Friday, July 22, 2005

It's happening again

If the news wasn't noteworthy enough to cross the Atlantic the news story is on the beeb.

It's weird, not managing to get a job in London is looking more and more like a good thing as the summer goes on. It was unpleasantly familiar this time around, sitting at the kitchen table while eating my lunch looking at the static pictures of police cordons and listening to the wild speculation and rumour that that rolling news purveyors have to rely on at times like this, especially when the police are trying to keep their mouths shut until they are sure just what is going on. It was noticeable, however, the difference in the tone of the reporting between the attacks of last week and today's confusing mess; last time it was all panic and shock, you could hear the weirdly human concern in the otherwise flat newsreaders. Today though it's just business as usual, admittedly this attack is nothing like the scale of the last one - although not for want of trying - but even right at the very beginning when nothing was known about what had happened other than 'Incidents' at three tube stations and one bus. Even with the echoes of the last attacks still ringing in people's ears people don't seem to be that afraid anymore, I think the attitude is that the bastards have done their worst, it's like a horror film that shows you the monster too early, it isn't half as scary the second time it appears. I think soon they will be seen in exactly the same way as the IRA - just a bunch of idiotic idealists, vicious thugs and psychopaths (and the odd combination of all three) - their mystique is breaking now, especially considering they fucked this one up.

Although I find that a bit strange, I'm assuming (my turn at wild speculation now folks) that this lot were a bunch of copycats, without the organization of the previous group, although the fuzz are saying that the forensics on the explosives matches that of the previous attack. If that is the case then it seems odd that they couldn't get the bombs to work the second time, I reckon that the spooks (MI5 probably - it's their scene) might have had a hand in this one; feeding them incorrect information or wrangling it so that their explosives were crap. In which case I think we might not know the truth about the matter until the 30 year rule releases the papers.

But anyway, I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist now, and there are definitely enough of them on the internet already - top quality nutters too, not just paranoid but really creatively so. My favorite being David Icke - look him up if you want a laugh - he thinks that all people in power are in fact man-eating, shape-shifting lizards. Various Jewish groups think that this is some kind of thinly guided anti semitism but I think that they are really reading too much into the ramblings of a nutter; for god's sake the guy is an ex sports commentator who infamously declared that he was Jesus on live TV in the '70s.

hmm. I appear to have drifted off on a bit of a tangent here, never mind, I didn't really have anything in particular to say anyway. I'm just bored and itchy and I haven't left the house for days. Tomorrow I'm going to walk down to deptford and have a look at the abomination that is parked in the Thames down there - a cruise liner called 'The World' - according to madre it looks like a floating tower block that's been coated in PVC.

Now where did I put those limpet mines...

-Ben