• Seanbaby’s Hostess Page … ‘In the seventies, villains weren’t as deadly as they are now. All it took to be evil back then was a pair of bellbottoms with matching turtleneck and headband. Maybe an afro, maybe just some panties and a cape. One or two of them thought just being ugly would bring the world to its knees, and most times it almost worked.’
• Atari 2600 Porn and a Brief History of Video Games … ‘The Atari 2600 wasn’t just built for games. It was built to punch our brains in the face with it’s indescribable madness. And this article is here to try to describe some of its most disturbing games.’
• Seanbaby’s Super Friends Page … ‘The Super Friends somehow stayed alive for 10 years by hiring people who could talk to fish, match a cape to their underwear, and turn into a bucket of water.’
• The Nation that Freaked Out … Seanbaby on the War on Terrorism: ‘One of the biggest tragedies involving airport security was the huge number of editorials that appeared in every paper, magazine, and TV show in the country complaining about it. That’s fine; you should complain every time someone shoves a bomb-sniffing dog three feet into your asshole for wanting to ride their plane. Those don’t bother me. The editorials that bothered me were the ones by people complaining security wasn’t tight enough. There were all these brave investigative jouranlists that were outraged they managed to get through checkpoints with a butter knife in their carry on.’

• Wilful, charming, grumpy and regally badly behaved — ‘…deference died, and if ever there was a princess who needed deference, it was Princess Margaret, implacable believer in the ancient and divine right of royalty to behave badly. In this, she might be blamed for a lack of intelligence and sensitivity; there can be little doubt either that she and her life led the move downmarket into the unforgiving public glare. But whatever else you might feel, there must be admiration for the gusto with which she threw herself into the plot. If life resembles nothing so much as a bad movie on Channel 5, Margaret is its queen. ‘
• The final days at the personal court of Britain’s alternative Queen — ‘The problem was very much one of the institution of the Royal Family, permanently stuck, it seems, in a 1950s version of Britain. “The Queen Mother, and to some extent the Queen herself, have very little time for illness,” says another source. “When Princess Margaret used to take to her bed, her mother would come in and pull back the covers, saying, ‘What’s all this nonsense? Get up!’.”‘

• Film: Risky Business … ‘Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then say, “What the fuck.” “What the fuck” gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.’ [Related: Risky Business at IMDB]
• Comic: Swamp Thing 21 — The Anatomy Lesson … ‘You see, throughout his miserable existance, the only thing that could have kept him sane was the hope that he might one day regain his humanity… the knowledge that under all that slime he was still Alec Holland. But if he’s read my notes he’ll know that just isn’t true. He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland. He’s just a ghost. A ghost dressed in weeds.’
• Book: Christine by Stephen King … ‘If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.’
• Game: Manic Miner by Matthew Smith … ‘Can YOU take the challenge and guide Willy through the underground caverns to the surface and riches. In order to move to the next chamber, you must collect all the flashing keys in the room while avoiding nasties like POISONOUS PANSIES and SPIDERS and SLIME and worst of all MANIC MINING ROBOTS. When you have all the keys, you can enter the portal which will now be flashing. The games ends when you have been ‘got’ or fallen heavily three times.’
• News: Headlines on Ceefax for the evening of Monday 3rd October 1983 also Guardian Coverage from 1983 … Mrs Thatcher in 1983: ‘ She has a temperamental determination and some shrewd populist instincts and she has acquired that inner metal which comes from having visited the edge of disaster. But she owes as much to luck as to native skill and her success has been achieved in spite of her propensities to rash misjudgment, wilfulness, and narrowness of mind and vision. She is not short of fatal faults to bring her down.’

• Dan’s Website / Daily Doozer … January 1999.
• Bifurcated Rivets … April 1999
• Blogger Launches … Late August 1999.
• Barbelith / plasticbag.org … November 1999.
• The Nutlog … January 2000.

• Alice in Wonderland and the WTC Disaster … ‘The predictability of the ritualistic, emotionless, reptilian mind can be seen in the news management that has followed this U.S. disaster. Look at what always happens in these circumstances and you will see that the blueprint is the same in almost every case. Before the event happens the fall-guy or “patsy” is already set up to take the blame, thus steering the public mind away from dangerous speculation and onto a pre-ordained target. After the Kennedy assassination it was Lee Harvey Oswald; after Oklahoma it was Timothy McVeigh; now it is Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden, deeply misguided as he may be, is no more responsible for what happened this week than I am.’
• How it is possible to orchestrate and mastermind a terrorist attack without the terrorists themselves even knowing who is really behind it? … ‘The Illuminati do not represent a “side” or a “faction”. They CREATE the “sides” and the “factions” and they use them to manipulate the game of divide and rule and centralisation of global power. They operate within the Islamic world as they operate within the “western world”. So as the bigger pyramids envelope the smaller pyramids you reach a point in the structure where the same force is manipulating and organising the horrors in America while also manipulating and organising the RESPONSE to those horrors through their puppets such as Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Blair.’

‘In November, on a blustery cold day in northern Germany, a young woman in Hamburg, the former girlfriend and now wife of one of Atta’s old roommates, talked about an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She said when the bombs started falling in Afghanistan, she would sit in front of her television, staring in disbelief, unable to comprehend that the bombs were in a very real sense put in motion by her husband’s old roommate. Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didn’t fit. She would ask herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It’s impossible, she said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.’

• Dan is wondering about Human Cocks.
• Dave is pondering the future.
• Matt is filing things for the future.
• Meg is burning CD’s for her sister.
• Mo has got water in his bathroom.
• Tom thinks he isn’t Arch, Illicit or Warped.

• Don’t mess with the man in the leather skirt — profile of Russell Crowe … ‘I’d move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed up in a huge tidal wave. If there were a bubonic plague in England, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack. In Australia, they treat you like a piece of furniture. Your mates are your mates and the folks who hate your dark and bloody guts, they don’t change their minds. That’s why I love it, I suppose.”‘
• Interview with Tony Benn … ‘Today, he is wearing House of Commons braces and an old shirt with little burn holes in it. “I burn holes in all my shirts and cardigans all the time. This is the trouble with being a pipe-smoker.” Overall, he has the look of a homely, crumpled, go-ahead vicar. I ask him if the Labour Party ever tried to tart him up, encouraged him to seek advice from a Colour Me Beautiful consultant. “No. And I think that they wouldn’t have succeeded. I’ve still got the coat I was given when I was demobilised in 1946.”‘

• A wizard with Worlds — Interview with Pullman … ‘Earlier this year, he gave a remarkable speech called ‘The Republic of Heaven’ in which he succeeded in converting the words ‘God is dead’ into something positive. He refreshingly recruited Jane Eyre to his cause while giving Tolkien and C.S. Lewis the thumbs down for failing to salute the real world. He is not short of faith but it believes in humanity and in goodness, not in God. He believes we need this ‘thing which I’ve called joy’. His is an engaging moral optimism.’
• Not for children — Robert McCrumb on Pullman … ‘…you can enumerate any number of qualities that separate Pullman from the herd, but at the end of the day, it’s because he grounds his fantasy in well-observed reality and is not afraid to acknowledge the importance of plot in his work. ‘When you are writing for children,’ he told the Bookseller in 1996, ‘the story is more important than you are. You can’t be self-conscious, you just have to get out of the way.’ Because it is easier to write description and dialogue than tell a good story, very many contemporary novelists write bad plots – bad plots that are full of inexplicable lacunae and wonky motivation. Pullman seems to know this. His writing has the hallmark of work that has been held up to the light and minutely inspected from every angle. Look at it where you like – it is seamless.’