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| "John, you just about crashed into the Empire State Building! Hey,
that would be cool." - Microsoft take
a few bits out of their Flight Simulator game.
[via zx64]
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| Good things at DayPop,
resolving the classic problem of search-engine dustiness by
frequently spidering news sites and weblogs to keep up with
current events. Only a matter of time, I trust, before Google
implements such a gubbins as a search-option.
| Three-minute-silences and the Day
of Silence seem patronisingly insulting for anyone over the age of
seven, harking back to the schooldays
when teachers felt they had to tell children to sit and be quiet and think
about some tragedy or other, because they wouldn't have done
otherwise. Is it really that absurd to take private contemplation and
mourning as read, at a time like this?
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| A shady
but intriguing claim that the over-used footage of cheering Palestinians
is actually archive stuff from ten years ago. Even if it's not, it's
still a lot of rage-inspiring hyperbole for some astonishingly minimal and
context-free footage. It scares me how much of the recent opinion poll results have been shaped entirely by television.
[via Raven]
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| Face
of Satan spotted not once, but twice, in the smoke clouds
above the collapsing World Trade Centre. Time to call in Quatermass
and bomb Hell, I suppose.
[via Quin]
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| A somewhat predictable but superbly-written article from Richard Dawkins in the Guardian
today, on suicide bombers and the elephant of religion.
That if the death of a martyr is genuinely seen as a "hyperspace button
to another universe", it makes for a rather terrifying world. Sobering
angles.
(And there's a bit about pigeon-guided
missiles.)
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| Something Jon Snow said while the BBC were busy
speculatively-interviewing London firemen - why wasn't there any
coverage of the initial hijacks? Government suppression to spare any
cheery "terrorists steal planes, heading for Manhattan, may be
suicide bombers" headlines on the half-eight news? And did they
shoot that fourth plane
down, or not? Much conspiracy fuel. America's over-eager
sabre-rattling and waving of
laughable
evidence almost suggests confused disappointment that a random
terrorist agency hasn't improvised a confession yet. I worry.
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| Knocking the World Trade Centre down with a hijacked passenger plane
only seems a stupefyingly obvious thing in hindsight. Except that
the
X-Files people thought of it a while ago. Conspiracy
ahoy.
[via
qwertyuiop]
| It'll be interesting to see how the
"no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts,
and those who harbor them" trick works if it turns out to be those
pesky American terrorists again. (Well, it won't be interesting
really.)
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"I, as we've already established, am in my head. So, that's a torso,
arms and legs occupying a cranium (Is it even fair to call it my head,
now? It's not part of me, any more). How can one fit all that inside a
skull? It must be either a really large container, or very small contents."
Reading up on other stuff for distraction, Raven's early-morning
consciousness boot-up has gone horribly, horribly awry at
Upsideclone.
And Victor writes
"Back on the path the bind weed turns my head, a beautiful Keefian
trumpet on a stem of strangulation."
over at the Clown, which is the best
sentence I've read in ages. Bindweed is easily my favourite plantlife - a
glorious showpiece of evolution, of merciless, unthinking beauty.
Weeding seems such an arrogant thing to do. We'll lose in the end.
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| It all seems too vast and symbolic to have really happened. We are
sickened by the feeble, inescapable fate of those trapped and waving from
the higher windows, can imagine the rising realisation of the hijacked
passengers, but as the camera pulls back and the window columns blur to
pinstripe, it becomes unimaginable. An entire town shuffled and restacked
into the sky, to be demolished at a stroke by its society's own toys,
steered to destruction by four people with knives. If only we'd
had giant missile-defence laser robots! Feh.
It felt like the cliff-edge of apocalypse - that there could be
another crash-landing, and another, and a figure with subtitles
declaring war or madness through our television screens. The world still seems
to be here this morning, but with Bush making "no distinction between
the terrorists who committed these acts, and those who harbor them"
and seeming more like a teleprompter-reading gibbon than ever,
it looks like we might be in for another world war after all. Humanity.
Bah.
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