Mark Pack has a very good post up on how the Lib Dems’ distinctive approach to campaigning evolved, and what that meant for the party. Essentially, since the 1980s, the party was reshaped entirely around one particular technique: direct mail. I didn’t know that the LDs’ identification of target seats isn’t, or isn’t just, based…
Read More stuffing envelopes and getting stuffedSwinging off something I discussed in another place, the Wikipedia list of culture-bound syndromes is fascinatingly odd, although several of them seem to reduce to depression and several more to sexism. I wonder if different Wikipedias have different ones? But what interests me is this: what with globalisation an’ all, will these get smoothed out…
Read More Culture-bound syndromesAm I right in thinking that Moazzam Begg’s political role is getting more complicated, more important, and more impressive? Here’s a story. It kicks off with: British jihadi fighters desperate to return home from Syria and Iraq are being issued with death threats by the leadership of Islamic State (Isis), the Observer has learned. A…
Read More Moazzam Begg, always in the paper, rarely reported.The Observer is a strange newspaper. Here’s a bit from its business page today: Disturbed by the lack of similar action in Brussels and in Frankfurt – home of the European Central Bank – investors fear that the eurozone is sliding ever closer to recession. They are also worried about a sharp slowdown in China,…
Read More China changes government. Exclusive in the Observer.Oh Rugby League, must it always be so? The answer is always yes. The FFR XIII, the French governing body, had the great idea of streaming their match with Wales today on the web, presumably because TV wasn’t interested and there are plenty of weirdos who would get up for the England/Samoa and Australia/New Zealand…
Read More #rugbyleague tries streaming on the web. it doesn’t go wellThings I’d like to include: Phil Lapsley’s book Exploding the Phone and some observations about telecoms billing records and the police that arise. David Wood’s book Smartphones and Beyond about how the future was right here and then it…wasn’t. (“right here” includes Macclesfield and Bury St. Edmunds.) Circling back to Scottish and other devolution. Is…
Read More Open newslist 8Michael Hofmann reviews Martin Amis and it’s a stinker. This is the bit that stuck out for me. It will look pedantic but there’s a lot that can be recovered from this paragraph. I walked on for another ten minutes; then I turned and looked. The Buna-Werke – the size of a city. Like Magnetigorsk…
Read More er, spark plug. thingy. germans. ha ha.Music log for today. (hat tip here) Plus this: and this: This was a Monday music post.
Read More music.So I was recommended this blog post. Don’t bother – this is better. It’s a pity there’s no video, at least that I’ve found, because of course the banner is part of an integrated performance from the Red Faction, the Middlesbrough FC ultras. But to get a sense, try this. OK? Now we’re oriented, that…
Read More no accessSo Brooks Newmark, Tory dickpic exponent. As Harlan Ellison didn’t title, I have no mouth but I can’t stop laughing. Or rather, I can’t stop laughing but I have a serious point I need to make. Obviously this was really awful journalism, in fact, hardly journalism at all in any meaningful sense. For a start…
Read More The one with Rupert Murdoch, Lord Nicholls, and the cocaine