(Been in the queue for a while) I’d assumed that actually *lots* of intelligent people considered Withnail and I charmless drinking-game boorishness (NB I don’t, obviously) — Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) March 29, 2013 So, why should you watch Withnail & I, other than just for the laughs? Comedy built on tragedy There’s Monty, tragically alone,…
Read More Monty. Monty!…“biased public opinion” has caused 70 percent of the civil servants to feel “stressed”, with about 30 percent of respondents saying they were “severely stressed.” news reports in the recent years have exaggerated the negative portrayals of civil servants and are often connected with phrases like “forced demolition”, “intercepting petitioners”, and “secret prisons.” You could…
Read More why won’t they report the good news?To expand on something I wrote as a comment, one of the things I hate about wizard privatisation schemes and especially “total outsourcing” or whatever is as follows. The FSTA deal for the RAF’s new jet tankers is especially awful and exemplary. Here’s the idea. Rather than buy the aeroplanes and do the job, we’ll…
Read More Railtrack in the sky, at war!So, I went to the Bowie exhibition. I went midweek on a fairly grim windswept evening, so part of the deal was showing up at “Secretariat Gate” and being ushered into the V&A down miles of corridors, sometimes past a security control room, sometimes past a masterpiece, pushing ahead of the dame. It gave the…
Read More culture page post it’s safe to ignoreSo, the Kenyan Police counter-terrorism spokesman has this to say: “Kenya’s government arrested Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” a Kenyan counter-terrorism spokesman, Muthui Kariuki, told the Associated Press. He added: “The Kenyan government…
Read More A very Blairite disasterA short post. Here Mises.org. Here Keynes.org. This is unsatisfactory. Even if no-one’s going to build a shiny new website (and why not?), shouldn’t it at least point at something useful? Update – Thanks, David! Keynes for Kids, the economic version of the Children’s Illustrated Clausewitz.
Read More keynes.org considered insufficientWhen the history of this government is written, the point that will baffle everyone will be: Iain Duncan Smith. Why? On New Year’s Day, it turned out that the Universal Credit system fails to get the right bank account 25% of the time. In March, the project’s director was replaced again. The fear was such…
Read More IDS, and the spivI’ve been meaning to get to this. Now, he’s bound to be out telling us to give up this or that to fight the terrorists, so here goes. OK, who’s this? The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our…
Read More The Radicalisation of David GoodhartGavin Kelly argues that it doesn’t much matter, from a practical point of view, what the Eds decide about the coming spending review. It covers 2015 and 2016, and administratively speaking changing it wouldn’t have much impact before the end of the financial year in April, 2016. After all, the Tories and the Lib Dems…
Read More Faster, please.So I was thinking about user-experience design, specifically watching my partner squinting at the web-based paper-marking interface built into the British universities’ joint monster Turnitin plagiarist killer. And I’d said to Oliver Rivers that few things fascinate me more than human-computer interaction, but then again most things seem to fascinate me in the end. OK,…
Read More A short homage to the ThinkPad keyboard