January 2012
33 posts
I love a good zeugma, especially when it involves...
Ms Gillard appeared shaken as she was rushed out of the Lobby restaurant near Old Parliament House. During the evacuation, she lost her footing and a shoe as she was ferried by armed officers to a waiting vehicle. The ironies involved in this episode are a delight. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
News that is not news from Libya and Egypt.
Interesting to see which events the major media outlets decide are not “news”. Forces supposedly loyal to Gaddafi seized the town of Bani Walid earlier this week. And another woman was attacked and sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Cryptolitera - the weirdness of anonymous emails.
Cryptolitera<script type=”text/javascript”>(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s);...
John Betjeman film - King's Lynn to Hunstanton.
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
American-backed private universities plan dropped...
A Higher Education Bill, which was to be introduced in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech, has now been delayed indefinitely and is unlikely to be published before 2015. The new legislation was designed to make it easier for private colleges, including big American education firms, to set up new universities in Britain. David Willetts, the higher education minister, had hoped that introducing...
Is the Bishop of Durham an idiot? Religion "not...
In an interview on the BBC the Bishop of Durham states that religion is “not the fundamental issue” with regard to the bombings and murders committed by the Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria. Apparently religion is just a front for other factors. The interviewer, naturally enough for a BBC apparatchik, doesn’t challenge him on this rather bizarre assertion. The good...
Dutch teen sails the world and sticks two fingers...
via the week.co.uk: AT THE AGE of 16, Dutch teenager Laura Dekker has become the youngest person to single-handedly sail around the world. But is it a cause for celebration or an issue for child welfare? Dekker completed her year-long journey to cheers from her family and supporters at the Caribbean island of St Maarten on Saturday, proud of her record-breaking feat. But Guinness World...
What do Borgen and The Killing tell us about...
That it’s a tiny country where the chances are your spouse slept with one of your ministers many years ago; that people seem to be able to afford champagne and lots of other booze even though we’ve always been told alcohol is monstrously expensive in Scandinavia; that everyone (including the PM) lives in small houses or apartments, but works in industrial-sized ancient buildings or...
The Upper Miliband proves socialist credentials by...
Miliband served as Britain’s secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs previously. PHOTO: REUTERS KARACHI: In what appears to be a coup for the fledgling Pakistani private equity industry, Indus Basin Holdings has managed to get Britain’s former foreign secretary David Miliband on board as a senior adviser. “We are...
Poem 4/32
we were sitting in the living room watching the Miss Ohio Pageant when all of a sudden I heard a smack at the front and I run out and then I heard something hit a window here in the back and I tore round to our driveway here and I looked all over but I didn’t see a thing I didn’t see one guy you know you can put up with this crap just so long then pow somebody’s gonna get it ...
No Berlin Time for Britain - Daylight Saving bill...
A private member’s bill to discuss the possibility of moving the UK’s clocks forward one hour on a permanent basis has failed after running out of time. The change to Berlin Time (or Central European Time) would have meant darker mornings and more light in the late afternoon. I’ve never met anyone who has been asking for this. It was only when Tory MP Rebecca Harris supported...
The European Crack-Up by Theodore Dalrymple.
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal: A Belgian journalist who interviewed me recently about the European debt crisis asked me whether I believed in the European Project. I replied that I would answer her question—if she would tell me what the European Project actually was. By revealing my doubts, I proved to her that I suffered from the strange kind of mental debility known as Euroskepticism, a...
Ubuweb also going dark for 24 hours in protest...
UbuWeb Will Blackout on Weds, January 18th for 24 hours to Protest SOPA & PIPA If SOPA passes, you can kiss UbuWeb goodbye. Remember, the web won’t be this way forever. Don’t bookmark. Download. Download. Download. Everything on Ubu is downloadable. Hard drives are cheap. Grab what you need. Don’t trust the cloud. Stop SOPA. ubuweb Posted via email from Michael...
Wikpedia blackout in protest against USA's...
