Video of said event

The transcript of said event

And this is the most important thread i've made here (a hard job, i'm sure most of you will concede), so i'm gonna bump it if it disappears, something I tend to be loathe to do.

This is also the biggest and most important event thus far in terms America's internal dialogue concerning the war in Iraq.

Of course I have my own opinion of this debate;

- That Christopher Hitchens' calm and cutting denunciations contrasted favourably against his opponents vulgar, blustering remonstrations (I particularly liked Galloway's remark, and I paraphrase; "...handing out ridiculous leaflets on the street like an idiot" You'd have to hear it).

- That Christopher Hitchens' quiet and humanitarian awe for the Iraqi secular left along with his equally humanitarian and quietly seething contempt for the Saddams and Assads of this world contrasts favourably with George Galloway's booming defence of the jihadists in Iraq and denunciations of the 'two biggest rogue states in the world' Britain and America.

So I think Hitchens won, his approach was one of a detached, cereberal left-wing liberal who is utterly bemused at other supposed representatives of the left's contradictions, hypocrisies and intellectual dissonances when it comes to their supposed anti-war stance. Galloway shouted a lot and was very emotive, but far far less substantive.

My other opinion is one of bemusement that this kind of substantive, combative debate does not occur in the talking-point oriented, relentlessly massaged and simplistic American media. Watching this debate made me realise just how turgid and predictable that American political discourse has become since MoveOn, Michael Moore, Sean Hannity, Bill OReilly and Rush Limbaugh pissed on it.

It also includes a hugely important quote that sheds light on how perverse and wrong-faced the current flow of dialog is in the debate, from Chris Hitchens;

"Um, an impression, I think, ladies and gentleman has been allowed to form and perhaps even to coagulate, and to congeal, that it is only those of us who support the regime-change, the revolutionary change in Iraq, who have any explaining to do. Um, I think that that assumption needs to be countered from the very beginning."

Anyway, the greatest quote, and probably soon to replace the briliant Charlie Brooker in my signature was this gem of Hitchens;

"There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials, as far as I can tell that you do from the zoo-noises that you make... And the scars that you can demonstrate from your long, underground, twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you're masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left, the socialist and communist movements, the workers' movement, the trade unions, are fighting for their lives against the most vicious and indiscriminant form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time."

So, it begins again.

I can remember, back in the halcyon days of 1994 when I was still a dependant and spotty little rascal, when Sony casually strolled onto the console hardware scene. No one fretted too much about the new fella, it inocuously sat there and smiled at us and we smiled back at it as we remarked on the adorable audacity of this wee underdog trying to take on the stern-faced, baby-eating sadist Hiroshi Yamauchi and whoever mis-ruled Sega at the time.

Like the cute little ferret that furtively bores into your eye-sockets the moment you bow down to goo-goo at it, Sony's Playstation had been busily gnawing into the luscious buttocks of Nintendo and Sega while we all had our backs turned, only to smile and wave coyly at us when we would glance in their direction and look bemusedly at Sega and Nintendo making frenzied signals toward us.

Then all of a sudden we looked once more, Sony waved at us casually as per usual but something was different this time. Their Playstation was a morbidly obese, blood-soaked mafia boss, insane and cackling with power, while Nintendo was waving excitedly like an over-sugared and under-attended toddler at us on the horizon and Sega's skeletal corpse lay slumped at the Playstation's bloated feet, serving as a convenient toothpick dispenser for the power-mad king. The Playstation had become the console titan, without anyone really realising it.

Now Sony are doing it again with the PSP and, inexplicably, getting away with it. Getting away with the precise strategy they employed to eviscerate their rivals ten years ago. While Nintendo busily whittle away their R&D on finding new and exotic ways to alienate third-party software companies, Sony woos them by luxuriously gyrating in their faces. While Nintendo strenuously courts the nerds who are going to buy every console anyway, Sony gives them a teasing wink to make them fall into line before getting on it's knees to fellate the metro-sexual, BOSS wearing yuppy man.

And, as one of those nerds, I have of course refuted my better judgement and sympathetically patted Nintendo on the head with its DS and generously given them one hundred of my English pounds. Because of this, as well as my innate sympathy for the poor wee blighter, I am stuck in the kind of slow-motion, useless limbo of the parent watching as their happy wee toddler swims straight and happily into the maws of a Great White Shark. A shark for whom the bloody fate of the child is merely a tasty incidental to claiming a stake of the cool, salty, idiot-infested waves of the handheld market.

So, I got Half Life 2 on Tuesday morning and completed it Thursday night......thats pretty fast for me, and I was quite impressed (or appalled) with myself

Then I got Metal Gear Solid 3 on Saturday night....man....

...I sat down, about midnight saturday night/sunday morning and then......13 hours later at 1pm Sunday afternoon I stood up again and went to the toilet to cogitate on the ending of MGS3 and it's story.

Right now I need to sleep, then I plan to write my reviews for Half Life 2 and MGS3.....then I plan to install Bloodlines and start that up..........I have to do this while setting aside the evenings for going out and getting drunk.......and in between all this squeeze out a few end-of-semester essays (well, 3 of the buggers, to be precise)....

....Wish me luck eh.

This is a wee test to see how this journal thing goes. So I'm basically pasting an observation I made on one of the more popular User Created Boards here;

"GTA SA reminds me of Tomb Raider 3 in a fair number of ways.

Tomb Raider 3, IMO looked really ugly. I can remember playing it and thinking it looked worse than the first generation of Playstation games that I played (Destruction Derby, Wipeout, Doom, etc), of course this wasnt the case......it just seemed it at the time because of the ugly textures, bugged up maps and whatnot. The increased complexity of the game just highlighted all the badness, someting a simple-looking game with its basic texture maps didnt suffer from.

Grand Theft Auto SA, as I look at it now.......looks worse than MGS2, Devil May Cry, GTA 3 or Tekken bloody Tag......that may or may not be the case and I might just be a blind mentalist, but.....there is so much going on on the screen with GTA SA that it really just looks like a mess.

The link, in my mind, between Tomb Raider 3 and GTA SA is my bafflement, when seeing them, that such a late generation game could be so ugly.

I'll also add that, because its been so long since I played a PS1 game, Tomb Raider3 came to mind because GTA SA actually looks like it (in terms of the flimsy polygons that are always breaking up and glitching, bland textures, poor frame-rates), looks like a PS1 game.

Interesting how I've gone through the same process of initial awe (Wipeout, Doom and Ridge Racer knocked my socks off) to being rather turned off (Tomb Raider 3, etc) as if as the PS1 aged, so did its ability to produce good graphics, which is of course absurd. The PS2 has mirrored this with its 1st gen (MGS2, Devil May Cry, GT3, ICO) completely knocking me out and its last generation (GTA SA, Killzone, prolly some others if I bothered looking) looking horrible. Funnily enough, Gran Turismo is the one game to buck this trend, the original knocking my socks off late in the PS1's life and GT4 looking better than any XBox game late in the PS2's."

Hmmm, hopefully I can be a wee bit more lucid and elegant in my writing as I go about this journal business.