Well, this is grim. Intelligent comment is to be found here, in Jamie Kenny’s interview with David Wilson. Would you say that serial killers are a kind of negative indicator of the health of society in the sense that the fewer victims there are, the better society functions? Serial killers function best within fractured communities,…
Read More some memories of west BradfordSo, 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 sceneWell, well, well. The Conservative chairman, Eric Pickles, last night appeared to disown the leadership of the Young Britons’ Foundation, a rightwing training organisation for young Conservatives whose officials have described the NHS as “the biggest waste of money in the UK” and suggested the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified. Pickles spoke last week…
Read More tha mun laike wi’t gangling-iron, Councillor DuxburyHow did I miss this? A Sikh who thinks he’s a native American shaman? In Bradford? Where else? Weird religion is a Bradford thing, and it’s in our best tradition that it should go all syncretic like.
Read More featheredAnother On Roads thing is the special role of the North; indeed, as he points out, it’s the construction of the M62 that made the North of England a sensible geographical construct rather than an awkward stereotype that uneasily combined Lancashire and Yorkshire. And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the…
Read More yet more roadsI’ve just been geocoding. In fact, I’ve been putting together a non-GPS geocoding function for FixMyS60. Specifically, I can say that I have no use whatsoever for geonames, which although it has an interesting range of Web services doesn’t seem to have any data in it. I love OpenStreetMap, and it’s possible to query its…
Read More easter eggAndrew Brons apparently likes the voluntary repatriation grant clause in the 1971 Immigration Act, a sop thrown in for Enoch. Well. A feature of this legislation, if I remember correctly, was that accepting it was without prejudice to one’s immigration status. You could go back. So the only people who accepted it took holidays back…
Read More my country needs me…This is sad: ITV kills the Yorkshire Television studios in Leeds. The wikipedia article should tell you why – the first studios in Europe designed for colour TV, the biggest working TV studio in Europe, and a lot of very impressive programmes. The history is interesting, too – the station set up in 1967 was…
Read More you’ve got to get out of the valley25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl – they set up a radiation monitor in the car…
Read More alternative YorkshireThis BBC Radio 4 documentary about the British nuclear deterrent and the people who operate it is absolutely cracking. Not surprisingly, the man behind it is none other than Professor Peter Hennessy (can we call him Henn-dawg yet?). One of the things that stands out is the amount of desperate psychological coping going on. The…
Read More mentalities, bunker, and otherwise