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Monbiot, in his book 'Captive State', 2000, says p.16 "we are faced with a profusion of minor choices and a dearth of major choices. We can enter a superstore and choose between 20 different brands of margarine, but many of us have no choice but to enter a superstore". This is of course true in many areas of life. We have a choice of parties at elections but they all have a similar agenda. We have a choice of clothing stores on the High Street, or in the o- o-t mall, but they all offer a similar range. And for information too. We have scores of TV channels, but almost all the programmes or of similarly low standard. We may have many documentaries, but very few scratch below the surface. The news bulletins, similarly, little effort at telling what's behind the news. In fact little effort to sort out what the main news is anyway. there's lots going on in the world that has major implications for our lives - not wishing to sound callous, but fatal parachute sabotage, house fires in anywhereville, armed robberies ditto, are not among these items. Not without some comentary on why the crime rate is rising/falling anyway. Or if these things are mentioned once on the news, they come up again and again for several days running. Makes for cheap news anyway, one story does for several days, no need to analyse, a few irrelevant jerky images of what could be anything (here's what a parachute looks like - this is a cloudy sky like the one he fell from - this is an aeroplane a bit like the one he jumped from, and so it goes on, Shame we don't get similarly cheap TV licences. Could we do better on crit geog? This list too is often single -issue for days on end, or no issue at all. Geographers of all people must be aware of all the things going on round the world, that haven't been on C-G for months or years. Or maybe we should rename this list the Balkan List. Because it, like the Balkans is split into many small groups, each one never talks to the others, and one can wait for years on end for something world-important to come out of the Balkans (1914 or something, a bloke called Archduke Ferdinand, another guy called Gavril Princip, that was about the 2nd from last major thing to come from there I think) ((Apologies to all Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Hercegovinians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Albanians, Rumelians, etc on this list, but well, you know...)) Hillary Shaw, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds. Hillary Shaw, P/G Geography, University of Leeds