More iconic junk! Johnson & Coe Ltd have taken to buttering up the Evening Standard for its Olympic coverage.

It seems the iconic 2012 Olympic stadium is going to be out-iconed by the Mall and Buckingham Palace! LOCOG is looking at ending the London 2012 marathon in the Mall. A bit embarrassing really. Maybe no-one bothered to do a recce of East London's mean streets to see how exactly they would bring the athletes back to the stadium along a dazzling avenue. Locations like Bow roundabout and flyover would be prominent features to be broadcast around the world. I guess Bow Road can't quite match Piccadilly, the Strand or the Embankment.

The Olympic Bid - Blair explains what it was really about - having an alibi at the scene of the crime, winning with the help of his friend Silvio, manipulation British style and avoiding humiliation at the hands of the French!

A quick mention for the excellent Bow Back Rivers pages on the londoncanals.co.uk website.

Compiled in the period just before the Olympic onslaught hit the area, it's the definitive tour round all the waterways with their cocktail of history, industry and rampant wildlife which makes me realise how many places I never got to before it all disappeared.

Tanni Grey-Thompson fears the London 2012 Paralympic Games will be a sideshow to the main event.

The demand for new staff at the ODA to fuel the insatiable requirements for distortion, obfuscation and misrepresention of information on an Olympian scale shows no sign of abating, despite the promises of public sector cuts. Some things are just too important.

As Steve pointed out in the Or maybe there's an extra swan in the CGI? post, the ODA's latest 'unveiling' of plans for the Athletes Village landscaping contains nothing that hasn't already been publicised previously by LendLease (who are responsible for the project) on their own Athletes Village website.

The 'normal' IOC which says it 'needs efficient transport' has come under attack from Tory GLA member and Transport spokesman Richard Tracey. He told the insidethegames blog: "The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is concerned that traffic is the biggest problem facing London 2012, but this is because they expect thousands of their officials and camp followers to be whisked around in limousines."