From my hometown newspaper’s 75 years ago column, last week: There was the most hilarious party in Ilkley on Saturday night. It was described as a “poverty party” and a gathering of about 20 people assembled in a well-known house with their shabbiest garments, sat about on orange boxes and chairs without backs, with tallow…
Read More I’ve been to a marvellous party..An interesting story from Pacific Magazine on the Bougainville fraudster king we covered back in October, 2004.
Read More Nonexistent state updateThe next big miscarriage of justice makes it to the BBC. Great. But this is impressively dishonest from Jim Gamble, former supercop and head of the Home Office’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre: He also defended the record of the operation and told the Radio 4 programme that more than 90% of the individuals…
Read More Jim Gamble: no integrity at allLast weekend, for the first time in years. A couple of things – first of all, they’re knocking down the first attempts at regeneration now, whilst a lot of the empty sites that used to be mills are still empty. The whole 60s grey tickytacky city centre is gone, leaving half a mile of rubble.…
Read More Back in BradfordThe Independent appears to have repented of its indulgence of Martin Durkan’s quackery, publishing a report on various scientists usually considered to be “climate sceptics” whose work Durkan misrepresented or even falsified. Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in…
Read More The Indy takes a holiday in saneEveryone’s vexed (h/t to Dan Hardie) about the spankin’ new city academy in Peterborough that, courtesy of Perkins Engines, will be offering education with a total ban on “unstructured play”. It’s the most expensive state school ever built at £46.4 million, but hey! Perkins put up all of £2 million out of that, always assuming…
Read More Libraries gave us powerThe Falklands War represents a big part of the Thatcher mythos, to the extent that it’s become part of the media’s operational code that you can’t divide the two. This is founded on a couple of facts, and more myths. The fact is that it undoubtedly helped her win re-election from a fairly ugly starting…
Read More Myths of the Falklands 2: Thatcher’s WarWell, for the first time this year I got to a game on Sunday. London (…sorry, Harlequins) and St Helens. As always, a tough first half, with some hope, then a horrible rout. But the hard thing is League at the Stoop – I never saw London there the first time round, and I’m familiar…
Read More Rugby League Bloggin’ – The Fix is InSo Lord Browne is gay. Who knew? Well, I did, simply because people have googled and hit this site at a rate of 20 a day since March, 2004. Think digital privacy doesn’t matter? Think again. But let’s ask another question. Back in 2005, BP killed a dozen workers at its Texas City refinery, in…
Read More MoralityI didn’t grok the significance of “Debi Jones”, a Tory councillor quoted by the Sindy‘s latest WLAN pseudoscience scare piece, until I checked in on this row at the Ministry. In a box-out that doesn’t appear on their website, Jonathan Owen quotes “Debi Jones, Tory councillor for Hightown in Somerset” as saying that: “It seems…
Read More Digital Dave signs up to WLAN psuedoscience