I’ve been known to be uncomplimentary here about Tamworth, the town where I grew up. Back in the 80s, an Australian barman once told a friend of mine that, travelling around England, it was the place where he had been beaten up most frequently for being Australian. And he was white. Thanks to Paulie for […]
Read MoreBernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”. Mr Ecclestone endorsed the concept of a government based on tyranny. “Politicians are too worried about elections,” he said. “We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea […]
Read MoreFor the past four years, I have been involved in a dispute with a utility company over a sum that ultimately amounted to several thousand pounds. The company will remain nameless here because, today, thanks to the intervention of the relevant government watchdog, we finally settled without having to go to court. It is a […]
Read MoreEvery single “serious” newspaper in the UK led with Iran this morning. But The Daily Mail devoted its entire front page to an attack on Gordon Brown and the Iraq Inquiry, and The Express (alongside a photograph of a Euro Lotto winner cradling a giant cabbage) to asylum seekers, the largest group of whom before the war came […]
Read MoreI love tie-and-dye, and used to carry books around in tie-and-dye bags that my mum made for me. It was some time before I became aware (to my discomfort) that people in the west associated it with hippies. Here’s a BBC slideshow about makers of tie-and-dye fabrics in Mali.
Read MoreThe resignation of Hazel Blears reminded me again that this nation’s government now has a “Department for Communities”. Letting that phrase pass my lips without implied quotation marks would be like vomiting into my mouth without washing it out. Thanks to Kevin Harris’s “neighbourhoods” blog, I can sample a little of that department’s output, a […]
Read MoreCunningly, Yahoo! has made a virtue of the Alex Massie view of the relative lack of sophistication of “Twenty20” cricket to promote their live online coverage of the world championships. [The video embedded below is a Windows Media file.]
Read MoreSlashdot links to a report in the New York Times about a project to combine genetic material from lawyering and fund management and create the highest hourly fee known to man. Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits. Not in trip-and-fall […]
Read MoreThe new “un-search engine” Wolfram Alpha beat Google in at least one of my tests: Here are some of its answers to other, harder, questions.
Read MoreVia Clive Davis and thanks to YouTube, Esperanza Spalding plays Stevie Wonder for POTUS [Click the “HQ” button for better quality]:
Read More“There ain’t a woman in this town big enough to keep me warm.”
Read MoreActually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right. If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, “Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?” it hurts any chance […]
Read MoreI hated Oxford and didn’t speak to anyone the whole first term, she says.I hated the way students used big words when plain English would do, how they laughed at things that weren’t funny, and how they spent the day in the library, then lied that they’d done no work. I also thought they’d reject […]
Read MoreChorlton Villa: 6 — Manchester International FC: 4
Read MoreTom Freeman doesn’t see the sense in The Times capitalizing the words “Left”, “Right”, and “Centre” when its writers use them to describe political leanings. I think the newspaper is right to do so. Language is a communication channel, and shouldn’t be a fashion accessory or status symbol; however, in this country, more than many […]
Read MoreBack in the 80s, I used to be in a band with a guy called Martyn Hope—indeed, we went to school together. Back in the 90s, having read that, surreally, Elvis revivalist Shakin’ Stevens was a closet Red1, I went searching online to find out if he was a member of a late 70s cohort […]
Read MoreThe headline above is a lie, as is almost everything in an article in The Daily Mail, fisked here by the British Humanist Association. [via wongaBlog]
Read MoreYou park the team bus outside Anfield on a Sunday and within minutes the wheels are off. (Now that our improbable “breakthrough” season has officially gone down the tubes, can Villa just return to mid-table mediocrity again, please? I can’t be doing with the misplaced hope.)
Read More[A] bat, seen clinging to the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its launch on Sunday, apparently clung for dear life to the side of the tank as the spaceship lifted off. … The shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 milers per hour, which is 25 times faster than the […]
Read MoreFrom The Motley Fool: My 8-year old daughter enters the room. Millie: Aww, football?! Football is such rubbish. As the daughter of a life-long Saints supporter she has a point. Me: That’s true, but it’s not on for long. A lump of sulk flops down next to me. I try to remember why other teams […]
Read MoreThe other day, I was (as one so often is) on the door at the latter stages of a central Brighton soul and Motown event with a mixed-race lesbian bouncer. She leerily told me tales of her days running sapphic club nights, and how the punters only really started to pile in when she imported […]
Read MoreBrothers and sisters, watch and listen as the universal language of music meets the multimedia multi-ethnic mega-mashup that is teh Interwebz and a groove is born [YouTube video]. Kutiman, a 26-year-old citizen of [sarcasm]the Evil Zionist Entity, isn’t too busy baking the blood of Palestinian babies into matzos[/sarcasm] to do a reggae one, with a […]
Read MorePaul Evans worked for a company that built Websites for political organizations long before the current crop of johnny-come-latelys started twittering about “digital engagement” and “campaigning 2.0”. This post of his about the kinds of people who use the Net to harass politicians and the kind of people politicians should listen to—two groups that, in […]
Read MoreFor some lucky and rich people who describe themselves as Left-wing, one of the worst things about free markets is that they have given the oiks the freedom to enjoy the pleasures that were previously restricted to their betters. A real “socialist” state would provide the lower orders with more suitable goods: perhaps they would […]
Read MoreThank you very much to the PooterGeeker who sent me a Minolta SLR camera, lenses and other exciting goodies. You are star. I feel guilty writing so little lately when my readers are so nice to me. The person who sent me that amazing gift is someone I have never met in my life, which […]
Read MoreThe (Monty) Pythons raid YouTube, displacing poor-quality rip-offs of scenes from their films on the site by adding official, high-quality rip-offs. Are they mad? Well, they’re certainly richer. Their DVD sales have increased by 23 000 percent. [via Slashdot]
Read MoreWhenever someone implies that anti-Semitism isn’t racism, I point out that it’s one of the few examples of discrimination that really is racism (unlike, for example, the invented thoughtcrime “Islamophobia”1 ) because the Ashkenazi Jewish population is as close as you can get scientifically to the common (and deeply flawed) notion of what a “race” […]
Read MoreThis has to be one (if only one) in the eye for all those people who say there’s no point in listening to passenger plane safety announcements about how to slide down the inflatable ramp and put on your flotation aid because if there’s a crash the best you can hope for is to be […]
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