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One interesting thing I've noticed is a real racial divide in reactions that I haven't seen since the OJ trial. It's by no means universal but it seems that, by and large, black people are more willing to forgive his various transgressions, paedophilia allegations and wild and crazy 'eccentricities' while whites tend to be less forgiving and less cut up over the whole thing.

I'm wondering why this should be and which is more understandable. On the one hand it isn't fair to only remember someone for the bad things in their life when they've also got good accomplishments behind them. On the other hand we shouldn't forget everything bad someone does just because they're dead, or rich, or black.

There was something deeply and obviously creepy about Michael Jackson and dollars to doughnuts he was a paedophile, for whatever reason, bad childhood or not. Being a good dancer and a maker of hugely overpriced, grandiose and egotistical music videos doesn't wipe that away and it doesn't do anyone any favours to gloss over his freakish peculiarities.

Seems to me like celebrity is the new 'Papal Indulgence'.

For my part, Michael Jackson doesn't really mean a lot to me, it's just always interesting watching people's reactions to these things.

It seems like Iran isn't going to get any change after all now and I can't say I'm really too surprised. Yes, it's an obvious fix up but no revolution succeeds without turning the security forces and that conspicuously failed to happen this time around, not that surprising since many consider what's happened to be a military coup. The people protesting are also largely drawn from a minority of educated, relatively well off middle class people and students, there's a lot of them - in the cities - but can it really be called a mass movement?

Even if there had been a change, what would it have actually meant? Iran's definition of a political moderate is a bit like America's definition of left-wing, unrecognisable as such to anyone from outside that specific political context. The council and the Ayatollah wouldn't have changed so why would changing the President really make any difference at all? It wouldn't.

Of course, the stakes were upped by the mass arrests and the bloody violence but the protests still seem to be petering out and not expanding or extending into the security services. Of course, the new clampdown has bitten now so we can't really be too sure what's going on.

Still, it's odd, some analysts think it's America's less hardline attitude that helped exacerbate this and that would seem to be confirmed by the UK replacing the US as Iran's hate-target number one, the BBC in particular. Obama and the rest got a hard time for not wading in gung ho and demanding things of Iran, but in my opinion they played that the right way, though I think they caved too early to their critics and ramped up the language, allowing the regime to blame us more easily.

It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here but for now it seems like Iran's stuck.

You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You give me cancer
With U.V. rays
You'll never know, dear
How much I hate you
Please, please take my sunshine away

I will be on www.rpgbomb.com tomorrow night (Wednesday) from around 2am UK time for an interview/chat. So if you want to come along so I don't get lonely and quiz me about anything to do with gaming, or indeed anything else, you're welcome.