Pain for Pleasure

Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Citizen erased is in pain, terrible pain.

Okay, perhaps that was a little over dramatic (not to mention geeky) way to begin his entry; but admit it. You love Yoda, who doesn’t? Well, the Emperor I guess. But lets move on. I have managed to pick up another injury, the second this year, again through pushing myself too hard in training. A muscle strain and hamstring combo meant I was on a road trip to painsville. I had to strap my left calf up with pressure bandages so I could walk on it, which was fun. It isn’t a major problem, so hopefully I will be training again soon. I get bored when I’m not pushing my mind and body to the brink of destruction! …I have issues.

In other news, Gordon Brown hosted the latest G20 conference London yesterday; which seems to have been largely successful. The majority of the headlines prior to the meeting were concerning the rifts between the “Franco-German Alliance” and the US & UK over financial regulatory measures and further borrowing to stimulate the economy; with President Sarkozy (France) supposedly ready to walk out on the conference if it did not yield solid results. Thankfully it did not come to that. In fact, both he and Chancellor Merkel (Germany) praised the outcome of the conference.

The big headline grabber was the news that secretive tax havens would now face sanctions and tougher regulation. Already the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) has begun to name and shame non-cooperative havens, it will be interesting to see how that story develops. It was also announced that Bankers pay and bonuses will be more stringently regulated (no surprise there), and that hedge funds will now fall within the global regulatory net. I believe agreements were also made to introduce more uniform accounting practices, and to develop a common approach in regard to cleaning up Banks toxic assets.

Jon Stewarts (The Daily Show) take on the American coverage of the event was as hilarious as ever, drawing attention to the amount of reporting that was invested in following Michelle Obama’s fashion choices, and the overly enthusiastic coverage of certain news-anchors to the Obama’s meeting the Windsor’s.

We need a news channel in the style similar to those in America! One where the news anchor gets emotional and excited over the news, a channel where every big story is accompanied by its own theme tune and a crazy amount of graphics showing as many statistics, in as many ways as possible.