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On the pornography of news:

News is increasingly characterised as entertainment, but this only goes half-way. News is essentially a pornographic enterprise – and a dark one at that – repackaging human misery and destruction in easy to assimilate text and pictures – the content of which becomes swiftly meaningless to the audience, to be replaced by image and spectacle of collapse, catastrophe and mayhem. When did you last gasp at the news? Was it when you heard about an international summit limiting arms? Or was it when you saw images of earthquake damage, diseased people or identikit pictures of recently deceased people. And why the fasination with murder? More people die of car accidents and failures in the health service every day than are murdered in a year. The news packages up killings, and sells them to our worst instincts. News is rape trials and police plodding through fields looking for corpses – it is sex scandals and disgrace. It is all stories, and it’s a strange death instinct in all of us that gets off on it.

Whatever anyone else tells you, there is time for change. The election was a farce – we can make it right once more. The two lacklustre candidates that America was presented with need to accept that neither of them were right for the country – and that’s why the country couldn’t decide. We need a third candidate – an intelligent, able … sexy … candidate. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you: Pacey Witter for President!.

Newsflash: Davo launches ickle.org.

Via linkmachinego: Sandman author Neil Gaiman is maintaining his own Blogger powered weblog about the writing of his new book American Gods.

Bills, bills, bills. They’ve all come at once. Water bills (£35), Council Tax (£90), Phone (£200), Barclaycard (£50), Frasercard (£10). It’s pretty much cleaned me out, and just as I’m going to be unemployed in … say … four days.

Check the source code: “It’s not like this is the last episode of M*A*S*H or anything.”

If you have any down time at work today, I very much suggest you watch a couple of episodes of Behind the Music … That Sucks.

Spotted on a sticker stuck to the front of Time Out towers this morning was a URL written in a Time Out font: YourTimeIsUp.co.uk [whois]. If you go to the address, you see the logo again – written in almost exactly the same style as the adverts that were circulated for the timeout.com/shopping site. And then – a couple of moments later – you get redirected through to one of Time Out‘s direct competitors: LondonTribe.com. Good prank or legal disaster? Only you can decide…

If there were, say, a concurrent reality which we all occupied simultaneously with this one, a reality in which symbol and image ruled supreme, and where the reality as experienced within the empiricist mindset fell away – and in this reality, change rolled like storm-clouds across our collective experiences – then I think there might be something burnt-edged blue-tinged about the last two days – something seen through an indigo filter – from above. There’s a sensation in the air that clasps the lungs and dislocates the heart. An anxiety, a sense of the world shifting uncomfortable with itself for a moment. I feel it myself, and I see it in the writings of those around me.