From Warren Ellis' Bad Signal mailing list, on the London bombing:

My American friends have noted
that four bombs have been met
with stark indifference by the
British public, and have asked if this
is some stiff-upper-lip thing. Listen,
Christmas bombing campaigns
used to turn up with the same
regularity as the Queen's speech.
We've done this before, and,
frankly, the IRA were better at it.

This 7/7, 070705 shit is bugging the
fuck out of me. Especially when it's
coming from Americans. It's an
insult to the genuine disaster
suffered in New York, and it goes
against the general feeling here.
This isn't something to be enshrined.
It's something to leave behind. It's
happened before, and it'll happen
again. Don't expect us all to go
insane. Most of us went to the pub.

For those following the details of
the thing: this was a real low-rent
operation. The attacks were on the
most indefensible part of London --
the public transport. The bus bomb
is indicative of small-scale devices
-- London buses are basically tin
and sellotape, and yet most of the
seats on the top deck, where the
bomb went off, were left intact.
There's photography of the upstairs
passengers standing up and looking
at the new hole in the bus. The
pressure wave of the blast blew out
the sides and took the top off --
tin and sellotape meant that the
pressure wasn't contained in the bus,
which probably saved a few lives.
If you want to kill everyone on a
bus, you put the device on the
lower deck, not the top. This was
crap terrorism, using devices they
obviously were not confident of
smuggling into Live 8 or even the
crowds that gathered for the
Olympic win.

Most people are still joking that
it was the work of the French.

Hell, probably so are the French.