- Blog
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A gruffalo? What’s a gruffalo?
If you’re in charge of small children (3 and up) and you can still get tickets, I think you should take them to see Tall Stories Theatre Company’s deliriously entertaining The Gruffalo, a touring stage adaptation of one of our favourite picture books. You’ll laugh and shout and, if you know the words, you’ll join…
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Forecasting
I’m bookmarking The FT’s page of predictions for 2003 from business, finance, politics, diplomacy and culture mainly so that I can check back next year to see how they did. Among other things, I learn that: Saddam will fall, house prices will not and Robbie Williams will not make it big in America.
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New religions
If you were to invent a new religion – a post-enlightnment, post-Darwin, post-DNA, post-space travel religion – what would it look like? Would it scrap a conventional, external deity in favour of some kind of meditation-enhanced ego? Would it have an extra-terrestrial creation myth? Would it have a ‘chief scientist’ and be active in gene…
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Oh no it isn’t!
Happy Christmas From Steve Bowbrick! — .Have a great new year, stay in touch and do let me know what you’re up to.
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Creative Commons
Let me get this straight right up front: I think the public domain is critically important to human advancement, I think the net is its most important representative on this plane and I think copyright is out of control. I also think that Creative Commons is a fascinating and practical new approach to networked copyright…
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Readership in need of renewal
Peter Preston highlights the effects on newspaper publishing of the UK’s falling birthrate and aging population.
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Joe Strummer
I’m certain we’ll see better obituaries for Joe Strummer from some of the great writers of that period (many of whom are presumably now drowning their sorrows) but, in the meantime, here’s one from the NME whose crass content management system just can’t help offering ‘Joe Strummer ringtones’ under the headline.
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Intoxicated
I make no apology for the fact that this weblog has taken a domestic turn lately. It’s Xmas. The pleasure of watching the faces of our three and four-and-a-half year-olds watching Cinderella this afternoon was so intoxicating – I wish this dumb camphone would work in low light. I could have shown you! You’ll have…
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How do they do that?
This £9.95 toy records twenty second sound clips and incorporates them into its programme of lights and sirens and racing around. Oliver, aged four, takes this entirely for granted, of course. This morning, the car raced up to me in the kitchen and announced “Daddy, you are under arrest”.
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Tily in the gloom
The questionable low-light capabilities of this Ericsson cam-phone (have you wondered why the TV ads all seem to be set in the Sahara or Southern California in high summer?) and the sepulchral gloom of Blacks in Dean Street produce interesting results. Here’s Stuart Tily, another.com‘s new capo, looking like a Rembrandt merchant (you might need…