Owen Hatherley has an immense post about Sheffield, modernism, socialism, privatisation, etc. Which reminded me of an estate agent ad I saw recently, for a gaff in the Highgate New Town estate. The sales-slug referred to a “3 double bedroom apartment in an architecturally-designed ex-local authority development, with 19′ kitchen/diner, 12′ reception, and exclusive access…
Read More architecturally designedThis is hilarious, from a blog I thought had gone on hiatus for good. This is pretty good too, though I say so myself.
Read More Building a modern army is not simply a matter of buying the first armoured mortar system in sightSo, I went to see Chris Morris’s takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review – it’s desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long. Perhaps too funny – one of the markers of Chris Morris’s work is that…
Read More we’re the muslimeen, creating a sceneA thought: Raj Patel can honestly say that the lurkers really do support him in e-mail. Something quite hilarious about the notion of a blogger getting deified. On the Internet, no-one knows you’re God.
Read More and finally…OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when…
Read More optimise your social isolation more efficientlyUS security agents indulge in street theatre, frequently accidentally involving members of the public: As a presidential limousine rolls closer, an instructor cues, “How about a little homicide bomb?” Bracaglia throws himself at the limousine and detonates…..Mike “The Horse” Dutch, who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 280 pounds, has been playing villains for five years. He’s…
Read More coming to a security theatre near youI often miss chunks of the humour at the Stiftung because I would rather do almost anything than watch US business-spot TV news. If you wanted to hide something from me, you could do worse than put it next to a TV tuned to CNBC. But I think I experienced something of the culture the…
Read More talking without speaking; speaking without talkingI liked this (via): Although technically speaking releasing testosterone precursors on the world’s trading floors to try to rally valuations wasn’t criminal as such, the affected traders lobbied to declare it illegal. But governments liked the idea too much, and oxygen masks were forbidden. (Electronic traders were of course immune, but they knew floor traders…
Read More a genuinely sinister drugThe Rude Pundit has a very good point. You can’t even picture Obama pardoning a fucking turkey. Sure, he’ll probably do it. But unlike Bush, who approached such obligations with dunce-like glee, for Obama it’ll be like a kick in the groin. As usual with Rude, there’s a serious point here, sneaking past the guards…
Read More a short film about killing turkeysDid I say I like Touchstone? But he ignores the fact that the European left did not soar in the polls within days of the Great Crash. It took a World War and 15 years – does Tony Barber really not know this, or does he not mind displaying faux ignorance so publically? Mind you,…
Read More Thinktanks we can believe in