Congratulations to Al Gore (and the IPCC) for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I see that the BBC ‘most recommended comments’ page on the topic is, as always, full of right wing nuts.
I wonder whether the right-wing noise machine that is the BBC Have Your Say feature is a bad sign for (a) the BBC’s ability to get user interaction right, (b) the future of politics or (c) the future of the human race. Or (d) all of the above, I suppose.
How could I not be when we have such a wonderful upstanding press? Take the Daily Mail, which forever defends this island against politicians of a socialist bent, immigrants and those cunning, waxed-moustachioed Europeans. This fine example of all that is best about British honesty and fair play has, the Economist reveals:
[paid a Pole] to drive a Polish-registered car to Britain and spend a few days breaking parking laws and speed limits with a photographer in tow, to demonstrate that Poles and other eastern European immigrants flout British rules with impunity.
When challenged as to the accuracy of this allegation, the Mail reporter claimed it was OK because they only committed civil offences, not criminal ones.
So, in summary, deliberately procuring people to break the law is fine upstanding British values, slandering immigrants and deceiving your readers is an essential part of our proud island’s history, but exercising your right of free movement within the EU is an abomination that must be stamped out immediately. See also under “Human Rights”
Today’s Observer has and interesting piece on shaving, with the writer being given a tour of Gillette’s research facility in Reading (complete with MIT-style “eureka stations” where people can drink coffee and have ideas).
There’s an article in Salon today (sub or click through advert, sorry) that really surprised me. I’d always assumed that American car parks were so big because Americans drove everywhere. It turns out that the causation may in part be the other way round: lots of planning regulations require developers to provide large numbers of on-site parking spaces – up to twice as many as would be required on a normal day. Thus, an academic study of Tippecanoe Co., Indiana, revealed that the county (pop. 155,000) has more than a quarter of million excess parking spaces: in other words if every car registered in the county was parked in a car park rather than at home, there would still be parking spaces for 250,000 other cars.
This is so far from the British approach (which is getting tighter and tighter on car parking provision in new developments) it makes my head spin.
I don’t normally read SomethingAwful, but I do like the Art of Wikigroaning.
Some great links about Sumerian atMetaFilter.
A professional photo retouching service has some before and after photos (click ‘portfolio’) of various celebs, some of which have gone through some fairly major retouching. via YesButNoButYes.
The old sobersides at Time magazine try to explain lolcats, I can has cheezburger, in ur base killing ur d00ds, etc.
A collection of online male personal ad photos (hem, hem), with the advertisers blanked out. Why? So you can critique the décor, of course. Via MeFi.
The odd thing about the Conservative policy announcement today – where they pledged to match Labour’s public service spending over the next three years – is that the plans aren’t published yet and won’t be for a month or so. Talk about signing a blank cheque: if I were in the Treasury, I’d be tempted to put in a couple of joke commitments, just to annoy the Opposition. A gold statue of Kier Hardie, perhaps, or a really expensive metrication campaign. Right, Cameron, match that!