Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

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Article about Robert Green in The Observer;

I only got picked once [for an England squad] when I was playing outside the Premiership. To put it bluntly, I'd fancy my chances more there. The Premiership is where you want to be, everyone does. Otherwise you question people's ambition. I like playing in big games and they're not going to come around as much. But you get paid a lot of money to play a good standard of football. If I played in the park I'd still want to win.

Article and interview about Johnny Depp:

I made a decision that I would only do the things that I wanted to, that I found interesting and thought I could bring something to. It's still shocking to me that I can work.

Top 10 Web fads;

Internet phenomena. Memes. Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke through to the mainstream. Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs."

So Inter Milan have cancelled their pre-season tour. I can't help thinking of the old joke about how Italian tanks have 15 gears - one forward and fourteen reverse;

...the Italian club cancelled their pre-season tour of England because of safety fears in the wake of the London bombings. The Serie A side were due to play Leicester tomorrow night then Palace, Norwich and Portsmouth, but notified the clubs by fax that they were pulling out.

Paper on racism in Japan given at Meiji Gakuin Symposium;

This paper discusses the phenomenon of racism in Japan, and how Japan's version is subtler than those found in other societies. This subtlety has both positive and negative consequences: Negatively, it deprives the issue of the power of social shock, alleviating pressure to eliminate racism through clear and expedite legislation. Positively, because the Japanese variant is grounded less in an inexorable hatred per se, it will be comparatively easier to persuade people of racism's evils, particularly since Japanese paradigms conflating race and nationality increasingly affect multinational and genetically-diverse Japanese citizens.

... and now the clean up begins. Jack Ruby anybody?

"I saw an Asian guy. He ran on to the train, he was hotly pursued by three plain clothes officers, one of them was wielding a black handgun. He half tripped... they pushed him to the floor and basically unloaded five shots into him."

It's obvious, isn't it? They planted the latest round of bombs in London; they being the government, secret service, MI5 or whichever bunch does this top secret stuff. Let's look at the evidence;

1. It's in their interests to sustain the fear of ongoing terrorism

2. It can't be just good luck that all 4 'bombs' failed to properly detonate. The chances of at least one working seem reasonable. If these people had been serious about suicide bombings then they would surely have had the skills to manage that.

3. All 4 'bombers' managed to escape. Surely at least one of the 4 would have been sufficiently incapacitated by the minor blasts to have been apprehended by the public. This all took place in busy and possibly confined places. Scuffles even apparently took place between one of the 'bombers' and some members of the public. Yet, they all escaped. Strange, that.

Now this sent a shiver down my spine;

The National Sex Offender Public Registry Web site is currently unavailable due to heavy demand. Please visit http://www.nsopr.gov/ again later or use the following list to search individual state's sex offender registry sites.

All over North America, rednecks and zealots are feverishly clicking away. How long before Charles Clarke starts looking at this?

Hot on the heels of Bob Dylan cuddling up to Starbucks, surviving Black Panthers have found an unusual new way to exploit their brand;

Former Black Panthers in Oakland have cooked up a hot sauce called 'Burn Baby Burn'. The phrase is associated with the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965. Onlookers started chanting it after police arrested a young man for drunken driving. The confrontation triggered six days of rioting, resulting in more than 30 deaths, 1,000 injuries and devastating fire damage to the neighborhood. "It was a catchy phrase, and I thought it would be reminiscent of the 60s," Fredrika Newton said Tuesday. "I sure didn't want it to be a call to burn anything other than our taste buds."

Seminal criticism of the corporatisation of Hollywood by Pauline Kael;

This is one of the angriest rants against business-as-usual in the film industry ever written - and one of the most lethally accurate, I always believed, since it stemmed from Kael's experience in working as a kind of senior development executive at Paramount Pictures. Her piece was seen at the time as a kind of obituary for the golden era of expressionism American movies had enjoyed from the late '60s to mid '70s, which was pretty much killed off by the marketing revolution brought about by the wide release of Jaws in 1975 and the growing corporate influence upon the filmmaking process that followed.

Sixty years old this month, As We May Think by Vannevar Bush which foresaw the Internet way before its time. Always worth reading again occasionally;

The process of tying two items together is the important thing. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined.

One of the more unusual summer festivals took place today - Saudi Arabian Days, a cultural showpiece in its second year.



Fenced off like a harem in a far corner of Heaton Park, the sound of ululating women floated on the air, and after picking our way through the minefield of balloon sellers and bouncy castles that leech us parents at every public gathering, we were treated to the delights of the Empty Quarter.

The first large tent was dedicated to old Saudi, cultural artefacts such as carpets and teapots. Next door the state oil company sponsored another tent packed with huge flat screen Panasonic monitors showcasing modern Saudi - smiling business people, Western shopping malls and big sparkly oil refineries.

Strangely, one corner was given over to a desert mural in front of which the floor was covered in sand. Lots of little Muslim kids were scrabbling around in there filling little bags with the stuff, presumably taking home authentic holy land sand for the mantelpiece. Oscar had a quick look but lost interest when it became apparent that the floor wasn't covered with sweets as it had first seemed.

Further on, several paddocks contained the fauna of the Kingdom - Arabian horses (much like english ones to the untrained eye), birds of prey (actually a falconer from Stoke) and four moth-eaten, mangy camels, secured out of spitting and biting distance behind two imposing wire fences.

