At the moment I am reading an autobiography by John Simpson, the BBC World Affairs Editor. It is quite interesting and I found out I like autobiographies much more than biographies, which are most of the time factual, but boring. Review will appear here shortly, as I have already a lot to say about it. And finally after 4 weeks, I got my “Scot’s Law for Journalists” and the Guradian style guide. After trying for months to order it from WordPower, Edinburgh’s radical, independent bookshop, who were unable to obtain it, whilst all my collegues already got it from Amazon, (also anti-trade-union) I switched over to order it on the web because I hoped I would get it before the Law exam, but unfortunately something went wrong – I neither had a parcel number, nor ever got a card from DHL the transport company, and only was able to make some progress by stopping a driver from DHL on the road asking for contact details.

Yesterday, some nice Indymedia Manchester, Indymedia UK, Video Indymedia people came up to Edinburgh to do a workshop with a community video group on how to encode videos for the web. Training resources and some video clips can be found here. We got a new book “The Video Activist’s Toolkit” for free from the Community Media Association, and it was a fantastic workshop which was as usually well organised despite without hardly any funding but was still free for the participants. Today the same workshop will take place at the Camcorder Guerillas Office at the GMAC in Glasgow.

Contrary to my beliefs, this region does really exist in the West of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan and Iranian border. Somebody posted a contribution to Indymedia Scotland about an atrocity being perpetrated in Balochistan, and with some help of Indymedia volunteers we found out that this is true, though the posting is still problematic to actually find out what happened when where and why and by whom. Horrible pictures of mashed up brains and heads and people are attached, but that’s what people should see if there is a war – the truth and reality. I wish I would have time to investigate a bit more about what is going on, but have exams in the following days and weeks.

Have watched “One Day in September” and it is a brilliant film. Still leaves a lot of questions open, such as how three of the hostage takers survived. It also does not explain the political climate and the lack of experience at the time, so that nowadays many of the decisions taken seem absurd. I am wondering if Steven Spielbergs “Munich” closes the gaps left open by the documentary, but probably more by assumtion rather than research. Hopefully the topic is kept authentic enough. George Galloway is in Big Brother, a “fly-on-the-wall” entertainment real life 24hrs a day TV show, modelled on George Orwell’s 1984, and which seems also to be related to hostage taking, as the people kept in the house are totally under the controll and mercy of the commercial company Endemol.

The new booklet about the G8 is out. It is called “Shut them down” and consists of a whole lot of vanguardist bullshit. Thus said, it is at least easier to know why my submitted article wasn’t accepted by these elitist idiots: It wasn’t deemed good enough by these “non-hierarchical” big-mouthing intellectuals, it wasn’t glorifying enough, too much true and realistic. Anyways, it seems anticapitalism is a whole lot of ideological shit when these “comrades” behave worse and more dishonest than anybody else in this society. At least I did not give them the pictures. I love Indymedia. <div align="left" style="text-align: center"> <div align="left" style="text-align: center"> Everybody can contribute.