22 October 2009 – 10:45 am
June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]
There was a curious piece in the ‘Work’ section of Saturday’s Guardian (I only read it for the problem page). It was headed
10 things we’ve learned so far
We send our reporters around the UK to see what happens in a downturn
but on inspection there were only three things that they’d learnt from their roving reporters; [...]
2 October 2008 – 10:38 pm
The estimable Merrick declines to do the album-for-every-year-of-your-life thing, with some compelling reasons (and some truly horrible images). I think he’s got a point about the aridity of the list format; when I did mine I seriously considered going back afterwards and writing a paragraph or two about just how wonderful some of those albums [...]
Anothere meme (I’ll get back to proper blogging soon, honest) – via. Books this time, and a tie-in of sorts with the BBC’s Big Read (although I can’t find a BBC page with this list on). Viral boilerplate follows:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books [...]
Another music meme: “Pick an album for every year of your life”.
I guess anyone born much before the mid-50s is going to have trouble with the early years, says Jim. You don’t know the half of it. I was born in 1960, and I’ve really struggled with anything before 1966. I like Rubber Soul well [...]
WorldbyStorm:
Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.
Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major’s Conservative government had been re-elected [...]
A meme from Paulie:
Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
The dogmatic certainty that God does not exist, and that His non-existence really matters. Like Paulie, I prefer ‘agnostic’ as a label.
Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
Church of England; I described it here. We were quite big on the story about feeding the hungry [...]
I seem to be disagreeing with WorldbyStorm quite a lot lately. Here’s WbS on the Lisbon Treaty:
I’d tend to the view that it is difficult to see how 26 countries won’t move forward. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no advantage to the status quo.
…
I was once, in a fairly received way, quite wedded to the federal [...]
Tagged by Rob:
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to [...]
Autocomplete blog meme. Simple procedure: type each letter of the alphabet in the address bar (one at a time, obviously) and see which blog comes up first. The result should be a map of your personal blogosphere, or at least those bits of it you’ve visited recently.
I saw this on a blog somewhere years ago [...]
6 January 2008 – 10:53 pm
A post-Christmas meme from Rob.
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. Bags are for bottles of wine.
2. Real tree or artificial?
We switched to real trees a few years ago. This year was our first dead tree stuck in a bit of wood; it dried out quite a lot over the twelve days, and [...]
I’m sorry to see that Ellis has closed his blog. I’ve enjoyed and admired Ellis’s writing since we were both contributors to Casablanca; I remember he did a piece on the slave trade ostensibly by John Smith, which antedated Tony Benn’s joke at the expense of the Economist by a decade and a half. Unfortunately [...]
7 November 2007 – 11:48 pm
Apologies for the long silence – and for the post that’s about to follow, which will be of much greater interest to some than others.
Unlike Liam and Andy, I am not now and have never been a member of RESPECT. Like Liam and Andy, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the fallout within [...]
22 September 2007 – 8:47 pm
The following comment didn’t appear on whatever post it was meant for, as WordPress’s spamcatcher automatically sent it to the bitbucket.
I like your blog and I feel we share sufficient common ground for a link to each others blogs to be mutually beneficial.If you agree to link then please contact me at ‘An Unrepentant Communist’
http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/
on [...]
19 September 2007 – 8:28 pm
Rob has tagged me. I’ve had this particular meme once before, but I’m going to try it anyway and see if I come up with anything different.
Total number of books owned
About 1500, although my wife has just pointed out that many of them aren’t actually mine as such. (I had a big clearout a while [...]
13 August 2007 – 11:42 pm
I’ve just updated “Still haven’t found” – my running list of recent search strings – to include
Jim Khambatta
Douglas Reed
Yes, this blog is your number 1 source of “Jim Khambatta” “Douglas Reed” information. Best “Jim Khambatta” “Douglas Reed” site on the Web. Accept no substitute.
As for the person who came here looking for “Phil Edwards” “Socialist [...]
A while ago Rob passed me the meme stick with a couple of questions deriving from Big Brother:
Tell your readers three things about you that would make you the Ideal Housemate if you were imprisoned in a house with ten random strangers for weeks on end. Then three things that’d make you the Housemate From [...]
More about blogging from iSeries NEWS UK (or System i News UK as it now is), this time from April this year. (Reverse chronological order?)
SINCE BLOGGING exploded onto the national consciousness about a year ago, around the time that I first wrote about it, the phenomenon has grown exponentially. It is now estimated that, out [...]
A propos of not very much, here’s a magazine column about blogging. Regular readers of iSeries NEWS UK may recognise it, as it appeared in that estimable magazine last year.
BLOGGING – it’s the new thing! Everyone’s blogging these days – at least, everyone except you! But what is blogging all about? What are the do’s [...]
It became apparent that most of them hadn’t heard of Twitter.
Tim Bray misjudges his audience. What’s interesting is that the audience in question was at something called Web Design World. This leads Tim to wonder just how small the ‘Internet in-crowd’ really is – and, conversely, if it is that small, how come it makes [...]
