- Blog
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Things I love…
The Dover Press free samples. Always something useful, always something bonkers. Next time you’re in the West End go into the Dover shop in Earlham Street – a proper goldmine of graphic ephemera (including all those fantastic woodcut creatures from the O’Reilly books).
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Brown vs Blair links
Charles Clarke’s blistering Telegraph interview and, of course, the interview with The Standard’s Associate Editor Anne MacElvoy that brought his entertainingly incendiary views to light in the first place. The Statesman’s interview with David Milliband (the one who looks like Mr Bean) and, from the same issue, Martin Bright’s It’s Already Over. One of those…
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Now that’s not very nice is it?
Visiting the still-in-closed-beta web site of Newmark and Jarvis’ intriguing citizen news startup Day Life today I guess I was expecting the kind of cuddly and informal welcome you get from all these cuddly and informal Web 2.0 businesses. No such luck. What I got was about as close to a ‘fuck off’ as I…
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Disconnected thoughts on Blair’s mugging
It’s been too late for Gordon Brown for at least a full parliamentary term. Using his party muscle to secure the leadership now is petulant political vandalism. He is shedding votes by the day. Brown’s studied absence from the national debate on health, education, transport, immigration, the war in Iraq, Lebanon… (you name it, in…
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Political unwisdom
There are many reasons to be frustrated if you’re a Labour supporter right now. First, there’s the epic squandering of political capital. In the year-and-a-bit since Labour’s important and unprecedented third general election victory in a row Labour has inexplicably surrendered so much ground to the Tories that the humungous electoral mountain that stands between…
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Joy Division on YouTube
So what is it about this nearly thirty year-old video that makes my spine tingle. Bloody hell…
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OK. I give in
So, I’ve always been suspicious of orchestral music. I’m no musician (no kidding) but I love music and a long time ago I decided that orchestral music was all together too bourgeois for me, too big and industrial in scale. Orchestral music in the nineteenth century mold – hierarchical, formal, un-ironic (capitalist, black tie music,…
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Grief and crocodiles
In our house we’re sort of unexpectedly mourning strange, stupid Steve Irwin. The man was a bit rough – a sort of Anti-Attenborough, barely literate (mashing up the language like George W), constantly wading into nasty-looking lakes and rivers and oceans in his stupid khaki shorts (did the man not possess a pair of swimming…
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How much is music worth?
Universal’s spin is that they’re going to give away music downloads to defeat the file sharers. It’s not true. To understand why the Spiral Frog announcement is important you need to understand what Apple’s iTunes Music Store has done to the music industry. iTunes is important for all sorts of reasons, obviously but – as…
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Morality and Labour Mobility
Labour mobility is a good thing. That much is economic orthodoxy. It spreads wealth and makes economies more efficient. In Britain, over the last two years, we’ve been experimenting with the limits of labour mobility. As a result, we now know that if you open your borders to poorer states their more enterprising young citizens…