- Blog
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Transport issues in post oil-crisis urban policing in the United States
Important journalism from Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian (the paper that reliably tackles the big issues). I hate to quibble but, even when I was a kid, everybody knew that Starsky’s Ford Gran Torino wasn’t a real muscle car, just cheesy product placement from the wrong side of the oil crisis (by the way, check…
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Warm white wine, peanuts, outer space, celebrities… Marvelous
The highlight of the week was on Wednesday. First, fantastic French Vietnamese lunch with parent and wife Juliet, baby Rosa, sarcastic artist Paul Murphy and noted author Yolanda Zappaterra (they don’t have a high-chair but Bam-Bou was probably the most baby-friendly restaurant we’ve ever been to), then to Carlton House Terrace to help Demos launch…
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Pictures to set a small boy’s pulse racing
Lovely 360 degree QTVRs of aeroplanes (and rockets, of course) from the Smithsonian’s collection and a gallery of equally lovely photos of old tractors and trucks from Antique Power and Vintage Truck Magazines. Someone gave me the Smithsonian link but I can’t remember who. Sorry!
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Colour photographs from a B&W world
These colour photographs from pre-revolutionary Russia are beautiful and strange. The Library of Congress has made handsome digital images from the three-part glass negatives left by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the last Tsar. BBC4 ran a documentary about him this evening. I expect they’ll run it again.
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Thank you Faruk!
Andrew Murray at PCM – sponsors of this weblog – delivered my new Mac the other day – my third G4 Powerbook and probably my tenth Powerbook in all. This one was a dud, though. Wouldn’t boot at all or booted and then showed me a lot of nasty debug code before it passed out…
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Elstein on the Beeb
If David Elstein was a standard issue public service bootboy (like Gerald Kaufman) or a free market storm trooper (like Tony Ball) it might be possible to dismiss his report for the Tories as politics as usual. The trouble is he’s one of the most experienced and intelligent managers in the business and a provocative…
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Picturesque Disneyland
We spent the weekend in a sort of 19th Century Disneyland – staying in a gorgeous, completely bonkers, self-consciously rustic cottage by a placid (and artificial) pond, hidden in the greenest (it’s February for Christ’s sake!) valley I’ve ever seen surrounded on all sides by the sound of rushing, tumbling streams. The cottage is on…
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Our friends in the East
Britain, for the time being, is out on a European limb in regard to immigration from the ten accession states. This is a good thing. There’s competitive advantage in being open to resourceful, economically-active migrants while other Nations aren’t. While the UK economy is still growing strongly and while there are obvious gaps in our…
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The really big deal
I know a lot of you come here for straightforward, unbiased advice on what to do with your next $66 billion so here’s my angle on the Comcast Disney offer: they’re on drugs. Executives in big media firms are addicted to the buzz of the epic deal. Do we not have enough case studies of…
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A bloated Lear
Without the distractions of Hutton and the BBC’s self-immolation we’d probably all have been paying more attention to the Shakespearian Conrad Black saga. Black is an appalling figure. Decades of cringing deference and unaccountable power have turned him into a bloated Lear, raging against the ingratitude of his shareholders and erstwhile friends – many of…