- Blog
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Random anthropology
My wife is researching a new haircut. So she finds herself typing the phrase ‘graduated bob‘ (that’s a kind of haircut) into Google Images. The first half a page of results are as you’d expect: photographs of haircuts. After that it gets really funny and strangely poignant. Look at all those Bobs! And every one…
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Shaving for a living
A couple of months ago I blogged a company called King of Shaves, one whose product I had always admired and whose brand I thought was interesting – unconventional, quite funny, a bit knowing. I sort of thought it was American: a bit too much chutzpah for a UK company, I thought. Anyway, it turns…
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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…