It’s kawaii, it looks like a birth control pack, it comes in pink, paisley, and other “feminine” colours. Yes, new from DoCoMo (Japan’s largest provider of mobile phones) is the FOMA D702iF:

It also comes with a number of features designed to appeal exclusively to women: the “biorhythm memo” alerts you 3 days before, and on the day of, your ovulation (I’m NOT joking – click here); a recipe database that, I suppose, allows you to keep on top of all those recipes as you fritter away your time on your endless commute; and, best of all, it has a “camouflage melody” that allows you to press a subtly located button on the side of the phone in order to pretend that you’ve got a call coming in, so that you can avoid any pesky people who may want to talk to you in public (yes, Blanche DuBois, you can shake off all those unsuitable gentlemen suitors with the press of a button).

It’s also designed to “fit a woman’s hand” with a “round form” and a “feminine size”, which reminds me of the article I read in the Nikkei weekly several months ago about mobile phone manufacturers’ research into phone size relative to women’s hands. If I recall correctly, the result was that the phones should not be longer than 24 or 25mm in order to fit into a woman’s hand, which was supposedly much more comfortable than other phones which tend to be a full 3mm longer (yes, three millimetres).

While I am in the market for a new mobile, I think I’ll give this one a pass…

As Maureen Dowd puts it in her Oct. 25 column:

Things have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president.

You’d need a divining rod to make sense of the administration’s recent clarification of their Iraq policy. It goes something like this: we are not staying the course on staying the course because, if we stay the course on staying the course, people will think we’re staying the course and we want Americans to know that we’re not really staying the course, and that we weren’t staying the course all along – we just said we were (again and again and again).

As Dowd puts it (and others have commented long before this month):

Of course, the administration has never really said what “the course” is, so it was never really apparent what “staying” it meant, anyhow.

I’m not in the Keith Olbermann fan club or anything (I know I was praising him the other day), but watch this (via Crooks and Liars) for a montage of Bush’s now-abandoned “message” and a good chuckle, and then shake your head in disbelief when you follow it up with this.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, “doublethink” is defined and includes the following:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies…

Sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four just might be Rove’s bible.