Condi Rice visited Blackburn, Lancashire and all we got was this stupid T-shirt. It seems that since Jack Straw visited Rice’s hometown of Buttfuck, Alabama, Rice promised to do the same for him the next time she was in the UK. While she was there she decided to ask Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies what the line “4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” meant.

It means Condi is a square. Even Davies, who was never the hippest of the Fab Four’s chroniclers, thought her question too lame to be answered straight. (Lennon, legend has it, had read a newspaper article about the number of potholes in Blackburn and was no doubt amazed that someone had bothered to count them all, all the more amazed having been no doubt on acid at the time.) Why not listen to the pretty sound of the protestors instead?

For as Rice lamely admitted that mistakes were made in Iraq, she defended the rationale of the war — and was greeted by a chorus of boos wherever she went. “Four Thousand No’s in Blackburn, Lancashire” was how the protest was billed and as the Times reported, friendly faces were in short supply. “Shame on you!” they chanted, while some wore T-shirts that read, “No torture. No compromise.”

Quite a few of the hostiles were Muslims, hand-picked by Straw’s advance team. When Bush’s people select a crowd to greet the president or any of his henchpeople, no dissent is allowed. Everybody stays in line. In England it seems some care more about the holes that have been shot through Iraqui citizens in the growing civil war, a conflict Rice had a hand in creating.

The other article Lennon read that day was about the Guiness heir who killed himself in his car. The juxtaposition of the stories — the hole in the man, the holes in the road — made for a kind of art and a commentary on life’s more futile aspect.

I’d love to turn her on.