- Blog
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Oh shit
MRSA – the hospital super-bug – is well-and-truly out of the hospitals (and getting more super by the day – it kills between 25 and 43% of its victims). Species-level ecological trends like this really sort out the optimists from the pessimists. If you’re a classical anti-growth green or an eco-warrior there’s really only one…
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Images of the lost
Beautiful and melancholy images from a profoundly lost era – Irwin Klein’s photographs of hippy settlers in New Mexico in the late Sixties. The kids in these photos would now be my age – I’d love to know what became of them. Link from Sharpeworld via Things.
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The Neurotic Doctor
Doctor Seuss is the opposite of the tradition of lovable hedgerow creatures, talking pets and mildly rebellious schoolboys in British literature for young kids. He’s a neurotic A. A. Milne, an uptight Kenneth Grahame. There’s nothing sunny or light-hearted about Seuss. All those dark, placeless landscapes and stringy, demented characters of indeterminate sex (and species)…
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Finding fonts
Ivan Pope (yes, Ivan Pope) sent me a link to this very useful (and apparently infallible) typeface identifier. I could seriously have done with something like this about fifteen years ago when I was trying to make my living from ‘Desktop Publishing’ (remember ‘Desktop Publishing’?). It also reminds me of ageless Nico Macdonald, who worked…
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Philoflagellationism
If I were a proper Catholic and not the miserable unbeliever I am proud to be, I might be upset with the way Garry Wills links Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with the history of out-of-control sexual abuse in the Church and especially within the ultra-secretive, right-wing Legion of Christ in this review…
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Evan Parker on Radio 3
My friend Steve Shepherd used to produce Radio 3‘s Jazz flagship Jazz on 3, then he moved to Wales with his family – nobody knows why but we assume he’s on the run from the triads or trad jazz buffs (triad jazz buffs?) or something. Anyway, he’s just made a kind of come-back with a…
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Murphy triumphs, Hackney lives up to its reputation
Paul Murphy’s opening at Transition in Hackney (London’s Brooklyn) was brilliant. APU150 is a really mature show – coherent, clever, beautifully worked (even quite nicely hung). I expect great things – provided Paul’s advanced age and scary appetite for very old Cognac don’t get in the way, naturally Paul’s priced the work to sell (he’s…
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This week’s top cow meme
Journalists don’t know anything. That’s their job. If they knew anything they’d be doing something that paid better. Besides, knowledgable journos wouldn’t be better journos, they’d just be more opinionated and that would reduce their value as reporters. An exception to this rule seems to be Mars guru Oliver Morton. I don’t want to gush…
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The future summarised
I’ve been meaning to blog this for ages. I’ve been subscribing for a few years to a ‘monthly abstract of books, articles and reports concerning forecasts, trends and ideas about the future’ from a serious-minded (but appropriately kookie) outfit called The World Future Society. Future Survey is a dreary-looking two-column newsletter with a slightly cheesy…
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Yuck
Politics is an ugly business and there’s nothing uglier than Messrs Howard and Davies scoring the easiest points of their miserable careers from the Romanian visa scam. They’re so in tune with the Daily Mail’s second-rate racial hygiene fantasies that it makes me nauseous. The apparent chaos in the immigration service is hardly encouraging (another…