Monthly Archives: May 2005

Good God, Biggles!

From page 247 of Biggles in the South Seas comes an unforgettable image … Those of you reading this on an aggregator are just going to have to guess. Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Local services

John Naughton follows up this Register story and discovers that Google Maps lists four brothels in Cambridge: the Medical Research Council, BBC Radio Cambridge, one pub and one publisher. Inspired by this research, I tried checking for brothels in Saffron … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Net stories | 4 Comments

Pigs kill more people than sharks

A great quote from Bruce Schneier: One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, ‘news’ means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | 13 Comments

A new scam

This phishing technique is new to me. Nowadays you get lots of scams in which they appear to have printed the URL in plain text, but hovering the mouse over it shows that it goes to a completely different URL. Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Not quite “but for the grace of God”

When first I read that Michelle Delio, a prolific freelance for Wired News, had been caught making up sources, I felt a twinge of sympathy, as anyone would who has had stories fact-checked and legalled to death. But the report … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

the Cream reunion

Crossroads was the first music that I remember paralysing me with joy and the simultaneous knowledge that this joy was inextricably sad. Until then I had listened to music largely as a tribal thing. At my then school I was … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Apologies for Absence

I went over to Stockholm for the weekend, and was effectively offline, since the hotel had no wifi, only a public terminal. It was extremely disconcerting to see how much more standard European the city had become. I found the … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Travel notes | 2 Comments

What the Guardian reader wants

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

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on What the Guardian reader wants

Local Politics

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?

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

Posted in God, Journalism | Comments Off on Who’s your Pope?