Month: August 2005

Vote for Lewes

Lewes has been nominated by Country Life as one of Britain’s 15 best market towns. Celebrity judges, including Noel Edmonds, bizarrely, will now judge the best market town in England, from a selection that also includes Faversham (Kent) and Hexham (Northumberland).

Daring Fireball: Colophon

John Gruber tells it like it is about standards compliance:

If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

Political correctness gone mad

Good line from a Christopher Brookmyre book Jane is reading:

“And there it was, the line he’d known would be along soon enough: ‘Political correctness gone mad.’ [He] had referred to it in a column recently as ‘ the distress cry of the thwarted bigot.’ Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of ‘a victory for common sense’, which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the last ten thousand years evolving away from.”

Christopher Brookmyre, Be My Enemy

Collected Essays, by George Orwell (part48)

Orwell on Tolstoy’s hostility to Shakespeare:

“[As a puritan, Tolstoy] could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. “Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can’t you sit still like I do?” In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.”

and

“One docs not necessarily get rid of [a violent] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one’s native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.”