Yearly Archives: 2005

What the Guardian reader wants

Posted on May 5, 2005 by acb

General election campaigns are normally wonderful for newspaper circulation: it was the 87 election which rescued the Independent from an early grave. But in this campaign, the Guardian’s circulation has only risen by 2%. By contrast, the issues dealing with … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Local Politics

Posted on May 5, 2005 by acb

Charles Arthur has a thoughtful screed up this morning about why he’ll vote Green, though he lives in a constituency with an unshakeable Conservative majority — and the MP is the deputy speaker. It’s a nice argument, but I live … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in British politics | 4 Comments

Who’s your Pope?

Posted on May 5, 2005 by acb

I know there is at least one German-speaking Catholic reader of this blog and was originally just going to post for his benefit a link here which goes to a pisstake of Bild Zeitung’s headline on the election of Pope … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Below the fold

Posted on May 4, 2005 by acb

is Cthulhu’s own concept album: a lyric mashup of Tori Amos and Raymond Tallis. Every line in this horror has been printed. There are people paid to take every line seriously. There is also the FWB, who made this song. Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Greedy young hobbledehobbit

Posted on May 4, 2005 by acb

It turns out you can’t photocopy the bound volumes of the Times and TLS in the London Library. They’re too fragile. Typing is hard on a reading pulpit, but I copied out the last three paragraphs (about half) of Alfred … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Unlikely imaginations clash

Posted on May 3, 2005 by acb

Two people wrote to the Guardian to complain that Alfred Duggan had never lived at Blenheim. Er. Hrmph. An error in transmission, as we used to say before email removed that alibi. However, poking around Google print revealed the unlikely … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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old fart baffled by new technology

Posted on May 3, 2005 by acb

When I lived in London, there were cassette stalls in the Portobello market which had bootlegs of all the interesting gigs in town. Where is the electronic equivalent for people who wanted to know what Cream sounded like last night? Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 6 Comments

almost tolerable powerpoint

Posted on May 3, 2005 by acb

Here is a very interesting slideshow, found through Ros Taylor on the Guardian’s election blog. I have posted about it before, when I took the survey, but this is a very lucid explanation of the Axis of UKIP, as they … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in British politics | 2 Comments

The wheel of progress

Posted on May 2, 2005 by acb

You’d think that handwriting was easier to identify than typewriting. But when the latest Government memorandum on the war was leaked, it came hand-written, copied from a computerised original to make the leak harder to trace. Evidence that this was … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in War | 1 Comment

The curious authority of leaks

Posted on May 1, 2005 by acb

Claud Cockburn used to say that there are no real secrets. Anyone who spends a week reading all the available newspaers and talking to well-informed newspapers can figure out what the government is up to, and must be up to. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments