• Penguin Crime – a set on Flickr
• Penguin Books – a set on Flickr
• Penguin & Pelican Collection – a set on Flickr

• Guardian: No new stadium. A huge debt. Despite their promises, Hicks and Gillett have ‘done a Glazers’
  – Excellent piece by David Conn
• 5 Twitter Tools to Help You Manage Unfollowers
• The Worst, #1 – Magazine. Section on “saddest” celebrities from eastern Europe is marvellous.
• Media Monkey: Well I Warbler! Packham reveals Springwatch lark – Presenter slips Smiths song titles into TV banter
• YouTube: Cassetteboy vs The Bloody Apprentice – “I’m certainly better than you tossers!” (NB This will probably be removed quite quickly, so watch while you can. Plus it contains some rude words.)
• Guardian: You ask, they answer: Neal’s Yard Remedies – Neal’s Yard offered to answer some questions about their products on a blog, presumably under the impression it would be good PR. Unfortunately, lots of people asked some rather searching questions about the efficacy of homeopathic treatments and other rubbish sold by Neal’s Yard. No-one from Neal’s Yard answered. The end.
• Robin Brown: What your Wordpress home page probably looks like…every day – Excellent parody of the typical Wordpress home page.

• The Apprentice Analysed – Occupational psycholgist offers insight about candidates on the Apprentice
• eaves.ca: Newspapers’ decline is a sign of democracy, not a symptom of its death
• MediaGuardian: MEN Media to use ’skills matrix’ to decide who will be laid off – “Reporters, subeditors and features writers will be assessed differently. Elements will include: commitment and professionalism, design skills, judgment, speed/accuracy, multimedia skills, media law, adaptability and resilience, and story generation.”
• Guardian: The Wire creator David Simon’s new TV show, Treme – Show will be set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans
• Polly Toynbee: Regional and local newspapers will die unless we act now – Includes a mention of the Stockport Express
• Anazon.co.uk: PAUL ROSS – 20 Inch Canvas Print (51cm) – 158 customer reviews of this amazing art print of television presenter Paul Ross
• Teenager draws penis on parents’ roof to lure Google Earth
• Yahoo Answers: STD From A Dog…Is It Possible?

• U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work
• Designer credit cards
• Hughes plans for Kaka arrival as City close in on Milan playmaker – Meanwhile in the real world, Mark Hughes attempts to sign Craig Bellamy
• Rio police claim drug gangs cleared from City of God

I use the word “supposedly” because nobody can truly know whether it will live up to the various adjectives used above (which, like any good journalist, I lifted from the La Machine website) until they see it. Before that happens, the whole thing is surrounded in secrecy for the entirely understandable purposes of hype and PR.

North West Tonight has bought into this hype by running a series of stories on La Machine that say absolutely nothing about the project because the programme’s “08 correspondent”, Jayne Barrett, is “sworn to secrecy”. One report featured some taxi drivers looking at the “thing” off camera and saying stuff like “It’s amazing”. I mean, seriously.

The Sunday Telegraph is also at it. Its correspondent helpfully reported this weekend:

Moments after arriving at the workshop, I come face to face with the Liverpool machine, suspended on its mechanical float, not quite completed. Smaller than the elephant, it is none the less a mega-scale version of an animal. It is also less hefty and will not plod so much as prance or pounce. As many as 16 operators will manage its multi-directional movements, and it looks intricate enough to suggest that these will be impressive.

So, er, what the fuck is it? I appreciate that we aren’t dealing with WMD or Watergate here but what happened to the basic journalistic premise of finding something out and then telling your audience about it? If, as a reporter, you are “sworn to secrecy”, then where is the story?

I’m not a total news purist – there’s a place for fluffy stuff in a regional news programme – but even fluffy stuff should say something. This obviously isn’t news and, thanks to an almost complete lack of content or insight, it isn’t a feature either. It’s just pure, unadulterated hype.

Perhaps after the event has happened there will be some great pictures of what will probably be an entertaining show. It might have made sense to wait until then before covering it.

(PS It’s a spider isn’t it? It’s just a big bloody spider.)

Update, 4 September: Fancy that! It really is just a bloody big spider. And a bloody terrifying one at that. Remember, I half-heartedly guessed it here first.

I suppose it ties in with the artwork for their new album, which comprises an 1830 painting called “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix, with the album title Viva La Vida scrawled over it in the style of a political graffito (ooh, edgy!). But sorry to point this out: Isn’t the idea of a stylist decking a band out to match the “theme” of the album cover a bit, you know… naff?

You can imagine the thought process: The last album, X&Y, with its enigmatic, mathematical title and abstract artwork, was perceived as cold and mechanical. So this time, they’ve decided to go all emotional and heartfelt and they’ve raided the fancy dress box. This is what passes for creativity.

Aside from the music, which, from the two tracks I heard on telly, plumbs new depths of terribleness, Coldplay represent the axis at which rock and big business cross paths. “Private equity guitar music” adequately describes the genre.

Coldplay dressing up and “having fun” in the style of Parisian revolutionary (new) Romantics is not a convincing sell. It’s like trying to relaunch a Volvo estate as a cool choice of car or a job at McDonalds as a worthwhile career. It doesn’t wash. In fact, the whole contemptible enterprise is mesmerising for its piss-awful idiocy.

The second one is in Manchester. I recognise the hoarding underneath the advert. No, really.

Dazed & Confused has an interview with Hewlett this month, in which it’s revealed that the production begins with “a large screen animation of an egg rolling down a hill” in time with Albarn’s score, after which a screen lifts to reveal “a bamboo forest, with actors dressed as monkeys leaping from branch to branch”. Sounds excellent.

The magazine also carries these rather good images, which are Hewlett’s concept drawings and won’t actually be seen in the production.

Click thumbnails to enlarge.

All images copyright Jamie Hewlett

Would you look at that?

A massive 4ft designer toy by in demand artist KAWS. Not sure where I’d put this – perhaps it could stay in the window to scare away burglars.

It retails at around £1,250. Not that unreasonable for an artwork on this sort of scale. Consider, for example, that Damien Hirst is flogging what basically amounts to a signed 60cm poster of his diamond skull thing (For the Love of God) for a whopping five grand!

Via Vinyl Abuse.