Archive for October, 2009
young people: get thinking!
Saturday, October 17th, 2009A nice article here in the Spiegel, about an innocent East German journalist who is upset when his editor changes the meaning of a piece he wrote in an attempt to save Communism.
I remember all the times I was warned to ensure my personal interests matched those of the society in which I lived. [...]
Unbelievable Ludicrousness
Saturday, October 17th, 2009I was a bit shocked yesterday when someone on The Unbelievable Truth (Dom Joly? not sure who he is anyway) suggested that Churchill might have been depressed after WWII because he must have felt guilty. David Mitchell put down this idea fairly quickly, pointing out that WWII and the war in Iraq were morally rather [...]
my take on Mr Hirst’s new collection
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009a shark, not a Hirst one, wouldn’t want to infringe copyrights…
Well, it seems that nobody likes Damien Hirst’s new paintings, with the possible exception of my Son, who says they are amazing (the “3d fx”). If you ask me, this is just a new twist of the old modern-art chestnut: is modern art any good? [...]
that peace prize controversy
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009If I am missing a major point here, or being insensitive or dumb, hopefully commenters will enlighten me. But: does anyone else think that awarding the Nobel peace prize to Obama was racist?
It’s a bunch of posh white people giving a prize to the black young newcomer in order to encourage him to do [...]
English earthquakes
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009Glastonbury Tor
I was helping Daughter with her homework the other day, on the subject of British earthquakes. You would not believe the weird and wonderful subjects kids get set for their homework these days, now we all have internets… back in my day, on a subject like that, there would have been one sentence in [...]
how do these evil kidnappers get away with it for so long?
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009This Times article about famous serial kidnappers and child-abusers, How evil goes undetected in our midst, points out, accurately in my view, that most of these cases are preventable, with the fairly obvious signs going uninvestigated:
the media, and even the authorities, were quick to create a myth of a highly intelligent villain who operated [...]
on growing a business while not freaking out (much)
Monday, October 5th, 2009trailer for “Dirty Mind”, a Belgian film from Fantastic Fest about a brain-injured stunt man who becomes fearless and dangerous
From Working hard is overrated at Caternia.net (HT Chris Yeh’s twitter):
We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be [...]
song of the day
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009We’ve been having an 80s revival in our in-house discotheque lately (the car, with my ipod plugged in), and along those lines I was really impressed by this chorus version of Toto’s “Africa” (HT Shefaly). I know, yes, it’s Toto’s “Africa”, which doesn’t sound too good. But you will like this for the way they [...]
Britsploitation
Friday, October 2nd, 2009Great British marketing: Little Britain makes the UK look hilarious, clever, original and amusingly self-deprecating. And extremely rude.
***
This article on Englishness, by Irish comedian Dara O Briain makes for an amusing read. Here’s a good quote:
You want proof of London’s international iconic status? In any Hollywood science-fiction movie, when they show that montage of all [...]
