Greetings once more, Blog-Children.
Back from my last trip of 2006 to picturesque, sunny (much of the time) West Wales. A few early nights pulled me right back into shape, in preparation for the upcoming six months-plus of eternal darkness, death of all hope, and silent, screaming, existential despair otherwise known as Winter. Yes, it's time to put the crazy shorts and gaily festooned T-shirts back into the bottom drawer, and solemnly don the grey-brown apparel of dark-mornings and horizontal rain. Your flips will flop no more this year pop-kids, not unless you've plans to travel to sunnier climes.
I wish I had, but I haven't.
Still, like I said, a long-weekend at my secret country residence, Sonic Caravan, has at least blunted the edges of my Seasonally Affected Disorderliness.
Even Sonic BBQ2 made a final appearance of the year (scrutinise pic below). This was his lone showing on the Welsh Tour, and I have to say it went quite well, despite rain and temperamental, lo-grade briquettes. A few wines quaffed, a few discreet tears shed.


I mean, I try to put a brighter spin on the coming of the Dark Months, I really do, but each year this seems to get harder.
Another grim prospect at this time of year has to be the drizzle-loving, dampness-addicted Winter-Apologist. I seem to be a magnet for these. You know the routine...'Oh, but this time of year is so beautiful, the crisp mornings, the turning of the leaves, the snow...' blah blah.
Yeah right. I can see that this might be the case in New England or Aspen, Colorado. From what I've seen on the National Geographic channel, Autumn/Winter there is a riot of unfolding beauty and awe-inspiring colour. Here in the UK, it's just Brown. Brown and damp.
Anyhoo, I'll try to get into the swing of it by the next post, I assure thee.

Schools, homes and businesses have been cleaning up after torrential storms and a tornado struck West and North Yorkshire yesterday.
About 10 days' worth of rain fell in half an hour and some homes were trashed by the tornado in Leeds and Harrogate.
Train services were returning to normal after lightning strikes hit signals at Leeds station during Thursday's storms.
Insurance assessors were inspecting the damage caused by the
tornado, which tore off many rooves and uprooted trees.
The Gods are angry my friends, this much is obvious.
I mean, in this part of the world we're used to miserable Bible-ass weather conditions (see various previous posts), but this is getting spooky.
I'm currently nurturing an urge to move to Los Angeles. The risk of Death By Weather is about the same as in the UK now, but you can at least be buried in beach-shorts and flip-flops.

Yes indeed, the attacks of 9/11 were five years ago today.
Naturally, there has been a vast amount of press coverage and TV airspace over the past week or two, devoted to this very subject. Apart from anything else, it serves to remind us just how little of this atrocity has been resolved in the years since. If one person has moved to the fore recently, in the ongoing quest for the truth to be told about that day, it's got to be Charlie Sheen.

To anyone who hasn't been on planet Earth for the past 6 months, Mr. Sheen has gone public on primetime TV in the U.S. making known his view that the events of 9/11 were possibly brought about, one way or another, by the U.S. government.

Apparently, elements of the stateside press have attempted to use his hard-partying past as some kind of mark of his lack of credibility as a social-commentator.
It's difficult to see the logic here - If such credentials are an automatic indication of a somehow dubious personality, whose judgement we should instinctively distrust, it may be worth remembering that the President himself is a recovering alcoholic, and as numerous published accounts of his life will attest, no stranger to life's ... well, short-term pleasures.
In spite of this, he has somehow managed to become the most powerful individual on Earth.

... And so back to the events of 9/11.
To even the most impartial observer, the inconsistencies come thick and fast. A few minor examples:
Why were both Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown and author Salman Rushdie, amongst others, warned by the Whitehouse not to fly to New York on that morning?
Why was Federal Law allowing airline pilots to carry handguns (instigated following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962) repealed only months earlier?
Did you know that George Bush's brother Marvin, was head of security for the World Trade Compex until his contract ran out on 9/11?
... or that Larry Silverstein, leaseholder of the World Trade Complex took out a 7 billion dollar insurance policy specifically covering acts of terrorism, only months before?

The flights that were highjacked were only 20% full, and flight-records reveal that they were not even scheduled to fly on that day.
Then there is the mystery of World Trade Building 7, the 47-storey structure not hit by any plane but brought down in an identical fashion to the north and south towers. A block away from the latter, this building housed a government command bunker, along with the HQ of the Secret Service, FBI and the CIA, amongst other official bodies.

Larry Silverstein has admitted on television news that between himself and the NYFD commander, it was decided to 'Pull' Building 7.
'Pull' is a term used in controlled demolition whereby explosives inside a building are detonated to affect it's collapse.
However, there were still people in Building 7 when it fell, who died as a result, so why have no charges been brought?

In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. So, this building's collapse resulted in a profit of about $500 million.

Then we have The Pentagon and the 'Missing Airplane', the one that doesn't seem to be present in any of the press-shots or available CCTV footage. The same plane that, we're asked to believe, performed a 270 degree turn at 500 mph, dropped more than 7,000 feet in just over 2 minutes, and flew at tree-top height for the last 500 metres of it's journey into the walls of the Pentagon building.
Even the most casual inspection of events immediately begins to reveal questions that cannot be ignored.

In response to the media dismissal of this entire line of enquiry as just another screwball conspiracy theory, I quote Charlie Sheen himself (click to view):
Nineteen amateurs with box-cutters, taking over four commercial airliners, and hitting 75% of their targets? That feels like a Conspiracy Theory...

Recommended further reading:

• Infowars
• Prison Planet
• 9/11 Truth
  

Near the top of this week's news-pile for hipster pop-kids everywhere has been Urban Art-Guerilla Banksy's appropriation of the Paris Hilton album.
In a nutshell, he turned the record-sleeve into an art-statement and (purportedly aided and abetted by none other than Dangermouse) replaced the CD itself with his own version of the musical contents, disseminating 500 copies around the highstreet music-shops of 42 UK towns and cities.

Like a lot of you media-savvy Situation-istas out there, I'm a fan. Of Banksy, not Paris. He combines often stunning imagery with social-comment, wit and irony whilst somehow managing to make the whole thing seem like Fun. You won't find Damian Hirst ticking many of those boxes. I personally anticipate his next offering in the same way I used to look forward to a new Tarantino movie.
So I got to thinking about how difficult it must've been to replace 500 CDs in the record shops of 42 cities, (a mammoth task in itself I'd have thought) without getting pinched by a store-detective at least once. Of course, I reasoned, there must be a small army of merry pranksters in his employ etc etc. Nevertheless, guerilla-tactics is half the story with this kind of thing, right?
Then I went to Ebay.

At the time of writing, the minimum price that one of these CDs is fetching hovers nervously around the £600 mark.
How great it would be, I mused, to be one of the relatively few punters to stumble across one, or more, of these in their local HMV/Virgin.
Then it occurred to me - could it be that only some, or who knows, maybe none of these items ended up in record shops at all... instead, all of them heading for Ebay? Surely not. But then, why not?
Simple arithmetic would put the potential final payout as upwards of a quarter-million.
So the question is: Have lucky members of the record-buying public been the recipients of this windfall, or the artist himself?
Hey people, I'm only speculating! Whatever the case, this is an inspired prank well executed, and if there's a slab of dosh at the end of it, more power to the him, I say.