Britain Deserves Better

Ok, ok. It’s not as if the world really *needs* another hot politics take or anything and more to the point I doubt there’s anyone out there to even *read* this blog, gathering dust as it is in this neglected corner of the web, but apropos of nothing in particular and really just for my own benefit here, dear god it’s been depressing watching the absolute state of British politics unfold during this election campaign.…

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Well That Was A Bit Embarrassing, Wasn’t It…

I got up early this morning before work to watch the Olympics Closing Ceremony. I have to say, having seen the lineup, I didn’t exactly have high hopes, but after the delight that was Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony I thought that they might just pull it out of the bag once again. It didn’t quite turn out like that. There was something rather poetic, though, about the shabbiness of the way things drew to a…

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Mr Pot, Meet Mr Kettle’s Web Presence

Just catching up on a couple of recent Private Eyes, I couldn’t help notice that they chose to conclude a story about recent problems at the Times Literary Supplement with this somewhat surprising paragraph: The resulting outcry is awkwardly timed for [Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS], since to access his organ online is to find utter chaos. Already a laughing stock because it is reached via the Times’s “entertainment” division, the TLS’s…

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Google To Destroy Music Industry, World

In the olden days it was a lot easier for newspapers to pass off ridiculous claims as facts because anyone who wanted to verify them would have to go to some serious effort to do so. These days, however, we have teh internets, and fact checking has suddenly become a whole lot easier. So if you’re going to make claims about teh internets, then you’d better be pretty sure that your claimed facts are, you…

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Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006. Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at…

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