The British Are Going! The British Are Going!

BBC.com is reporting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair will announce a timetable for the withdrawal of his country's troops from Iraq on Wednesday.

This sets yet another new record for the embarrassment level of George W. Bush and his administration. Although Blair certainly has not represented the majority opinion of the United Kingdom's citizens regarding the Iraq War, the fact that Bush has had him in his pocket since 2003 at least made him look good. The prime minister, with his outspoken support for the U.S. involvement in Iraq, has served essentially as a high-class hooker for the president on an international scale: everyone else at the party knew that he was paid for, but there was no question that George had spared no expense to get the classiest-looking gal he could find.

The scheduling of Blair's timetable-for-withdrawal announcement, however, sends a very clear, very depressing message to Bush: even the hooker thinks the party he is paying her to be at has gotten a little too sketchy for her taste, and she's leaving without him.

'Diddy' Not a Stupid Enough Name to Prevent Other People from Wanting It

You would think that an adult could voluntarily refer to himself as "Diddy" and be left alone, if not derisively laughed at by others. But the artist (?) formerly known as Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy, aka Diddy Kong (he hasn't actually started using that last one yet, but I assume he will) currently finds himself facing legal action from a London-based record producer named Richard Dearlove--who, for reasons unfathomable to man, also wants people to call him "Diddy" with a straight face.

Specifically, Dearlove wants people to know him as Diddy on MySpace and YouTube in Britain, and he claims that the American Diddy (the "real Diddy", if there could be such a thing?) has broken an earlier agreement not to let his MySpace and YouTube pages show their faces in Dearlove's territory and risk confusing residents of England as to who is the One True Diddy.

I don't know how you prevent web pages from being viewed by an entire country, but if Dearlove wins his court case, American Diddy is going to have to figure it out (and I'm sure he could--he seems quite computer-savvy) or change his name on the internets. Dearlove's lawyer is suggesting that American Diddy revert to a "neutral" name like P. Diddy (since when is "P. Diddy" neutral?), but I think that American Diddy should turn this lemon of a legal situation into lemonade and use the opportunity to once again completely overhaul his moniker. In addition to the previously suggested "Diddy Kong", he might also want to consider "Ziggy", "Twinkletoes", "Secretary Assface Fairypants", or perhaps "Guy Who Might Have Secretly Been Involved in Killing the Notorious B.I.G."

Hmmm. Maybe not that last one.