Poland.pl – a government website, has an excellent collection of historical artefacts online.
Clear thinking on immigration
Not Government blather, but at least political blather. A Tory hopeful’s husband has sent round a racist email joke from her email account (BBC). Her response:
“It was forwarded on by my husband, who took it in the form that he thought it was sent and that was a light-hearted view, which, again, anybody broadly thinking would not have made anything out of it, as has been made to be at this present time.”
A thousand bottles of wine a day
Did you hear the story about red wine cancelling out the effects of fatty foods? Yes? But did you hear that to get that effect you’d have to drink 750 to 1,500 bottles of wine a day? Thought not.
Simon Jenkins’ arse
Philip Cowley writes an excellent rebuttal of Simon Jenkins’s ludicrous hyperbole on Parliament. Why anyone takes Jenkins seriously, I cannot imagine. One of the quintessential sounds of the English morning is a distant Jenkins, barking up the wrong tree.
Idiomatic English
A collection of common English idioms explained for speakers of English as a second language.
Joe Strummer on Plastic Bertrand
“I don’t like saying, “You’re a punk and you’re not.”
There was a record out there called “Ca Plane pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand, right? And I guarantee you if I had to play it for you right now you’d go, “Right! That is rockin!”
Now, if you were to say to any sort of purist punk, “This is a good punk record,” they’d get completely enraged. But Plastic Bertrand, whoever he was, compressed into that three minutes a bloody good record that will get any comatose person toe-tapping, you know what I mean?
By purist rules, it’s not allowed to even mention Plastic Bertrand. Yet, this record was probably a lot better than a lot of so-called punk records.”
(via)
Stealing electronic elections
There is a detailed, and important, and terrifying article on Ars Technica, explaining how easy it is to hack the electronic voting machines increasingly being used in the US. Example (with my emphasis):
In order to use a supervisor card to access the AccuVote, you must first enter a four-digit PIN. In version of the machine that was in use as late as 2003, the exact same supervisor PIN was hard-coded into every single AccuVote TS shipped nationwide. That PIN was 1111. (I am not making this up.) This is still the default PIN for these machines, although the county can change it on a machine-by-machine basis if they have the workers and the time.
Slip-sliding away
Went to see the new exhibition at the Tate Modern, a series of huge slides set up in the Turbine Hall by Carsten Höller. They were rather beautiful, and Tom enjoyed sliding down them a lot, though I don’t completely buy the artist’s description of why they were art:
For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.
