A discussion on O’Reilly.net.
The Paramount Comedy Festival website authors need to use a spell check. link Rolling Stone magazine excoriates “the worst Congress ever”. Wired tells the story of how the iPod came about. To Reading for a meeting. Stayed at the Royal County Hotel, an old-fashioned place in a central location. Friendly staff and nice rooms, but on lift. Dinner on Sunday night at Santa Fe by the Thames. Chainy but nice American-Mexican place. Tonight ate at the fantastic Sweeney & Todd’s pie shop on Castle Street and ate heartily for £6. Then to the Three Bs cafe bar in the old town hall, which showed historic public sector randomness by not serving coffees after 4pm.
940th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and I’m in Battle for a huge re-enactment. It’s very spectacular, though of course the result is never in doubt. Even more spectacular, and a lot less organised, is the melee of kids with wooden swords charging around while their parents watch the battle. An piece in this week’s New Republic, not available for free online, The Russian community, interestingly, have been excluded from the “The result is this terrible apathy.What will my vote Pofigism – a word we have use for. The BBC reports on a foolish joke by a local councillor, who made some unwise remark about gay marriage. Unfortunately, in the interview, he just makes a bad situation worse: “”I believe in the law of Moses. I’m not a religious fanatic. As long as they do it behind closed doors, I don’t mind, but now they [homosexuals] control the media, the television. They have much stronger control over this country than they should have” Oh dear. It’s that time of year again, when papers run stories about conkers being banned by town hall bureaucrats. The tale in Worthing, reported in today’s Argus, is a bit more unusual, however. Worthing BC are taking the conkers off the trees because they are having to pay thousands to people who have their windows broken by children trying to knock conkers off the trees. What? Are Worthing so flush with cash that they can run a free repair service for their residents? Are the children employed by them? Why not say ‘tough luck, guys’? A piece in this morning’s Birmingham Post contains an interesting factoid. Only twelve Tory conference visitors attended morning service at Bournemouth’s parish church. You couldn’t get away with that if you were a Republican!
Commedy fetival
Rolling Stone on Congress
The birth of the iPod
Travel notes: Reading
The real battle of Hastings
Pofigism
talks about the large Russian community around Brighton Beach, in New
York state. There’s a fierce battle going on between two Russian-
speakers for the Democratic nomination (and hence the seat in November).
political process in the past, and that has bred in them a sort of
apathy that I find quite recognisable from disengaged people in the
UK. The speaker is Gene Borsh, a voter-education activist who works
with the Russians in Brighton Beach:
change?” He summed up the communal affliction as “pofigism,” a one-of-
a-kind Russian neologism that roughly translates as “I-don’t-give-a-
shit-ism.” Borsh’s colleague Marina Belotserkovsky described it as
trepidation before the unknown that became expressed as disdain: “We
stand apart—we don’t get involved in the things these idiots do.”Making a bad situation worse
Conkers
At prayer no longer