And so it comes to pass. The boy who wanted to see the world got caught up in a web he really could have imagined if he had been following world news these past few months. I said yesterday that the commercial networks were on a deathwatch, but did the boy himself have a deathwish? If so, it was granted. The networks will no doubt fill us in in the days ahead.
Somewhat insensitive on my part perhaps, but that's what the commercial news networks are on just now - a deathwatch. While the state-owned NHK still finds the story of the recuperating toddler too cute to bypass - 12 minutes and the lead story - the commercial networks are working themselves into a tizzy with every snippet of news from Iraq. As I write now, there is no news of the accidental tourist suggesting he is probably being videoed by his captors. For all of NHK's procastination on the story - third lead and today 40 minutes into the news programme - the fact is this country does not give up on its citizens (however stupid and culpable) easily. Let's hope they have something good to report at the end of this all.
Watching the extended 7pm news last night on NHK was a salutary lesson on what you get in this country if you fall out of bounds of national opinion. The nation's premier broadcaster spent the first 20 minutes of its flagship news programme going over every possible element of the rescued toddler story, including some pathetic conversations with teary neighbours of the family in question that even the commercial networks would have been embarassed to put out. The next 25 minutes dealt with the much more serious fall out from the earthquake and how things are not getting back to normal quickly (though we did have one reporter in a small village telling us that one woman, and I quote verbatim here, "had a headache and had to get some pills for her ailment"). Then, and only then, did the plight of the accidental tourist get five minutes of air time. It seems the boy who wanted to see what was going on in Baghdad has been abandoned by the public and Japan's national broadcaster alike. The country has other things to occupy itself with just now and any sympathy he may have expected disappeared in the vapour trails of the typhoons I mentioned yesterday.
BoingBoing is making rather a lot of the fact that President Bush's website now blocks access from foreign ISPs. How does this affect anything - other than possibly a few U.S. citizens abroad who would like to know a little more about Dubya as told by the Dubya camp? Nah! Leave them to it. This story of missing ballot papers in Florida is much more worrying - for anyone with an iota of interest in democracy at least.
A legacy of the days when I used to let Googlebot roam freely through this site, is that I get hit by comment spam. All this time off-line, but the spammers never left me alone. You, dear reader, are unlikely to see any of it because those who wish to sell me/you viagra or entice us on to some on-line casino, only target the blog entries that have been crawled and logged by Google - basically entries pre-April 2004. Anything since then is now free from Google's roving crawlers (I hope), but if you are reading this in Romania, Russia or China, you won't be able to post a comment. I've had too much crap from spammers from those countries and excluded all .ro/.ru/.cn domains from posting comments.
So the news from Japan. Well could there be any more news to fill the airwaves than we have right now? The 7pm NHK news programme is regularly extended until 8pm, and we haven't had that since the release of the detainees from North Korea over a year ago. First the biggest typhoon in a over a decade hit us directly, and then some 500km we have a series of earthquakes which frankly just don't seem to be stopping. Add a real rescue drama to the pot and suddenly the prospect of this poor sod coming to a grisly end gets relegated to a very lowly third in news-pecking order. These are all going to run and run.
I'm almost certainly just talking to myself here, but should anyone be reading this and would like to download a free copy of Fahrenheit 9/11, go and do it via the link. It ain't illegal - or so the guy hosting it says. Though personally, I think I'll pay the 150 yen (£0.75/$1.20) my video rental store charges to hire DVDs and watch it in on the big(?) screen rather than my 14" laptop.
I don't know if this marks the return of Joe Bloggs, but there is so much happening just now in Japan it is difficult to leave it unrecorded. I'll see how I feel tomorrow and get back.