- Blog
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Don’t tell me…
Do not tell me you’re not watching Nasty Pete, Wise Maggot, Vain (definitely not Gorgeous) George, Strange Traci, Sad Michael, Clever Dennis, Ditzy Chantelle and Cute Preston on the show of the year. I’m in awe. The unlikely offspring of Big Daddy Big Brother has grown up and is much better – more intense, more…
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Books and bombs
Will books be replaced (or even substantially substituted) by ebooks and hand-held readers? Robert McCrumb in The Observer thinks so. Maybe he’s right. A better question – do they need to replaced – is rarely asked. Instead, we line up around our entrenched positions – apocalyptic-Luddite or euphoric-futurist – both conveniently informed by the same…
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Forward Thinking
We live quite close to Watford which is supposed to be demographic dead centre of Great Britain so we see a lot of test marketing round here. The Lemsip people have been trying this one out quietly. I think it needs some work…
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Cuddly musical genius in town
About ten years ago, I met Elliot Carter. When I say ‘met’, I mean I stood next to him outside the cloakroom at The Museum of Modern Art in New York while someone fetched his coat. At the time I thought this was pretty cool (cooler still because earlier that day I’d stood next to…
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Abu, meet Rula
He’s not an attractive man is he? He reminds me of a PE teacher I once knew – a cruel, self-important man we laughed at when he wasn’t looking (funnily enough, he wound up in prison too…). Anyway, since the man is an obvious jerk and since he’s probably about as dangerous as… er… Jodie…
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Old music
A couple of years after the giant sucking sound coming from Cupertino was first heard in even the quieter parts of the record industry there can’t be much music released that isn’t available for download straight away somewhere or other and, for you cheapskates, the file sharing networks are bigger and more useful than ever.…
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Mortality, fallibility, electability
Death (all right, near death), addiction, conflict, betrayal, succession, loyalty, ambition… oblivion. Politics has it all. And it only takes a massive stroke or an intractable personality defect to take the story in a distinctly Shakespearian direction. Respect to tipsy Charles Kennedy and unconscious Ariel Sharon for the most gripping week in politics in years.…
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Radio Fun
Went to the Beeb to talk about Web 2.0 on Heather Peyton’s estimable Radio 4 business programme called Shop Talk. Four of us in the studio plus three other contributors in various parts of the world, including Joe Krauss, Excite founder and now the man behind Jotspot. The last time I saw Joe was at…
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Oh shit
This was always going to be the year of energy insecurity. I’m pretty sure that, if you gave me a minute, I could produce half a dozen authoritative predictions that in 2006 various (or all) Western economies would be damaged by failed or blocked supplies of oil or gas. We’re so short-sighted, so incapable of…
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Bowbrick Country
How did I manage to live in Stevenage (Saxon settlement and blighted Sixties new town) between the ages of seven and twenty without ever learning that E.M. Forster wrote Howards End there and that they call the country to the North of the town Forster Country? In the Seventies, when I was growing up there,…