The John Lewis Partnership – presumably because they don’t have shareholders, and therefore don’t care about quarterly results announcements – publish weekly sales figures for both John Lewis and Waitrose.
Blog
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GoMetric
The Irish have a good website left over from when they went metric on their road signs. Now there are calls for the UK to do the same, but obviously it would be the end of the world, the nation would collapse, no-one in the country can understand kilometres even though they’ve been taught in schools for forty years, our masters in Brussels etc.
Whatever. Maybe I should just move to Ireland. Their paranoid wing doesn’t appear to be in control.
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Shrine bombings
(NYT) Blast Destroys Golden Dome of Sacred Shiite Shrine in Iraq:
The shrine housed the tombs of two revered leaders of Shiite Islam and symbolized the place where the Imam Mahdi, a mythical, messianic figure, disappeared from this earth. Believers in the imam say he will return when the apocalypse is near, to cleanse the world of its evils.
Does this sound like anyone we know? The NYT’s straight-faced approach to this ‘mythical figure’ made me smile.
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Quango fight! Part 1
Quango fight: n. Directly contradictory campaigns run by different arms of Government.
This week
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Privacy and rationality
Two nice quotes from this week’s New York Review. First, Clive James on Philip Larkin:
Always averse to the requirements of celebrity, he didn’t find out enough about them, and never realised that beyond a certain point of fame you not only don’t have a private life any more, you never had one.
And from the Mughal Emperor Akbar:
The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly obvious as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism were proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders.
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Enigmo 2
A fun game just released for Mac users out there. Enigmo 2 is one of those simple-concept, difficult-execution games.
You have to use mirrors, magnetospheres (yes), guttering, etc., to get water drops, laser beams or plasma (yes) from the source to a defined finish point. Starts simple, but there are 50 levels of rapidly increasing fiendishness. Fantastic graphics, and appropriately noodly new age music.
Free demo available, and trailers, via the link above.
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Dick Bruna interview
Dick Bruna, creator of Miffy, may well be the nicest guy in the world.
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Joke’s on you
A group of Israeli cartoonists have launched a tongue-in-cheek competition to find the most anti-semitic cartoons – entry only open to Jewish cartoonists. (via MeFi)
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Anthea Turner: Woman on the verge of nervous breakdown?
The latest reality show format on BBC3 is perhaps the strangest ever. It’s called Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife, and for the life of me I can’t work out whether the subject under the microscope is Anthea Turner or the two non-Antheas in each episode.
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The American right
The American right, and their fixation with Bush: Link.