Highlights
Nearly half a bicycle
The atomic theory in Kilburn — This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
Some bullet-points about regulation
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about […]
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Two 9/11 books
Michael Tomasky reviews William Langewiesche’s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center in the New York Review of Books. Langewiesche was the only journalist to be allowed access to Ground…
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Memory at the British Museum
Bloggers will love ‘The Museum of the Mind’, a new exhibition in The Great Court at the British Museum: odds and sods assembled to support a larger purpose – a…
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Building Magazine on why construction needs migrant workers
Gordon Brown’s announcement of a larger quota for desperately needed overseas construction workers is cue for a good piece from Building magazine about migrant workers on UK sites. The article…
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Planet Parent
Juliet’s latest Planet Parent column is up at Tigerchild. It’s about the remarkable ability of our 4 year-old Oliver to get spontaneously grubby.
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Better Writer
12 or 13 years ago I used a Mac Word Processor called Nisus Writer. It was fast and cheap and it easily fit on a 400K floppy. I think I…
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Google buys another company
Azeem explains Google’s acquisition of a search tech business called Applied Semantics. He also seems to think I should understand this well enough to provide some kind of commentary. Sadly…
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And the winner is…
Jonathan Bell, who looks after the excellent Things weblog, got an email off to me quicker than nine other people in response to this entry so he gets to read…
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Book trade snippets
From The Bookseller. Ten (that’s all ten) of the current top ten bestsellers in the Children’s Non-fiction category are by the same author. They’re all from Terry Deary’s series of…
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A Pomfret at Blacks
Lunch today with Andrew Swift (not pictured), big fish at Price Jamieson, top recruiters to the media and marketing communities. We talked about Barcelona, weblogs, the crash and recruitment advertising.…
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Blue collar thrills
There’s a village in the flatlands of South Northamptonshire called Podington. Nearby is what used to be a US Airbase. In 1966, some locals decided to introduce the frankly weird…
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Wanna free subscription to the London Review of Books?
As a subscriber to the LRB I’m allowed to give a free subscription to a friend but, since you can’t have more than one freebie, my candidate friends are all…