Two separate news stories: the first from the Guardian. Apparently, the food crisis is ‘just a bubble’ and not the end of the world. Give it two years, and prices will return to normal.

“I see so much focus on food, and it seems to be so trendy in the investment world,’ O’Neill told The Observer. ‘The underlying dilemma has been created by the wealth of the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries; but, for the past year or so, it’s also been a major theme for financial institutions. The markets seem to me to have a bubble-like quality.’

Some analysts believe the bubble will collapse as supply responds to rising demand. Robert Ward, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, said he expected prices to drop by 8.5 per cent next year and another 17.6 per cent in 2010. Sean Rickard, from the Cranfield School of Management, said: ‘High prices will bring forth quite a significant increase in land area used for cereals this year, and Australia will come rocketing back now that its drought is over.’ Rickard predicted a 40 per cent drop in wheat prices in 2009. ‘I think this time next year, people will be saying, “what crisis?”‘ he added.”

From The Guardian

In the meantime, Haiti starves.

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

From the New York Times. Don’t miss the accompanying slideshow.

I absolutely love this game. Adore it. But I’m going to nit-pick.

The opening two hours are ludicrously bad. Tutorial after tutorial after tutorial, each repeating the last.

The sci-fi front end stuff doesn’t work. A number of times I’ve had a massive high from taking down a target and escaping, and all I want to do is get back out there and track down more targets, but I wake up from the machine, and get told to go to bed. Seriously silly stuff.

Altair’s voice-actor is pretty wooden, and his dialogue worse. I really like the in-game cutscenes that feature the targets, but the monologues between Altair and his boss, and in the future are really bad. It’s like the worst pretentious amateur dramatics.

I don’t understand why the devs decided to city hop between targets. I’d have much rather started the game, and the tutorials in Damascus, and killed three targets in that city, before finally entering the kingdom and moving on to the next city. The Kingdom, as it stands, seems to be dead space. Beautiful, but empty, and each target begins with a boring run and horse ride to the menu screen. The only reason I can see for spacing the targets in each city like this would be if the plan was originally to show the passage of time and effects of your actions on the cities, but because that doesn’t happen, it’s just a frustration.

There’s a bit of backward thinking in the way your powers are taken off you at the beginning. Because I now have both experience, and most of my inventory restored (7/9 dead) I’m finding the combat a trivial challenge. At the start, when I didn’t have grab breaks or counters, or an extended health-bar, I found fights extremely difficult. My extended utility has only made the game easier, and the game’s yet to step up with new twists or challenges.

The flag collection stuff is pointlessly videogamey, as are the informer challenges.

But I really do love this game. I love standing somewhere high, planning my route in, attacking, then leading my pursuers into a group of vigilantes. The cities themselves are gorgeous (the dock in Acre is my favourite place in a game, ever), Altair’s animation just jaw-dropping, and it’s the first time I’ve actually enjoyed just walking at street level in an open world game.

Brilliant beggars, too.

Overheard at the very swish, very trendy, very sceney hotel Anna and I have been staying at for the past few days.

“Have you heard about this new game? It’s like a hip sudoku.”

“No. What’s it called?”

“Bingo.”

So Will Porter and I totally saw the ladygarden of a minor US celebrity two nights ago.

What a fun job we have.

This is the most batshit insane technical problem I’ll ever face. God only knows if there’s a solution.

Here’s the problem: all the folders on my PC have been labelled Read Only by Vista’s over zealous security systems. I have no idea when, how, or why this happened, but it’s obviously causing some problems. When I try and turn the folders to writeable, they’re immediately turned back. So - what the hell is going on, how the hell do I stop it, and dear-god is this a ‘feature’.

Everyone else is doing it, and so shall I. In no particular order.

Film

I can’t recommend Children of Men highly enough. Even though it’s set some short time in the future, it’s torn straight from today - the kind of visuals we see piped into our homes and offices via Youtube or the nightly news, the same scenarios writ slightly larger. Slate says it best: Children of Men is a modern-day nativity story …. It’s also the herald of another blessed event: the arrival of a great director by the name of Alfonso Cuarón.

Games

Company of Heroes is a World War 2 RTS (wait! come back!) that manages a neat psychological trick: forcing you to care for, or at least wince at, the fate of your troops. You can just sit back and watch men and tanks explode, or you can lean in and appreciate the tactical subtlety - the way fixed defences are so important in the early game, or the way indirect fire and scouts can decimate a superior force given twitchier reactions and forward planning. Just look at it!

Or, you could try Viva Pinata. This is the barest description: by beautifying a garden you attract, and encourage to breed real-virtual life pinatas. Underneath the cutest, most delicious sugar-coated presentation lurks nature, tooth and claw. It’s brutal. You find yourself breeding squirrels to feed to badgers to make them fuck, delighting when a pinata is broken open and the sweets scattered everywhere, its friends scampering over to eat the innards. Best of all though, it’s a game that rewards experimentation and sharing information - little is explicitly explained, and much is hidden. I knew I could change the colour of my Flutterscotch butterflys, but I had no idea how. Then I fed one a buttercup - and it turned yellow. I tried it with a tulip - it turned red. Suddenly I found myself feeding butterflys anything I could get my hands on, just to see the result. And I was rewarded - all the bright colours attracted a Jameleon. It’s also funny. The ridiculous earrings you can accessorise your pets with are called ‘Butchas’ (think about it), when foxes mate they do the Foxtrot, and to make monkey’s mate, you have to make them wear a fez.

Music

Hot Chip

And the Boards of Canada album the Campfire Headphase which Jim bought for me. Beautiful sounds.

Books

Blindness, by Jose Saramago.

The March by E.L. Doctorow.

Television

Eats

Everytime we eat at the Walrus and Carpenter, I have an absolutely superb time. Maybe it’s the cocktails. Or the magnficent burgers. Or their absurdly complicated ordering system. I don’t really care - it’s my fave.

Also, Annie’s Christmas cake. Yum.

What are yours?

 This is the most important thing to happen to me today.

I can finally eat Revels. No peanuts = no death for Timmy = no Revel Roulette.

From We Make Money Not Art

That final, ridiculous Cole sampling theme tune that plays over the credits?

AWESOME

11/10