Concrete Achievements

Blog

  • 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.

  • What is Web 2.0

    A discussion on O’Reilly.net. 21 October 2006

  • Commedy fetival

    The Paramount Comedy Festival website authors need to use a spell check. link

  • Rolling Stone on Congress

    Rolling Stone magazine excoriates “the worst Congress ever”.

  • The birth of the iPod

    Wired tells the story of how the iPod came about.

  • Travel notes: Reading

    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.

  • The real battle of Hastings


    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.

  • Pofigism

    An piece in this week’s New Republic, not available for free online,
    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).

    The Russian community, interestingly, have been excluded from the
    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:

    “The result is this terrible apathy.What will my vote
    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.”

    Pofigism – a word we have use for.

  • Making a bad situation worse

    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.

  • Conkers

    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’?

    Argus story here.