- Blog
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Book review: go on… build your own
You could build your own car or your own TV but it would be rubbish. I suppose you could build pretty much anything (an aeroplane, a house, a speedboat…) if you wanted to – people do, don’t they – but a routine cost-benefit analysis (can I be bothered?) probably keeps that kind of silliness to…
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Kids love stories more than they love toys
A copy of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar is sold every 57 seconds. That makes it the best selling kids’ book of all time. Who knew? We like it round here, of course, especially the board book, which is indestructible as well as being a gentle, colourful and mesmerisingly-paced treat (Rosa, 18 months, is…
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Outstanding
Measuring value-for-money on a scale of 1-10, this Neal Stephenson interview (conducted by the Slashdot groupmind) approaches infinity. A generous, clever and funny man. Thanks to practically everyone for the link.
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Seeking smokers…
This sad-looking (and slightly out-of-focus) TV crew were standing in Carnaby Street lunchtime today and – I kid you not – as I passed them I heard the reporter say “Come on smokers”. Who knows how long they’d been standing there waiting for an indignant smoker to interview about the impending Liverpool smoking ban but…
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Dandy lives
It definitely cheers me up to learn that The Dandy has not only survived for seven decades (longer than any other comic) but has now emerged confidently into the glossy covermount era. The old characters have been updated deftly and there are some pretty good new ones. Good covermounts too (a sticky rubber tomato this…
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Weird American politics and technology standards
In the current NYRB Joan Didion mixes bile and incision beautifully in a long and detailed analysis of the simultaneously etiolated and hyped-up language of ‘the new normal’ in post-Iraq American Politics. Brilliant writing. I learnt a lot from this really meaty VoIP special issue and from this equally meaty essay about standards in ACM…
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What’s the opposite of sustainable software?
Government IT projects are out of control. That’s a given. 30 billion quid is a lot of money (for something visible from space it would be a lot of money – in fact, it would get you quite a long way up your space elevator). I don’t want to trivialise the task of integrating dozens…
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Britain’s only PHP celebrity
A productive day in town – meeting with interesting people: lunch at Blacks with my lawyer, top secret discussions with a Guardian journo in Farringdon, a chance meeting with a top PERL geezer in Foyles and an expensive glass of wine with the esteemed Phil Gyford. Outstanding.
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Jacques the clown
Wild guess: Jacques Derrida, demon of empiricists and humanists (and newspaper editors) everywhere, will, now that he’s gone, quite soon be reduced to a cuddly, French caricature – a sort of philosophical Jacques Tati: an eccentric, provocative, language-obsessed clown. His unsettling ideas will be neutralised by nostalgia for a period already mostly forgotten. I expect…
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Brands brought low
Crass television advertising is not dead. In fact we seem to be enjoying a renaissance. To begin with, there are the braindead sponsorship ‘bumpers‘ (I think that’s what they’re called) wrapped around Parkinson‘s new slot on ITV. Tightly framed mouths read ugly little poems clumsiliy themed on ‘plain speaking’ or something – about the silliest…