Friday afternoon news — some examples

Friday afternoon news is the kind of news that seeps out towards the end of the working week in the hopes that nobody will notice. Generally speaking, nobody does. It doesn’t even have to be the afternoon for it to be the kind of thing called Friday afternoon news, but if you’re like me, you are, by time said hours have rolled around:

1) tired, very tired — you might party or something tonight, but right now, you are tired.

2) bored — whatever constructive things to be done at work have been done

3) thinking of little but sleeping in on Saturday morning

This presents the opportunity for interested parties — via the media or on their own — to report things in the hopes that nobody will exactly notice. Alternately something might be a very good story to report that gets nowhere precisely because it is Friday afternoon news.

So Al Gore getting the Nobel, that’s news, but Friday afternoon news is more what Belgravia Dispatch notes briefly earlier today. As he says, “Can you imagine Kissinger or Baker or Schultz getting such treatment? Then again, the international community respected them as competent practitioners….” (I’m not so in love with the joys of straight up ‘if only we were Bismarck’ power politicking as Greg D. is but the larger point about the perceived stature of the current officeholders and who they represent is clear.)

Another bit of Friday afternoon news:

Blackwater USA guards shot at Iraqi civilians as they tried to drive away from a Baghdad square on Sept. 16, according to a report compiled by the first U.S. soldiers to arrive at the scene, where they found no evidence that Iraqis had fired weapons.

“It appeared to me they were fleeing the scene when they were engaged. It had every indication of an excessive shooting,” said Lt. Col. Mike Tarsa, whose soldiers reached Nisoor Square 20 to 25 minutes after the gunfire subsided.

His soldiers’ report — based upon their observations at the scene, eyewitness interviews and discussions with Iraqi police — concluded that there was “no enemy activity involved” and described the shootings as a “criminal event.” Their conclusions mirrored those reached by the Iraqi government, which has said the Blackwater guards killed 17 people.

But it’s Friday afternoon. Why bother? Why care?

Why indeed.

For now, a last IN RAINBOWS thought

As muttered, for now — I will think about a more in-depth revisit still but it won’t be for some weeks (and as it stands November will be full with my NaNoWriMo project anyway, which I’m strongly thinking about featuring on the blog).

Among everything else it hits me that — at least in Northern Hemisphere terms! — this is a perfectly autumnal release. Fellow ILX denizen Nickalicious once suggested that Radiohead for him were a good fall/winter listen in general whereas spring/summer would have been out of place. I tend not to listen to things seasonally, a couple of specific releases aside (Christmastime ones, for instance!), but I see what he’s driving at, and while I doubt it was specifically intended, the release of In Rainbows at a time when things are starting to slow down a bit, ease back more — the days get shorter, the contemplative evenings longer — is very well-timed. It almost matches the flow of the album, where an initial frenetic energy calms down more and more, though not uniformly so, and ends on a last quiet point.

The eventual December release of the full box set — which I am now starting to seriously consider, but only if the money is to hand after gift-buying and other end-of-year obligations — may make even greater sense as a result. We’ll see!

(As for me, I’m feeling pretty zonked at the end of the week here! But hopefully a coherent post or two on other matters later in the afternoon.)

Oh yes, my other OC Weekly album review…

Had almost forgotten about it! Which is a pity because it’s a VERY good album — Om’s Pilgrimage. Having missed out on Sleep, the band that spawned both Om and High on Fire, I was semi-missing out on Om as well, but enough talk over last year’s Conference of the Birds album was enough for me to make sure I caught their set at Arthur Nights around this time last year — as you can see here. (Wrote a review for Plan B as well but apparently that’s only in print, not online.) Anyway, new album great, well worth listening to, etc. Am otherwise zonked this evening so this is as coherent a post as you’ll get until tomorrow…