Operation Misery: Month 7, Week 3, Day 7.

In the past few hours Rihanna has performed her concert in Adelaide, Australia. Unfortunately the amount of information that was available through unofficial channels was not as high as it was for the Perth concert. This really serves to underline that it is unfair to rely on these official channels (i.e concert goers) especially when you consider the ages of some of the people involved.

However I do know that Rihanna performed the standard set-list with the standard costumes changes although I will need to wait for the videos to comment on the quality of Rihanna performance. The big talking point though is that Rihanna took to the stage some 1 hour and 20 minutes behind schedule. This is significantly more than the level of lateness that is to be expected and getting close to the Boston debacle when Rihanna appeared on stage almost three hours late. Rihanna's lateness appears to be the result of the curious decision by Rihanna's CIA handler/Live Nation (the management) to fly Rihanna from Perth to Adelaide just before the concert. This meant that not only was Rihanna flying when she should have been sleeping but she also had to adjust to the slight (90min) time difference between Perth and Adelaide. Therefore management's attempts to pique everyone's interest as to whether Rihanna's Australian hosts are engaging in a low level harassment campaign against her seem rather irrelevant because Rihanna's management are clearly engaging in a harassment campaign themselves.

With this sort of hostile conduct from the management it should come as no surprise that they are still trying to enforce their information blackout. Sadly that was something that was obvious from yesterday when the US Department of Transportation announced that it was investigating Japan's Asiana airline over its response to the crash of a Boeing 777 at San Francisco airport back in July 2013. The allegation is that Asiana failed to provide a contact telephone number for friends and relatives of passengers within the required 1 hour. Apparently Asiana did provide a telephone number after 3 hours but this was for an automated ticket booking service. They then provided an appropriate contact number a few hours later but that number was changed the following day. This sounds remarkably similar to my attempts to get in more direct contact with Rihanna that began a year ago today. Therefore the US is clearly investigating Asiana to pressure Japan into a discussion about why I'm not currently in more direct contact with Rihanna at this point. I happen to think that this is exactly the conversation the Japanese were trying to have with the US when Asiana failed to provide the contact telephone number at the time making this current situation even more inexplicable.

If the objective of the current situation is to make everyone deeply annoyed at the US is certainly seems to be working. Yesterday the Polish national airline LOT reported that two of it's Boeing 787 Dreamliner's had to be grounded because they were missing fuel filters and gave Boeing until the end of 2013 to pay compensation relating to faults with the aircraft or face legal action. This is all great news for Boeing's European rival Airbus who yesterday confirmed USD15bn worth of deals with airlines in China and Vietnam which of course are in South-East Asia - the area that this third leg of Rihanna's tour has been especially targeting.

With such clear evidence mounting that the management's Rihanna plan is having a devastating impact on the US' reputation and interests across the globe the obvious question is why are they still so confident they're being successful? To find the answer to that you need to look towards the America's Cup sailing race.  In the first eight races the US' Team Oracle were doing appallingly being beaten every single time by New Zealand. Then last Tuesday (17/9/13) just as Rihanna was making her ill-advised trip to Thailand the New Zealand team suddenly fell to pieces and the US' Team Oracle won 9 races in a row to win the competition. This has gone down as one of the most amazing turn-arounds in sporting history and feels very much like a very active member of the UK Commonwealth Realm egging Rihanna's management on by giving them confidence that their Rihanna plan is being a success. It is a sad flaw of the human condition that if someone wants to believe they are being a success they will ignore all the evidence to the contrary provided they are given the false confidence to do so.

17:25 on 26/9/13 (UK date).