Concrete Achievements

Blog

  • Drinking for Britain

    Paul Skidmore at the Demos Greenhouse riffs nicely on the Daily Mail’s latest rant topic, the 2003 Licensing Act.

    Of course, the Daily Mail is onto a winner here. Lots of fuming sixty-somethings, the Youth of Today, What Was Wrong With The Old Laws. Sigh. And, of course, it’s so much easier to campaign against a Government policy when it’s already been law for 2 years. Then it’s much easier to criticise them for not listening to the People Of Britain (by which, of course, the Daily Mail means the Daily Mail).

  • Gas prices in the US

    Metafilter discusses the prospect of American gas (petrol) prices reaching European levels.

  • Google vs MS

    Scott Rosenberg muses on why, if Google is set to challenge Microsoft, all its non-web products are Windows-only.

  • Faith

    I’m thoroughly enjoying the new blog I find your lack of faith disturbing. It’s comforting, or perhaps worrying, that even at the upper echelons of the film industry (my wife is in the lower echelons) it’s a grim, sordid business.

  • Civil rights? Eh.

    The Register reports the disturbing results of a survey, suggesting that Brits at least are happy to swap liberty for security, whatever Ben Franklin might say.

  • Vote for Lewes

    Lewes has been nominated by Country Life as one of Britain’s 15 best market towns. Celebrity judges, including Noel Edmonds, bizarrely, will now judge the best market town in England, from a selection that also includes Faversham (Kent) and Hexham (Northumberland).

  • Daring Fireball: Colophon

    John Gruber tells it like it is about standards compliance:

    If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

  • Left Behind

    A magificent, detailed and comprehensive stripping of the ghastly Left Behind books – every Friday at slacktivist. via MeFi

  • Political correctness gone mad

    Good line from a Christopher Brookmyre book Jane is reading:

    “And there it was, the line he’d known would be along soon enough: ‘Political correctness gone mad.’ [He] had referred to it in a column recently as ‘ the distress cry of the thwarted bigot.’ Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of ‘a victory for common sense’, which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the last ten thousand years evolving away from.”

    Christopher Brookmyre, Be My Enemy

  • Classical music as pesticide

    Sussex Police are going to use Beethoven and Vivaldi to scare off teenagers hanging around a bandstand in Worthing. Sad, isn’t it?