The first is at Freemania:
The really important thing about Iraq: us
Today Gordon Brown gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. This weekend, amid violent attacks on polling stations, Iraq holds an election. I wonder which will get the most coverage?
The rest of the world exists primarily as a mirror for us.
The second is at Skuds’ place:
A week is a long time […]
I didn’t catch this in November, when it was posted, but I can’t miss it now. It’s a YouTube video that tells an astonishing wildlife photography story.
[via this teacher’s life]
Via Slashdot, here’s an abstract of a study of graffiti found on the walls of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, performed by a member of its IT staff. You can also browse the full dataset, including photographs of the inscriptions made available under a Creative Commons licence.
The take-home messages (as obtained with […]
Ryan Tedder wrote Bleeding Love for Leona Lewis and his band OneRepublic consists of friends from his church in Denver making music for people who think Coldplay are a bit too experimental. They are about as uncool as it’s possible to be without actually being David Hasselhoff.
I love their new album, Waking Up. It’s track after […]
The BBC News Website has changed its original headline:
SARAH PALIN LASHES OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
—bring your houseboy, and let’s party like it’s 1779!—to this one:
SARAH PALIN CONDEMNS OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
but, Liz Jones’s latest wibble—search for it if you like; I’m not going to link to it—retains its banner:
HONOUR KILLINGS? WHAT WE’VE DONE TO YOUNG EMMA […]
Lord Macca of Loch Kodak on his appearance on The X-Factor:
[Sir Paul McCartney] said he got some great reaction from people about his performance on the X Factor.
“We got great feedback on the streets the next day. It’s my claim to fame now.”
Foes of President Barack Obama and his policies can vent their frustrations by engaging in fictional warfare, thanks to a new online strategy game with a heavy political component.
The satirical game 2011: Obama’s Coup Fails, launched last month by a group of Ron Paul supporters that call themselves The Founders, throws players into combat against the […]
Further to my rant about clueless DJs replacing proper producers, here are a couple of funny little animations about the horrors of being a mastering engineer to today’s “talent”: Mastering: The Movie Part One and Part Two.
And, from an interview this month’s Sound on Sound magazine, here’s Bruce Swedien, studio engineer for Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and Thriller albums, on Quincy […]
I have just searched Google News for “Afghanistan”. The top three stories are, in order:
500 more British soldiers will go to Afghanistan—[report]
Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan—[report]
France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan—[report]
This [HD YouTube video] is a bonkers slab of wonderfully British-sounding soul-pop from V VBrown. Shame about the over-compressed production/mixing/mastering that turns every peak into white noise.
This [HD YouTube video—censored version] is an equally bonkers slab of ironic hair metal from the self-proclaimed “modern Spinal Tap”, Steel Panther. I know it’s meant to be a joke, but […]
Have a look at this elegant illustration of the relative safety of one cervical cancer vaccine.
Read this intriguing blogpost about how the appointment of bean-counters at Premiership clubs might well have made league games even more exciting to watch (as well as costing bookies money).
[Thanks to Jim P.]
I picked up this Prospect blogpost, via the magazine’s twitter feed, where it carried a headline that falls into the Kamm/Rentoul category of “Great Historical Questions To Which The Answer Is ‘No’.”:
“Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?”
The article itself doesn’t bother with the question mark, but is a classic of the “another Vietnam” genre, once so popular in commentary […]
Via Paulie’s “Shared Items” feed at Never Trust a Hippy, I read on the Democratic Society Blog one of the best “Did Magna Carta die in vain?” comments ever [see foot of the post I link to] and, on Tory Troll, an account of yet another FAIL by frontline interviewers.
Here’s a tip for the meedja and […]
One cool thing about twitter is the ability to search for a particular subject and see what people around the World are saying about it right now. This morning, as England’s tail-enders were putting on some cheeky runs, I searched for “Ashes”—which, as you’d expect, has recently become one of the most common words appearing […]
On being shown Michael Jackson moonwalking to Billie Jean, a friend’s seven-year-old son shrugged his shoulders and commented, unimpressed:
“Ahh… He’s got wheels in his shoes.”
[Anecdote and title stolen wholesale from JL.]
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 drawing my […]
Bernie 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 of getting rid of […]
For 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 […]
Every 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 […]
I 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.
The 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 review document […]
Cunningly, 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.]
Slashdot 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 cases, mind you, […]
The 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.
Via Clive Davis and thanks to YouTube, Esperanza Spalding plays Stevie Wonder for POTUS [Click the “HQ” button for better quality]:
“There ain’t a woman in this town big enough to keep me warm.”
Actually, 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 you have […]
I 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 […]
Tom 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 others, it […]
