• Wilful, charming, grumpy and regally badly behaved — ‘…deference died, and if ever there was a princess who needed deference, it was Princess Margaret, implacable believer in the ancient and divine right of royalty to behave badly. In this, she might be blamed for a lack of intelligence and sensitivity; there can be little doubt either that she and her life led the move downmarket into the unforgiving public glare. But whatever else you might feel, there must be admiration for the gusto with which she threw herself into the plot. If life resembles nothing so much as a bad movie on Channel 5, Margaret is its queen. ‘
• The final days at the personal court of Britain’s alternative Queen — ‘The problem was very much one of the institution of the Royal Family, permanently stuck, it seems, in a 1950s version of Britain. “The Queen Mother, and to some extent the Queen herself, have very little time for illness,” says another source. “When Princess Margaret used to take to her bed, her mother would come in and pull back the covers, saying, ‘What’s all this nonsense? Get up!’.”‘

• Film: Risky Business … ‘Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then say, “What the fuck.” “What the fuck” gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.’ [Related: Risky Business at IMDB]
• Comic: Swamp Thing 21 — The Anatomy Lesson … ‘You see, throughout his miserable existance, the only thing that could have kept him sane was the hope that he might one day regain his humanity… the knowledge that under all that slime he was still Alec Holland. But if he’s read my notes he’ll know that just isn’t true. He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland. He’s just a ghost. A ghost dressed in weeds.’
• Book: Christine by Stephen King … ‘If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.’
• Game: Manic Miner by Matthew Smith … ‘Can YOU take the challenge and guide Willy through the underground caverns to the surface and riches. In order to move to the next chamber, you must collect all the flashing keys in the room while avoiding nasties like POISONOUS PANSIES and SPIDERS and SLIME and worst of all MANIC MINING ROBOTS. When you have all the keys, you can enter the portal which will now be flashing. The games ends when you have been ‘got’ or fallen heavily three times.’
• News: Headlines on Ceefax for the evening of Monday 3rd October 1983 also Guardian Coverage from 1983 … Mrs Thatcher in 1983: ‘ She has a temperamental determination and some shrewd populist instincts and she has acquired that inner metal which comes from having visited the edge of disaster. But she owes as much to luck as to native skill and her success has been achieved in spite of her propensities to rash misjudgment, wilfulness, and narrowness of mind and vision. She is not short of fatal faults to bring her down.’

• Dan’s Website / Daily Doozer … January 1999.
• Bifurcated Rivets … April 1999
• Blogger Launches … Late August 1999.
• Barbelith / plasticbag.org … November 1999.
• The Nutlog … January 2000.

• Alice in Wonderland and the WTC Disaster … ‘The predictability of the ritualistic, emotionless, reptilian mind can be seen in the news management that has followed this U.S. disaster. Look at what always happens in these circumstances and you will see that the blueprint is the same in almost every case. Before the event happens the fall-guy or “patsy” is already set up to take the blame, thus steering the public mind away from dangerous speculation and onto a pre-ordained target. After the Kennedy assassination it was Lee Harvey Oswald; after Oklahoma it was Timothy McVeigh; now it is Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden, deeply misguided as he may be, is no more responsible for what happened this week than I am.’
• How it is possible to orchestrate and mastermind a terrorist attack without the terrorists themselves even knowing who is really behind it? … ‘The Illuminati do not represent a “side” or a “faction”. They CREATE the “sides” and the “factions” and they use them to manipulate the game of divide and rule and centralisation of global power. They operate within the Islamic world as they operate within the “western world”. So as the bigger pyramids envelope the smaller pyramids you reach a point in the structure where the same force is manipulating and organising the horrors in America while also manipulating and organising the RESPONSE to those horrors through their puppets such as Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Blair.’

‘In November, on a blustery cold day in northern Germany, a young woman in Hamburg, the former girlfriend and now wife of one of Atta’s old roommates, talked about an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She said when the bombs started falling in Afghanistan, she would sit in front of her television, staring in disbelief, unable to comprehend that the bombs were in a very real sense put in motion by her husband’s old roommate. Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didn’t fit. She would ask herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It’s impossible, she said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.’