Month: March 2003

via Wallpaper comes news of a forthcoming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London by artists Langlands and Bell. The exhibiton includes a piece called The House of Osama Bin Laden, an interactive digital model which allows virtual exploration of the house and its surroundings. It is profiled in depth in this month’s Wallpaper, or you can find information about the exhibition here. Certainly looks well worth visiting.

Sticking with media news, I see that Wallpaper magazines, a division of the AOL Time Warner behemoth, has scrapped production of Wallpaper’s sister magazine Spruce after just three issues. I have to admit that I struggled to see how a bi-annual fashion supplement in the Wallpaper mold could either succeed or fit within the existing Wallpaper roster. Clearly the editorial team (and marketing and finance bods) have come to the conclusion that it is best to serve this part of the remit within the pages of Wallpaper. Which is a good thing, in my view.
As compensation, we subscribers will be getting a one-off extension to our subscription, and all future issues of Wallpaper will be sent to us with a special subscriber-only front cover, featuring less clutter on top of the cover image. Supposedly, these will be worth more than the high street copies to collectors of the magazine, and as a set of issues 1-10 recently fetched US$1000 in New York, I’ll be looking after mine more carefully than I have done.

Timeliness is the key: my new online news resources page is online.
I’ll be adding to this over the next week or so, and will probably add some non-English language resources too. Tips welcome.

Interesting. As the BBC seems to be putting as many journalists into the Iraq area as possible, the Americans are leaving.
Mind you, I’m not sure I’d be particularly keen to hang around the Iraqi capital at the moment.

The Straits Times, bless ’em, are currently featuring this image and caption on their front page:

Why don’t we get protestors like that here?

The BBC is blogging the Gulf conflict.

Nico has switched on the lights at my2p. It no longer seems like a black cat in a coal cellar.

The perfect tribute. Radio 4 is now playing Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, performed by Thora Hird.

Well, even before a shot has been fired, it looks like the Fog Of War is already descending, and getting accurate news (or, at least the best approximation for that) gets harder. At lunchtime, the BBC reported that US-led forces had moved into the UN-declared DMZ, a report that was pretty quickly contradicted by the US command. Now, Sky News is reporting thay Iraqi deputy PM Tariq Aziz may have defected to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, something that none of the other news sources I’ve checked are reporting.
Having said that, the fact that I can sit at my desk and access news sources from all around the world is a marked change on just about every previous major conflict. And with al-Jazeera launching an English language web presence by the end of this month (if not before), the sources just get more numerous and varied, which is a good thing.
I think I may spend this evening getting my news sources list updated, as promised. But the existing one can be found here.
UPDATE: Reuters: US rubbishes Aziz story.

Another utterly gorgeous morning here, ruined only by the fact that I’d rather not be working.
There was some quality about the light and warmth this morning, as I walked through Chichester, that reminded me of Lisbon or Barcelona. Maybe it was because I’m also in one of those bloody-minded moods of self determination and independence, with a nice icing of f***-you attitude?