Even more tempted now...

babysimon's "anti-iPod", the iRiver won PC Pro's comparative review of MP3 etc players, leaving the iPod in third place.

About the only whinge is that it doesn't record from its inbuilt FM radio, but apart from that it beats the iPod handily eg with a battery life almost three times as long despite costing less.

Speaking of being cheaper

Can anyone remember the 'Don't use heroin' TV music special back in the 80s where, in the middle of their set, the lead singer of one of the bands said "Hey kids, don't use heroin... use cocaine, it's more fun! Cheaper too..."

It created somewhat of a fuss at the time :) but google doesn't seem to know about it and I've been trying to remember which band it was.

Gullible people not confined to 1930s Americans listening to The War of the Worlds

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1218779,00.html

I'm particularly amused by the idea that terrorists wouldn't have thought of placing two bombs on an underground train.

When I was watching it, I was wondering why they didn't have some of the particularly nasty possible attacks, but I suppose having your emergency planning team go "right, let's pack up and go home, there's not much we can do" doesn't make for very good TV.

( Such as? )

Iraq pictures

I didn't post about it, partly because I was busy and partly because I couldn't find a reference for it, but when BBC Radio 4 news said - last Tuesday or Wednesday evening - that the Mirror was defending the controversial 'British soldiers being nasty to Iraqis' photos as "an accurate reflection of what happened", it was clear the Mirror already knew they were staged.

Iraq video

The other thing I didn't post about was pondering over whether or not to watch the Nick Berg execution video.

On the one hand, yuck. (Understatement!)

On the other, to misquote Jagger and Richards, "Who killed Nick Berg? / When after all / It was you and me". If the government of my country hadn't backed the US government, there wouldn't have been an invasion, and he'd still be alive. (That's not to take away the direct responsibility from the people who do such things.)

The yuck was very definitely winning, up until today, with the publication of articles like this one on the curious features of the video.

As reported (but not shown) on UK news, the video was simple: he said who he was, and then someone immediately cut his head off, followed by a rant to camera. Single take, no question of it being faked.

It seems that's not the case. If there's any editing (the extremely unfortunate jargon is 'cut', from the days of physically cutting film) in a piece, it is extremely likely that it didn't happen in real time. Minutes, hours or days can pass between one shot and another.

(Michael Moore was guilty of this at the end of Bowling for Columbine.)

So... I'm more tempted to see it, in order to see what editing was done and to see if it does look as if it was faked.