YTD

Benazir Bhutto

Went out to the newsagent this morning after another bad day of flu, saw the news about Bhutto. Tariq Ali has a piece about her in the Guard...

CDO to Pleasure

Interesting essay by John Lanchester in the LRB on the recent Northern Rock debacle and the largely unchallenged role of the City in the UK;...

Nancarrow

Got this in an e-mail from a friend just before I went to America. He'd been to a concert performed by Thomas Ades, which included piece...

amj tomorrow, amj yesterday but never amj today?

In bed with bad cold. 11am the doorbell rings. Ich komme, ich komme, I cry, rolling out of bed, pulling on trousers, ich komme (which may no...

Luddism

It's the time of year when one tries to deal with unfinished business. Do nasty little jobs one has been putting off. Starting with a cl...

sadly for simple piety

Various prominent members of German churches are extremely annoyed. German shopping hours have gradually been relaxed over the years (it wa...

pullmania

I was going to write a post on the Accents series I bought in Oxford, but it needed a lot of space to do it justice; as so often, the though...

the other side of the fence

Somewhat overwhelmed by end-of-year getting into position. Came across a rabblerousing analysis of the music industry by David Byrne (Surviv...

Things

Came across a review article on things by Jessica Helfand of Design Observer, taking in Perec, Dr Seuss, Buy Nothing Day, the Addams Family,...

Greening of books again

I recently thought I'd try out an online bookswapping site, Bookmooch . You sign up; you list some books you'd like to get rid of, f...

money shots then and now

Infinite Thought posts her recent paper on the history of cinematic pornography, of which this is an excerpt: Despite the overwhelming ‘cho...

Godard

Cahiers du Cinema has a video clip of an interview with Jean-Luc Godard here . I'm afraid I found this unenthralling and stopped watchin...

hangul to hanja

A reader asked whether one could do this in Tiger. I think so, I think the instructions were simply offered in Korean before the release of ...

geleopardet

I bought a MacBook in the States (against stiff opposition from Chase Bank): you can run Windows programs, something last offered in a short...

inanity, inanity, all is inanity

Sankt Oberholz is a café on Rosenthalerstraße. It has a blog with a somewhat Alexandrian aesthetic: that is, it has turned the Lost and Fou...

there's no place like kansas

My stepmother used to share an e-mail address with my father. Then she set up her own e-mail address and he would tell her when people wrote...

ups and downs and ups and

Got back from the gym this morning (good) resolved to get a new bike basket (the last stolen while I was in Morocco). Was not sure whether t...

votes for sperm

In 1984 Gerald Ford chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. I thought it was pretty exciting, the prospect of a woman as VP. My father ...

simplicity

Levitation aside, there is a vocabulary test engine called Lavengro that is written in Python (one you can use, in other words, to build you...

Dick Van Dyke, Rod Steiger, someone was watching

In Oxford to see my dentist, Roz Tritton. Or rather, in Oxford to see my dentist's hygienist. I would just as soon not make a special tr...

long ago and far away

Drove through the streets of Gainesville with my father, who talked about a book he is writing about Brazil. He said when he was in Brasilia...

shape and strength

Eliot said it was the poet's job to purify the language of the tribe. Philosophy has sometimes shared that ambition. The bidding systems...

never trust a widget

Level of education required to read PP: TAR ART RAT: According to critics rant

I know I know I know

The "blog which is an art project which is disguised as a blog" and which has, literally, changed names a couple hundred times bu...

I type QWERTY you type QWERTZ let's call the whole thing off

SMB said in a recent comment that if I were to have a shopping basket on the website it should definitely be in Flash. (SMB disapproves of s...

inscrutable occidentals

Was watching Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More again for a piece I'm writing for The Believer on sequels. The DVDs have inte...

One we made earlier

I got an e-mail from Rafe Donahue a couple of months ago with two plots that I couldn't get to display properly, and so time passed, tim...

Word from Q

I asked Hassan whether it was really necessary to have a shopping basket in Flash and he said Yes. He explained: What I have in mind is some...

SGTD

I got an e-mail a few days ago from Mithridates . He said if Tender Only to One was what he thought it was it should go public because it mi...

Imran sent off

"I am not a dictator, I want a democracy," he told Britain's Sky News. "The day when there is no turmoil in Pakistan, I w...

impossible negative

From Good Math, Bad Math The British lottery put out a "scratch-off" game called "Cool Cash". The idea of it is that it...

Edy Poppy

While in Morocco I got an e-mail from Rose Merrill, an American who does I forget what in Berlin, announcing the book launch of Edy Poppy. ...

Our Man in Port Moresby

IG is about to head off for Papua New Guinea, having been made AAP correspondent in Port Moresby.

the new new grub street

Gabriele Bärtels, award-winning journalist, founder and editor of the now defunct online magazine Frida, had a remarkable piece in last week...

Camfed

Readers of The Last Samurai may remember that I spoke in the acknowledgements of my friend Ann Cotton, who had started raising funds in 199...

paperwork

It's 6.50 am. I got up at 6.02 to put more coal in the ovens before they went out. It's tricky because you have to leave the flu ope...

Scott Adams reveals some

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, agreed to take part in a Q&A session on Freakonomics . On blogging: It’s the best creative outlet I’ve...

more on schmoozing

DSL said he was sure schmoozing meant simply social talk rather than sycophancy; I said I had always thought of it as social with talk with ...

Robert Donat Lookalike?

A reader has sent me a link to the Daily Mail which reports on Arpan Shama, a 10-year-old resident of Edgbaston who speaks 11 languages, bu...

inbox zero

This morning I did not even bother to clock into Fogbugz because, I forget, anyway it suddenly occurred to me that I had not checked out the...