with relatively clear back stories? I can understand the unreliable CVs. Its other things: No off-shore property trusts (*cough* Bandal), no specialist assistance from close relatives with taxation matters(*cough* de Putron)? Perhaps it comes with the turf?

7. Rearranging the UK: I finally understood the plan to re-arrange the UK post Brexit. South West trains have leaked the plan early. The whole country is to be pivoted around the Isle of Wight, which will become the closest point to France. The new South West rail map shows the revised configuration.
8. Containment It is quite difficult to stay on top of all the moving pieces now, with that oft uttered "It'll all work itself out".
9. General Sir John Hackett: Years ago, I read his novel, which was around the theme of containment, too many simultaneous events, which in his story led to outbreak of war.
10. Chilcot: The Iraq war doesn't have as many moving parts as the one in the novel. The report has just been released, some seven years after it was started. It reminds me of the old maxim about "I didn't have enough time to write you a short report, so I've written you a long one".
11. Forensic detailing vs Analysis: The challenge with the report is that the Executive summary is 186 pages long. It doesn't have a fast read introduction, but instead unpacks the series of events. Inevitably people look for the one liner. Whatever.
12. Girl on a Train: Was one of the best selling books of 2015, with probably about a million copies in the UK. Let's call it £10 million revenue. That's about the same amount of revenue that Chilcot and his merry band of consultants have turned over in the time that have been producing that report.
13. Crawford: I want to see the treatment of the Blair/Bush document from 2002 (preceding the Crawford, Texas meeting) which scripts their subsequent meeting and sets up the position of Blair in support of Bush. It was 15 months before the war was declared and seems to be somewhere in Volume 5.