Video game war (and other stories)

How have I never come across this before?

I present to you the dullest blog in the world:

Thinking about making some food   April 8
I was doing some things and noticed that it was nearly time for something to eat. I may well go to the kitchen and make some food shortly. This will probably happen five or ten minutes, although it could be as long as fifteen.

The blog can be seen as a subtle satire, nay parody, of the self-centeredness of the classic just-moved-from-LiveJournal type weblogger, whose every action is blithely noted down and stored away, archived for posterity. A mocking tribute, no less, to the leagues of journal-bloggers who are slowly filling up the ether with the minute details of what they had for breakfast, and how long they were stuck in the traffic this morning.

Or it can just be seen as funny. You choose. (And anyone who imagines any sincerity in the above paragraph is hugely mistaken, I might add. Particularly in light of the nature of my last three blog entries.)

Today I've read a number of articles that offer an interesting slant on the war in Iraq. One in particular stood out - James Lilecks on the "video game war".

Every day I watch the news, hours and hours of news, and I?ve yet to see one dead Iraqi soldier.

Now it?s a video game war.

[ . . . ]

Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. [ . . . ] Don?t presume we can?t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I?m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. The way that some media have been reporting this made-for-TV war has had the most incredible Wag The Dog-ish overtones. Although, admittedly, the British media seem to be rather less biased than the US equivalents, all the images we see are sanitised versions of events carefully selected to back up the notion that our armies are just walking into their cities, welcomed on all sides by the Iraqis' open arms. (Was that 'semi-automatic arms'?)

There was a particularly good "Oops, we didn't mean that" kind of moment on my radio news this morning, covering the toppling of Saddam's statue - "History is being rewritten at the moment!"

Freudian slip? You never can tell...

On a remarkably different note, who wants one of these?

Design graduate Andrew Cubitt has taken the humble toilet roll and turned it into a hi-tech news and information service. A unit installed in front of a toilet on the cubicle wall provides up-to-the-minute information on products, stocks and shares and lottery results.

People can even print off the information on a standard toilet roll.

Well, it's better than taking the newspaper in there with you...