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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
MySpace sex offender charged with running “fake” church. It’s lucky they caught him before “real” churches became associated with fraud and the sexual abuse of children.
PADDY POWER OFFERS ODDS OF 4-1 THAT GOD EXISTS
A bookmaker has slashed its odds on proof being found of God’s existence to just 4-1.
Since opening its book just two months ago, punters hoping to have their faith rewarded have placed £5,000 with Paddy Power.
It began taking bets on the question that has plagued thinkers for centuries in September, […]
The Economist plays air plastic guitar:
AS THE music industry searches for a new model in the age of digital distribution and internet piracy, it is getting a helping hand from an unexpected quarter: video games such as “Guitar Hero†and “Rock Bandâ€, which let people play along to songs on simplified imitation instruments. “These games are […]
My getting into this game had nothing to do with some kind of 9/11 epiphany. No, it was the insanity of the property bubble that started me writing spoofs and screeds on the Web, originally at the excellent, skeptical, principled, and free Motley Fool UK site. I retired from posting on its “Property: Markets and […]
I have been known to have fun at the expense of Chelsea and Manchester United on this site, but following their meeting yesterday, it’s time for me to invite my reader to extend some sympathy to the latter at least. Watchers of Premiership football who value the contribution to the league of Manchester United’s modest […]
This afternoon, I walked through my door and picked up this week’s local free newspaper, The Brighton and Hove Leader. Amongst the insert spam included today was a glossy advert for Forbes TV rentals, inviting me to hire a flatscreen TV in time for the Beijing Olympics 2008 and a brochure inviting me to come […]
I’ve just had an email from Yvette Cooper. My first thought was: “Bloody hell, after all these years!” Then I remembered that, since leaving college, I have become a washed-up nobody and she has become a member of the Cabinet with two houses—both of which I am paying for. Not that I’m bitter.
Coincidentally, property was the […]
This week, I saw John The Savage and Bela Emerson at Komedia.
John The Savage is an experimental post-something-or-other band featuring my friend Richard Brincklow on piano. Don’t be put off by my arty-sounding and vague description. They have tunes and they can play. They groove and they rawk. But they’re also very unusual indeed. Go see […]
While I’m on subject of recommendations I thought my parents had made to me but they hadn’t, this year I watched The Conversation for the first time. I thought mum and dad had been telling me for years that I should check it out, but, when I was round theirs a few weeks back and […]
It’s not just in the real world that inflation is a problem for those responsible for monetary policy. Right now, the virtual world of World of Warcraft needs to deal with an acute growth in money supply. Its administrators have decided to do so by conjuring many imaginary objects of enormous utility from nothing, giving […]
In an effort to push through an extension to the number of days the police can detain you without charge (if you are suspected of being a terrorist), the government—sorry: “Gordon Brown”, because all current and future legislation is the work of a single overbusy Scotsman—is suggesting that it will compensate innocent suspects held under […]
Perhaps you remember this story that I read in a “true life confessions” mag in a waiting room?:
MY SISTER’S BRUTAL KILLING INSPIRED MY BUSINESS PLAN
It seems that, a couple of years on, a US entrepreneur has had the same idea and the result is a similarly Onion-esque report in Wired. Under the headline:
MONSTER.COM FOUNDER STARTS […]
Mick Hartley links to a Times report of a “serious” novelist suing the proprietors of a neighbouring factory because the fumes it produced so affected her concentration that she was reduced to writing genre fiction. It’s not just a funny hook for a news story; it’s a delicious illustration of how class and status in […]
Tom Hamilton complains about being spammed by Naomi Klein’s people, looking for publicity for her latest volume of designer politics. (Exactly as I didn’t with Peter Cook’s book back here, I am going to divine without reading it that Klein’s book will be rubbish.) From Tom’s comments, it seems, they also pestered Tim Worstall, Mr Eugenides, and […]
When I tore open the plastic envelope containing my latest copy of The Economist there was a flyer inside advertising Felix Dennis’s How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom Of One Of Britain’s Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs. If you phone the number printed on it then he’ll send you a copy of the new paperback edition […]
Further to my post about remaindered books, Claire reminds me of Clive James’s poem on the subject.
I’ve just been on the phone with The Tax Man and we had a discussion in which we used the phrase “the bottom line” to mean “the bottom line”. Self-employment is weird.
I’ve observed before that there are good reasons to criticise Cherie Blair, but it’s revealing that those aren’t the reasons why most people in the media criticise her. It’s worse than that: they hate her—and for the oldest human reason of all: she’s “not one of us”.
Cherie Booth was a poor north-of-England Catholic girl from broken […]
Also at that party the other day, one of the Young People told me that Passenger, featuring Richard Brincklow on keyboards, are high up on BBC Radio 2’s playlist. The next day, one of my spies inside the Passenger camp also passed on to me a delicious factoid.
Whenever Richard and I write or perform any music together it’s […]
I listened to Gordon Brown’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as actual Prime Minister yesterday. If you put the substance of the “debate” aside (as the laws of contemporary British journalism require all commentators to do) then David Cameron made Gordon Brown sound a bit rickety. The good thing for our democracy is that, before most […]
One of the dangers of teaching your children to read at an early age is that they will just pick up anything that’s lying around the house or on the shelves of the local library and start reading it because it’s got words in. This inevitably leads to questions about the words. I clearly remember […]
A. N. Wilson has been writting cobblers for years. What disturbs me now is that The New York Times seems to be willing to pay him to write cobblers in its pages. Over at Tom Hamilton’s place there’s some more nonsense from Wilson.
While you’re at Davos Newbies, I also recommend that you read the proprietor’s extensive […]
Despite my general slackness, the Wedding Photography Blog is now in the UK top ten for the search terms “photography blog”. Thank you to everyone who helped to put it where it is.
People are therefore now offering me stuff (including hard cash) in return for my linking to them, but I am, for the time being […]
Please tell me this article is a parody, aimed at luring bloggers into making mocking fools of themselves. The suspiciously named “Sebastian Cresswell-Turner” complains at length that his middle-class peers aren’t as rich as members of their parents’ generation and have to do shocking things like live in Battersea or send their children to state schools.
When I […]
Somewhere in a box I have a copy of Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold on cassette. I bought it when I was a kid and listened to it on the Sony boombox that I won when I was thirteen in a competition to come up with a new advertising slogan for Pot Noodle™.
Dire Straits’ fourth, and […]