Still, at least we were in the presence of royalty. Prince Turki - Ambassador to the Court of St James - was there, kissing babies and pressing the flesh. I wondered about the security so soon after the London Bombing; you'd imagine the Prince would be surrounded by Saudi Special Forces, but it all looked quite relaxed and informal.

There wasn't a lot more to it, but on the way out, strategically placed to milk the anticipated Anglo-Arab bonhomie, they were giving out a leaflet called 'Saudi Arabia and Human Rights: A Clarification'. I haven't read it yet, but Dad seemed none too impressed with the claims of religious tolerance, explaining that when he'd lived there he'd witnessed a Saudi manager grab some Filipino employees' Xmas Cake and throw it clear across the room!

But at least they weren't beheaded.

The story of a man who committed suicide under the weight of credit card debts;

It began with a loan for 4,000 and finished with a 130,000 debt and a man ending his life in despair. His wife was barely aware of the calamity by credit card that had befallen them. How did it happen?

Particularly interesting is the light it sheds on the tactics and technology of the direct marketing industry;

Mosaic's lifestyle data is often really quite impolite. For instance, when people within the category known as "Welfare Borderlines" buy cosmetics, they are "likely to be striking accessories, rather than means for displaying natural beauty".

Wonderful stuff from Japan. Flavour of the month are the Otaku; socially-disabled supernerds that dress bad, live at home, obsess over manga and like waitresses dressed as schoolgirls.

Such is the otakus' newfound cachet that the search is on for Japan's top 100 geeks. Thousands of men are expected to sit the exam, organised by the Tokyo-based publisher Biblos, in which they will be tested on their knowledge of the fundamentals of the nerd lifestyle - comic books, video games, cartoons, female pop idols and computers.

The Observer Food monthly asks the question, "If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?". Interesting perspective on the food scare that seems to parallel society's attitudes towards MMR in many ways.

Chris Birchall of Port Vale made football history, becoming the first white man to score a goal for Trinidad and Tobago. Birchall seems destined for a grander stage, not least an appearance at the World Cup finals next summer if Trinidad and Tobago maintain progress in their Concacaf group.

Now that's a cunning plan - outsourcing your work to India so you can sit around getting paid a reasonable sum for very little;

Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."

Spike Lee answers email questions from Independent readers.

I still think that until this country deals with slavery it's never going to get to the place where it needs to be. There's great trepidation on both sides, black and white, to deal with slavery. There's guilt, blame, shame, everything. People like to forget about it like it never happened.

It was awesome. A historic, once-in-a-lifetime event with global importance and ridiculously high expectations. Yes, Pink Floyd together again.

Well, OK, it was all right. Let's face it, much of the interest value came from looking to see how uncomfortable they looked. You'd have guessed that Roger Waters, rather than Pete Townsend, was the guitar-playing sex offender if you just had Dave Gilmour's wary expression to go by. The group hug at the end was a bit embarrassing, too. Waters' cajoling put me in mind of a ne'er-do-well son trying to make good with his rich father on his death bed.

Of their brief set, I enjoyed 95% of Breathe; the out-of-context ending I find a bit abrupt. Money I think lacks substance - in a relative way - but I loved hearing Comfortably Numb, even on tinny, silent, telly sound. I think it's going to have to be my first purchase on iTunes. Ironic then, that the only other act that really caught my eye during the whole event was the Scissor Sisters, who have apparently done a disco version of it (no, I can't imagine it either).

Maybe they should have gotten together on stage. Gilmour would have preferred it, I'm sure.

From the London Review:

What the fuck do you think you're doing? This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work. All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds. Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Too busy to think about friends? Need to take a proactive approach towards relationship management? Solutions are not far off. This guy is experimenting with software to visually represent the status of relationships;

The avatars use body language to show how recently you've contacted each person: Regularly contacted friends appear alert and look directly at you. Less frequent contacts might slouch and turn to the side, and infrequent contacts could have their backs turned.

It's an interesting idea. Relationships are much more than frequency of contact, but the correlation between electronic communication frequency and relationship health is surely significant and becoming more so.

Thomas Helveg's brief stay at Carrow Road looks set to draw to a close later this week after he was given the go-ahead to join Bundesliga outfit Borussia Monchengladbach. The Danish defender will fly out to Germany today to meet his potential new employers following the Canaries' decision to accept a deal that could bring £170,000 to the Carrow Road coffers.

Yani messing about with the hosepipe on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Not a quality image but it captures her perfectly.

Several examples of American terrible anti-Japanese propaganda from World War 2. Strangely, the page is sponsored by my old friends Matsushita Panasonic.

America's fear and anger truly show through political cartoons and posters published in January of 1942. One memorable poster was one called 'Murder'. This poster shows a Japanese soldier knocking down soldiers and people. On the poster, the message read, "Stay on the job until every murdering Jap is wiped out."

Nifty work by my friend Mike, who has something of a Big Brother fixation. He's created a clever page which not only shows images from a whole bunch of traffic cameras belonging to Sheffield City Council, but also collects updates every minute. The very first one is monitoring the area in front of Sheffield train station which I have to negotiate every morning. Not only are the city fathers remodelling the whole station approach, but the university is also about to demolish the building in the centre, the old Nelson Mandela student union building, to create new teaching facilities.

Hot on the heels of the site I found yesterday honouring war dead, now there's this map showing geographical distribution over time of US casualties in Iraq using the recently released Google Earth. What's really amazing is that you can zoom in and around to particular areas, and then identity specific details of the person from that area. If the two datasets were combined the maps could show photos as well.