Following another thread in another place, here are a couple of reviews of books about Silvio Berlusconi, currently Prime Minister of Italy for the third time. As you can see, these reviews predate the 2006 elections, won by a united Left under Prodi (perhaps not quite the gran tessitore Aldo Moro was, but certainly a [...]
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; [...]
31 January 2009 – 2:11 pm
Nick Cohen in Standpoint (via):
a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the [...]
16 January 2009 – 8:50 pm
Those New Year music lists, in brief.
TWENTY ALBUMS OF 2008
The What?
Yeah, Right.
Oh, That… I Remember That Coming Out…
No, They’re Making These Up.
Ah, Now I Was Actually Thinking Of Getting This One.
They Were On Later, Weren’t They? Didn’t Think Much Of Them.
Bloody Hell, Are They Still Going?
Ah, No, These Are The Ones Who Were On [...]
2 October 2008 – 12:48 am
My worldview was formed in the 1970s, when (it seemed to me) there was no such thing as lifestyle: to say that personal choices mattered, were worthy of attention, was to say that the personal was political, which in turn connected those choices to a whole range of broader commitments. Because it all was connected, [...]
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 [...]
4 September 2007 – 3:15 pm
I turned 47 recently. Yes, that is quite old. Lines from Krapp’s Last Tape come to mind, as they do from time to time.
I’ve never linked to the Metro before, and never expected to. But this made me laugh out loud:
At this weekend’s Bestival, a three-day music event on the Isle of Wight, the Government [...]
11 August 2007 – 12:18 pm
I heard the news about 8.30 last night; my wife saw it on the BBC Web site. I spent some time looking for hastily-assembled tribute programmes in the schedules – you’d think Granada would have something at least – but nothing. There was a discussion on Newsnight between Stephen Morris, Paul Morley, Peter Saville and [...]
One last column, from right back in 1998. I had actually worked in IT until a couple of years before; I think my sympathies are clear.
BUSINESS MANAGERS are never short of advice these days. Any large bookshop has several yards of books devoted to Self Help for Managers: Feel the Stress and Do it Anyway; [...]
Another from 1999, this time from Ned Ludd’s column in NTexplorer. Bill Gates’s book Business @ the speed of thought had just come out. (No, I don’t remember anything about it either.)
SINCE THE SUCCESS of my first book, the Superhighway Less Travelled, rumours of a sequel have been rife. I’m happy to say that ‘Ludd [...]
After all those columns from 1999, here’s one from last month. (And then I’ll get back to proper blogging, probably.) They say you should write about what you know; what I knew, that particular weekend, was beer. ‘Dave Bitzer’ doesn’t represent anyone in particular. Years ago I invented a consultancy called Gargle Bitzer Helipad, and [...]
More from the last century. This one had a wider audience than many of my columns, as it appeared in Computing. I wrote five of these columns for the paper in the first half of 1999, working on a rota with four or five other writers, after which they had a big reorganisation and dropped [...]
As a sort of companion-piece to the last one, here’s a column from September 1999.
THIS MONTH this page is given over to an interview with a pioneering futurologist: Michel de Nostredame. De Nostredame – more widely known as ‘Nostradamus’ – has had a huge influence on the very course of life on this planet itself, [...]
This one’s from March 2000. I should say that I took Y2K very seriously indeed; we even stockpiled. (Well, we had a box.) I vividly remembered being a programmer in 1987, and having to argue long and hard before my project leader would allow me to use eight-digit dates. Multiply that out across the country, [...]
Finally (for now), here’s another one from a defunct print publication, in this case one that wasn’t even available on this side of the Atlantic. The magazine was called ePro and it was aimed at IBM users. IBM what users, you ask. That was the clever part – ePro was for users of IBM ‘eservers’, [...]
One more back number. This one is a bit older than the other two and requires some introduction.
For three years, I edited a magazine called NEWS/400.uk; it’s still going, albeit under another name, and I’ve gone on writing a regular column for it ever since. The mag’s appeal is and always has been fairly specialised, [...]
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 [...]
Ellis:
[Podhoretz]also barks:
As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.” (ellipses in original)
Now when you use apostrophes like [...]
20 February 2007 – 11:22 pm
David Cameron: active hypocrite or passive hypocrite? Or both?Jim has an excellent post up discussing Tory Boy’s not-quite-admission to a dope-smoking past. Clearly Cameron’s a hypocrite, in the sense that he’s conformed to other people’s standards while covering up his past transgressions. But, Jim argues, that only accounts for passive hypocrisy; what’s really objectionable about [...]
