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...