In protest against the dangerous anti-internet bills going through the legislative process in the USA, the Wikipedia Foundation will be going offline for 24 hours starting tomorrow (Wed 18 Jan). Read the press release here. Read Wikipedia’s statement and conculsion here. The White House is making it appear that it will not support the bills as they are, but the answer is simple:...
Romanians riot and nobody tell us.
Romanian PM warns protesters on fifth day Analysis & Opinion World » By Radu Marinas and Luiza Ilie BUCHAREST | Mon Jan 16, 2012 2:46pm EST BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania’s prime minister warned anti-austerity protesters gathering for a fifth day on Monday that violence would not be tolerated after 59 people were injured...
Dear Student: I Don't Lie Awake At Night Thinking...
Article by Art Carden in Forbes.com: Image via Wikipedia “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV) One of the popular myths of higher education is that professors are sadists who live to...
Dear Student: I Don't Lie Awake At Night Thinking...
Article by Art Carden in Forbes.com: Image via Wikipedia “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV) One of the popular myths of higher education is that professors are sadists who live to...
Labour's social media adviser dumped for using...
Tom Harris used the Downfall meme to mock Alex Salmond of the SNP. Fair do’s to him; after all Salmond is just another vainglorious politician on the make. Unfortunately, there’s no room for humour in today’s politics. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Read Will Self's "The Joy of Slow".
That’s if you can slow down for a minute. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Read Will Self's "The Joy of Slow".
That’s if you can slow down for a minute. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Simon Armitage documentary on Sir Gawain and The...
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
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Animated version (1953) of Poe's "The Tell-Tale...
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Three obscure German films: Cardillac, Marie, The...
(from The Death of a Flea Circus Director) Films I saw in the 1970s at the Swarthmore Centre, Leeds; and which I’d really like to watch again: Cardillac by Edgar Reitz; The Death of a Flea Circus Director by Thomas Koerfer; and Marie by Hans Geissendorfer. Especially the last. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
The Autumn of Joan Didion - Magazine - The...
January/February 2012 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE The Autumn of Joan Didion The writer’s work is a triumph—and a disaster. By Caitlin Flanagan Teresa Zabala/The New York Times/Redux In the spring of 2006, shortly after the publication of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Slate...
Is Facebook really doomed to die?
Charlie Jane Anders at io writes: Everybody seems to expect Facebook to die in the next few years. But there’s a good chance it could outlast you. Could your “Facebook timeline” one day include decades of status updates, and love letters from the boyfriend you dumped 20 years ago? We asked some futurists and experts to speculate on the future of what could...
Eric Cantona wants to run in the French...
Accueil > PolitiqueEric Cantona en quête des 500 signatures pour l’élection présidentielle LEMONDE.FR avec AFP | 09.01.12 | 21h31 1 Classez Imprimez Envoyez Partagez Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Viadeo L’ancien footballeur et acteur,...
The Poet Laureate and her 'Embarrassingly Bad'...
Ian Patterson takes the blade to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem: On Saturday, the Guardian published a short poem called ‘Stephen Lawrence’ by the poet laureate, and recent Costa Prize-winner, Carol Ann Duffy. It was embarrassingly bad, I thought. But to judge by the response on Twitter, I was in a minority. ‘This is what I want of a poet laureate! Brilliant Carol Ann Duffy poem re Stephen...
Brain starts to deteriorate in mid-40s - but only...
Loss of memory and other cognitive functions in humans may start as early as 45, according to new research. That’s according to an article in International Business Times, referring to a report by the BMJ. But panic not, the survey was carried out on civil servants. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Let it be known that I am feeling slightly under...
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
The coming war on general computation - Cory...
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
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Roman brothel token discovered in Thames.
from The Telegraph: A Roman coin that was probably used by soldiers to pay for sex in brothels has been discovered on the banks of the River Thames. Made from bronze and smaller than a ten pence piece, the coin depicts a man and a woman engaged in an intimate act. Experts believe it is the first example of its kind to be found in Britain. It lay preserved in mud for almost 2,000 years until...
