The third and final (and easily the best) part of The Power of Nightmares documentary was broadcast last night on BBC2. Fascinating stuff about how the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by politicians, this was put together in a collage style that will, in future years, be stored in some multimedia encyclopedia under the entry ‘Information Overload’. My brain is now seared with images of a 30-foot genie materialising out of smoke on a beach, ‘mad eyes’ and a slo-mo shot of a swooping owl.

Anyway, aside from the style, there were some very useful facts for those debates I’ve been having recently with people via online scrabble. These include

• ‘dirty bombs’ being ineffective and unlikely to kill anyone (Iraq and US tested them years ago but found them to be useless), and
  
• despite hundreds of arrests in the UK and US, not one person has been convicted of plotting a terrorist act in connection with Islam.

Kuro5hin has a nice page about it, which has some discussion and links to more at Crooked Timber and a summary of the main points at iconoplex. Isn’t the web just lovely.

Now I’ve spotted this neat little feature on Blogger whereby you can email a posting in. That’s it. Anyway, it takes a few days before the posting appears – and you’re best sending as Pure Text rather than HTML – but still: lovely.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for presents to buy me, try the blackspot sneaker at Adbusters.org. And if you need to convert UK sizes to US check out this site.

I’ve just finished reading a great book by Jeremy Paxman (of all people) called The Political Animal. Quite a depressing book about the career of a politician and how they have to keep their own beliefs and principles quiet in order to make any advancement.

In it he mentions Transparency International (http://www.transparency.org/), an organisation which monitors corruption in governments around the world.

The good news is that the British govt comes quite high (scroll down) – 11th in fact where 145th (Haiti and Bangladesh) is bottom. America is joint 17th with Belgium and Ireland so it seems the land of the free is Finland. Good news for brown bears and wolverines, then.

So, my arse is well and truly in gear. Thanks to the blog James And The Blue Cat (listed on today’s Guardian Newsblog) I’m doing what I should have done a long long time ago and started blogging.

It’s not that that blog was particularly inspiring or anything as far as epiphanies go, but it was the Right Place at the Right Time (ie. it was a dull Friday morning with that rare thing – no impending deadlines. I was at the bottom of my To Do list and getting to things like “speak to a human being” and this seemed a much more interesting thing to do).

Now you’d think the fact that my whole career for the past five years has been centred around multimedia – working in it, reporting on it, teaching it – would have meant I got here a long time ago. Yes, it’s embarrassing. So I’ve changed the posting date to say 1999.

Now, I must go speak to a human being…