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Fray.com: Missing Pieces.

From the Guardian’s letters pages, via linkmachinego: The omnipotence of American culture and childhood innocence ended in our house on September 11. I sat with my young son watching the images from the World Trade Centre. Suddenly we saw people hanging from the windows at the top of the stricken tower. “Mum,” he said, “where’s Spiderman? He could save them.” Later, as I tucked him up in bed, he asked sleepily, “Is Spiderman not real, mum?” [link]

8.30am: Tom awakens on the sofa in the sitting room. He has spent the night there and feels stiff, cold and creaky.

Pete, The Cat That Looks Like Hitler.

Check your level of mental health.

The terrifying lunacy of America’s fringe manifests itself: Falwell blames gays, liberal groups for terrorist attacks [Metafilter]. This is why it is not simply enough to mourn – people must investigate the background of these events before they can make sense of them. Otherwise the extremists in the west will make this battle their own. [song of the moment?“>Song of the moment?]

Don’t inflate the size of the enemy to fit the crime: “Searching for parallels to help them understand what has happened and what they should do next, Americans cite Pearl Harbour. A better reference would be the Cuban missile crisis. Then, as now, the United States had a new and untried president, John F Kennedy, and faced a danger that the wrong moves could turn a bad situation into a worse one.”.

The BBC’s attempts to start a new digital youth channel have failed, in an extraordinarily bizarre decision by the culture secretary. Interestingly, the blocked channel was to be called BBC Three, which (since BBC Four was passed) will result in an interesting hole in the TV pages…

A weblog post that I disagree with

I am extraordinarily tired and frayed at the moment. I look around me and everyone is engaged in the worship of this tragedy. Much like with Princess Diana, everyone is busy feeling. Some people are mourning, some are in violent rages. Everything that is being done is being done on instinct, and while we’re busy wondering what will happen, civil liberties are under threat (worldwide), ethnic minorities are being hounded (worldwide) and cities are building trenches to hide in when the inevitable apocalypse rains down from the sky. There’s a danger in uniting countries – do they unite behind the attitudes of the progressive, the mournful, the violent? And does anyone have the strength – or the inclination – to work through the issues from the beginning. At the moment, people are all running in one direction, and no one knows whether it’s the future or a cliff…