Currently listening to John Calder talking about...
Here at the Naxos site. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
BBC's Great Expectations - doesn't fail to...
I thought the new version of Great Expectations was going to be something special when I saw Ray Winstone’s Magwitch emerging from the Essex marshes like some beast from the primeval slime, but unfortunately I was to be disappointed. At best it was prettily watchable but at no point showed any of the darkness or humour of Dickens’s story. None of the characters generated much...
December 2011
41 posts
Interactive Lincoln cathedral.
Fabulous interactive view of the inside of Lincoln cathdral: “out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles” (Ruskin). Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
I have Meerkat.
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Amazon Cloud Drive and Jolicloud.
Two new bits of internet distraction for me recently: I’ve been trying out Jolicloud, which is advertised as ‘an OS for the web’, ie, a cloud-based system. That’ll be handy for my increasingly ageing machines. Free, of course. The other is Amazon’s Cloud Drive, which gives you a free 5 GB of online storage. That’s especially useful since my Dropbox space...
Dostoyevsky Never Had To Put Up With This - a poem...
Read Wayne’s poem over at SIR, the world’s most lackdaisical litmag. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Now I know who the Trololo Man is.
It’s taken a while for the Trololo Man phenomenon to enter the Blackburn household, but here he is. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Secondary schools not adequately preparing pupils...
Martin Paul Eve in the Guardian’s Higher Education Network. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Anti-EU politicians top YouTube charts. BBC not...
23 December 2011 Last updated at 02:24 Share this page Email Print YouTube political pops: Daniel Hannan tops the charts By Gavin Stamp Political reporter, BBC News Politicians can make an impact on YouTube in different ways Continue reading the main...
Falklands doomed - Cameron makes pledge to keep...
Cameron makes Falklands pledge. “David Cameron has promised that Britain would never surrender sovereignty of the Falklands against the wishes of the islanders.” Better check your passports and pack your bags, folks. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Irish join Greeks in resisting imposition of...
The Greeks have been finding ways of resisting the property tax tacked onto their energy bills by the EU-imposed government. Looks like the Irish may join them. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Argentina after Falklands oil. South American...
This could shape up to be a tricky situation. Oil reserves have been discovered off the Falklands and this enticing propect, combined with wounded national pride over their defeat by British forces nearly 30 years ago, is spurring on the current government and their South American allies. It’s nothing to do with fishing stocks or UN resolutions. Yet again politicians, to bolster their own...
Six dead birds in my boot.
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Liz Lochhead reading her poem, My Rival's House...
Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s Makar/Laureate, reading her poem, My Rival’s House, care of the Guardian. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
The New Pamphleteers - can e-books become a new...
From nymag.com, by Boris Kachka: In a year when Amazon sold more e-books than dead trees and publishers poured precious funds into actual tech ventures, a few hazy harbingers of the Future of Publishing began coming into focus. One is an emerging format that this year encompassed works by Jon Krakauer, Walter Mosley, Tyler Cowen, Amy Tan, and more than one...
Mobile evolution. Artist's vid of development of...
Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Desperate Clegg doles out the slop.
The Deputy Prime Minister yesterday delivered a speech at the think tank Demos, laying out his ‘vision’ of Britain as an ‘open society’. Modern politicians are obsessed with this vision thing. Clegg obviously believes that being an elected politician endows him with a duty to ascend the moral mountain, commune with higher things and return with commandments for the rest of...
What Osborne means when he says the UK will not...
He means, yes, of course, the UK will stump up more cash, one way or the other. That’s because he and his cronies are, in the words of the great Terry-Thomas, an absolute shower (of shits or charlatans, take your pick) and are not to be believed for one minute. IMF refuses to give to IMF’s EU bailout fund. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s...
Berlaymont is the Death Star - Michael O'Leary...
Michael O’Leary, founder of Ryan Air, speaks at the Innovation Convention 2011 organised by the Commission of the European Union, a body whose major innovations include stealing other peoples’ sovereignty and finding innumerable ways to waste taxpayers’ money. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »