The dark side of paradise
Ibiza 2000 was a well presented media event. Day time TV broadcast live from the island, Lynx ran their own mini-festival and every company and its pets offered you a chance to win the Holiday Of A Lifetime there™. MTV even staged a festival with 5ive and, of all people, Geri 'so bad she's actually fucking awful' Halliwell. Thousands of punters flew in for a week in the sun and came back several hundred quid lighter and with good (if patchy) memories. Slick, safe and well managed....
Features: Textual graffiti
Students leave their mark on Oxford in various ways. The majority choose the conventional route, becoming JCR President, Captain of the 1st VIII, organ scholar, pooh sticks champ or whatever. But I'd like to bring to your attention those individuals who earn themselves abiding recognition for their supposed ingenuity on the printed page. No, I'm not talking about the Oxford Student feature writer here, nor any scholar, shape or form. I'm referring to the student who earns his or her fame sitting with old tome on his reading list from the library, inserting specious comments with blue biro in the margin. Far from being backward or shy, a student of this breed likes to engage physically and openly with the text. He or she throws respect for the printed page to the wind, revealing to a future audience exactly what he or she thinks of it. Does this egotistic biro-brandisher ever spare a thought for the person later to discover the book decorated with cryptic numbers, exclamation marks and incoherent scribbles which could easily be the coding of a government spy? As if the content wasn't hard enough to follow without the added cryptographics!...
Features: Brave New World?
FRANKENFOODS! MAD Siamese Sheep! Designer Babies! This is the view of scientific discovery often propounded by the modern media, which with its hunger for sensationalism, can present a distorted view of the issues and only serves to arouse public fears. There is increasing concern that new technologies have been introduced without thorough enough testing to identify the possible dangers. Unfortunately for the scientists, such fears are not easily dispelled by any amount of scientific evidence....