Close to the end of February, I am now posting the second entry this year to reflect onTake 2 posts from the preceding month. As previously mentioned, the aim of composing the news is to interrupt the otherwise unending sequence of increasingly fictitious stories in the media. Fictitious not as in literally untrue; but because with each extension in the mediating sequence – one image/tweet/blog/comment/feature leading to another and another, the sequence itself is further divorced from reality. Accordingly, I am working on a form of writing which is derivative but consciously so – its content derived from material available online, with this freely available material reconfigured in the attempt to reinstate featured individuals in their human being. My intention is that the last word shall go to the common humanity in which each of these stories has its origins, restoring the arc from the general to the particular and disrupting the tendency to flatten human experience in that unending sequence of mediating phenomena. The form is indeed contradictory: the essential drawn down from an even higher level of derivatives; so too is the content. Thus the most recent post, ‘The Two Oscars’, purports to underline the similarities between the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius and the drama of Oscars-night in Hollywood; but the real aim is to pull them apart – to distinguish between reality and fantasy by juxtaposing them. In one way or another, all my posts aim to use more writing (rather than less) to arrest the mediating sequence of intangibles and make my chosen stories tangible again. But this is not a voluntaristic quest for something existential. It is prompted by the belief that there is a shared reality – social reality, beyond the partial aspects of it which come variously to the fore, depending on which part of the world you are in and what part it plays in the global distribution of roles and responsibilities. Thus my hope is that Take 2 comes from the point-of-view of the totality. Conversely, it is addressed to anyone who dares to view particular events from just this universal frame of mind.