- Blog
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More Norman Wisdom than Osama Bin Laden
They had an election in Nigeria. While they were getting ready to vote someone tried to blow up the Electoral Commission with a truck bomb. Truck bombs are pretty common these days. In Iraq and Afghanistan and a dozen other countries a truckload of flammable gas is a 100% effective, 100% lethal weapon. Truck bombs…
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More twitter notes
UPDATE: This post recently passed its FIFTH BIRTHDAY! Twitter is a simple application with one real function: notification. Twitter posts are called ‘updates’ (or sometimes ‘tweets’). People use Twitter to tell the world practically anything but usually what they’re up to right now. Twitter is clever because it’s a platform. Dozens of applications already use…
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The inevitable Twitter post
I’ve been twittering for a couple of months now. I’m not actually addicted (I could give it up any time) but I’m up to a couple of hundred updates and I’ve got two separate accounts going. I suppose you’ve been reading about it all over the place so I’ll stick to what I’ve learnt: It’s…
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A dictionary of my Dad
Last Wednesday my dad, George Bowbrick, died. He died in a hospital in Dublin a week after we learnt he had a bone tumor and a secondary lung cancer. He’d been in real pain for quite a long time and various stupid doctors had diagnosed this pain as ‘frozen shoulder’, which is common and non-fatal.…
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Those dictionaries
A list of the 55 dictionaries that I found amongst my dad’s books when he died. Back to my blog post about him. Dictionary of Gastronomy Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs Dictionnaire des Noms Propres A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names Dictionary of Inventions Dictionary of Pub Names A Dictionary of Eponyms The Oxford…
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Radio twittering
Be my Twitter friend if you want to know what I’m listening to on the radio. I know I’m always going on about BBC Radio 4 here: ‘jewel in the crown’, ‘best speech radio in the world’, ‘liberal education in a box’ and all that. Forgive me but here I go again. The network is…
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Playing in the road
Yesterday the suburban street outside our house was closed all day. It’s a busy road so the contrast with an ordinary day was pronounced – the silence lovely. We all rushed out into the street to enjoy the calm. Olly brought his scooter and raced down the hill (achieving some kind of scary, wobbly land…
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What I have learnt about Iran lately
Iran is not monolothic. The country is (weakly) democratic, has a (partially) independent press and a (moderately) autonomous judiciary. Dissent and criticism exist. Iran is not entirely Shia. Nor even entirely Muslim. Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Buddhists and tens of millions of secularists live there. Iran is the largest exporter of pistachios in the world. Iran…
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Better than reading the menu
You mean your club doesn’t have a dirty great, broadsheet- sized, full-colour intellectual quarterly? Really? Mine does. Clever Giuseppe Mascoli, who’s been sprucing up Blacks in Dean Street a bit lately, has a hand in The Drawbridge, a really quite amazing pinkish newspaper full of the kind of tousled sociopaths you used to see only…