- Blog
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Dodgy country reports send refugees back to their doom
Important journalism from Dominic Arkwright on the BBC’s Broadcasting House Sunday Morning news show. It turns out that the ‘country reports’ produced by the Home Office on which immigration service deportation decisions are based are partial and inaccurate. Arkwright says: “Some of the so-called Country Reports are so flawed, it’s said, that they’re virtually useless…
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Saving Radlett Fire Station
Radlett, the nice Hertfordshire suburb in which I live, is famous for many things – swinging, prostitution and credit card theft, for instance – but it also has a fire station and rather wonderful one too. It was built in 1907, paid for by a local subscription, and it’s staffed, to this day, by a…
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Piece of cake, this futurology
I feel obliged to draw your attention to September’s disastrous fall in sales of SUVs (4x4s as we call them here) in the US, not least because, back in May, I told you it was going to happen. (picture from HybridCars.com).
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Real cowboys and Indians
I bookmarked the National Cowboy Museum’s amazing rodeo history archive at del.icio.us (now defunct) but the site has many other amazing assets, including a library of photographs of native Americans by late Nineteenth Century European photographers. (I updated this post because the old links were all dead. The new links are approximately correct. All very…
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Enfranchising prisoners
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain should allow prisoners the vote. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with denying prisoners the vote. It’s an arbitrary, petty and outdated gloss on the withdrawal of liberty and, worse, it grants unelected judges a quite inappropriate role in the democratic process. Taking the right to vote…
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Get over it
A genuinely free market will produce whatever you need whenever you need it. so here you can create your own church signs. And why not?
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Links are back
So I spent about two months fiddling with my blogroll and tried a few ways of keeping it up-to-date and now, at last, it’s back. So, if you’re one of the people who’s been writing to me complaining, then you can shut up now. Of course, the thing I’d forgotten was that most of my…
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More Japanese corporate history
I love these Japanese corporate history sites – in fact, I’m becoming a bit of a connoisseur. Nikon‘s is a treat, and all the better for the wobbly translation: I, the author of this article, used to work in Nippon kogaku’s designing department, felt a bitter feeling when asked by a sales representative of an…
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Go analogue
Will digital cameras ever acquire the butch glamour of the classic mechanical bullet-stoppers of the 35mm era? Common sense says ‘I suppose so’ but I can’t see it myself. Digital cameras are as feathers next to these old copper-alloy lovelies. It’s like comparing one of those crappy nylon and tin sliding door commuter trains to…
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Some things are only possible on the radio
Three beautiful and evocative examples of the art of radio from the Radio 4 treasure trove. Last week’s Open Country, a really fascinating programme about East Anglian Churches and Chapels, evoking an era of simplicity, piety and ugly class brutality. A terrific insight into the work and thought (and language) of theatre directors: John Caird…