I was a bit surprised the other day to discover someone who describes himself as "The Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction". How could that possibly be quantified, I wondered? It is probably not too difficult to be *A* Leading Voice of whatever kind one might want to be. But *The* Leading Voice surely requires some numerical evidence. Of course, there is some numerical evidence available from my old favourites, Goodreads and LibraryThing. I had to stay up late this evening, and plugged a list of leading Hispanic sf writers into both systems. I populated my list from Wikipedia and ...
Listening to Boris this morning I have come up with a business plan that will work with the comparability of Brexit with the congestion charge. It my own solution to the obvious issues of the Irish problem afterwards. I shall set up four Boris Bike Hire Shops. A pair in Newry and Dundalk with the other pair in Derry and Muff. This will allow people to get the train from Belfast either North or South and get off at the station hire a bike and cycle across the border to avoid the congestion charge. This will be a highly profitable ...
Two of the grand old, grumpy old, men of psychogeography in conversation at The House of the Last London, Gallery 46, Whitechapel.
This afternoon I braved the snow to attend the Cultural Experience Award - this time we were at the Textile Museum on Bermondsey Street near London Bridge to explore the T-Shirt exhibition and art as activism. T-Shirt: Cult, Culture, Subversion - exhibition open until 6 May 2018 I have to be honest - I've never really thought about T-Shirts as anything more than just clothes, however as I walked around this well-planned and informative exhibition I thought about clothes as performance. One of the things I'm fascinated by, generally, is the claim that identities are inherently theatrical; rehearsed and performed. ...
Last week was our University Reading Week, so I spent most of my time writing... Laptops, Notebooks and Flowers We had a couple of essays to complete this week, and I actually quite enjoyed them! For one of my courses we were required to engage with a work of Performance Art, that we hadn't actually seen live, from before 2008, as a way of investigating how we discover Performance Art after the event has taken place; what survives? What is supposed to survive? The tricky element of this was the requirement to also make a strong argument for the work, ...
The organisers of Arts Fresco - Market Harborough's celebrated street theatre festival - have announced that it will not take place in 2018: The organising committee for the Arts Fresco street theatre festival in Market Harborough has unanimously agreed to give the festival a year off in 2018. After another tremendously successful event in 2017 with record visitor numbers, high profile UK and international performers, and highly positive feedback from acts and the audience, we now need to focus on generating more sustainable, longer-term funding models to secure the festival's future, and also to give the volunteer organising committee a ...
As Stephen Bush has pointed out in the New Statesman, the bungling efforts of the Conservative Party to fire up a culture war in the UK don't necessarily mean the underlying strategy is a bad one. Poor execution can wreck even the best of strategies. What these efforts also highlight is the odd position of the Labour Party under its most left-wing leader in decades. The leader may be left, but it's often caught in the middle - or voluntarily sat in the middle. That's most obvious on Brexit where for all Jeremy Corbyn's disdain of Tony Blair, he is ...
Second paragraph of third chapter: She [Scarlett's mother, Ellen O'Hara] would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on the ears of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly at ...
I've been listening to this one for a few weeks now, and the reason I'm reccing it today is the latest episode. The Boring Talks is a podcast about the intriguing intricacies of things which most people think are dull. It grabbed me with the first episode, about what the actual date of the end of the world in HHGTTG might be, and the second episode about book pricing algorithms was fascinating too. So I subscribed. And I rather enjoyed the next few episodes. Then came this week's episode: the Argos Catalogue. And it's not so much a podcast episode ...
This post first appeared on the Radix blog... I haven't ever given a lecture to nursing students before, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so last week. but it was also a bit of an eye-opener. I know the NHS is formally committed to 'co-production' in theory - though I'm not sure how they define it - but I don't think I had realised quite how far it has moved away from it in practice. I'm sure this is not the case everywhere, but it was a shock to someone like me who has spent most of their so-called career advocating closer, ...
The following information has been supplied about County Durham collections on Tuesday Feb 27th: Poor weather conditions that have affected parts of the county refuse/recycling collections. Please see below area percentage of completed rounds. South- 70% completed East – 95% completed North-60% completed The council has mop up crews in place to start collecting missed bins tomorrow and over the rest of the week, depending on the wesather.
On the Today programme this morning Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tried to compare being outside the EU with being part of different London Boroughs. Firstly it was clear from his choice of boroughs Camden, Islington and Westminster that Boris has never lived south of the river and had to awkwardness of trying to get a black cab home. When drivers refuse to carry passengers "Sarf of the River". Although I did love the loophole I found of asking a driver to take me to Hampton Wick (North of the River) I could guarantee that the driver would come over Putney ...
It can't be overstated what a milestone the Institute of Directors praising, even cautiously and with plenty of caveats, a speech by Jeremy Corbyn happens to be. That a properly socialist Labour leader could get praise from groups that are the backbone of British capitalism says a lot about how the Tories have allowed Brexit to distance the party from the concerns of the UK business community. "Liam Fox attacks business over support for Labour", as a headline in today's Times reads, is not a good look for the Conservative Party; the last time they were in this perilous a ...
It takes some resolve to keep track of the Brexit debate these days. Both government and Labour policies hinge on such nuance that creative ambiguity remains perhaps a better term than policy. As a party, we have been clear that Labour's recent movement on the/a customs union has been slight Corbyn started his speech claiming that Labour's position on Brexit has been consistent, by which he must mean consistently vague. And today was no different. https://t.co/dpApYCSkGt — Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) February 26, 2018 While this is all true I fear that it is going to be difficult to persuade anybody ...
[IMG: An International Women's Day (IWD 2018) Event on 'Skin & Feminism'] Come along and celebrate an evening of diversity within feminism in recognition of International Women's Day. The theme for the event is 'Skin & Feminism'. There will be speakers and discussions on how skin is a political... The post An International Women's Day (IWD 2018) Event on 'Skin & Feminism' appeared first on FeministMama @ambitiousmamas.
British heritage sites are at last beginning to acknowledge aspects of their queer past that have long been swept under the carpet. Many of the country houses and castles that I've visited in the last 40 years have been owned at some point by families with gay and lesbian characteristics. But guide books, exhibitions and [...]
Note from the district council: Each year the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) consults with the public and local groups on its plans for the coming year to tackle crime and disorder across the District. The survey seeks residents' views on whether the Partnership's priorities are correct and how they think we should tackle these. It [...]
Mon, 12:17: RT @bbclaurak: Here it is - 'Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs wit... Mon, 12:56: 'Black Panther' Is Not the Movie We Deserve https://t.co/84ACAD4lmE Spoilers, of course. Mon, 16:05: RT @MiKarnitschnig: If you need just one stat on the strategic rationale of #EU #enlargement, this is it. Shows the Union's power of attrac... Mon, 18:38: Monday reading https://t.co/jkTrGVVWi0 Mon, 20:48: RT @ElectionMapsUK: So here is EVERY US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION EVER 1788-2016 (designed to fit on the face of your phone). The history of... Mon, 21:01: RT ...
Why do women have periods? What is the evolutionary benefit or purpose of having periods? Why can't women just get pregnant without the menstrual cycle? hrist on a bike, even placentae are agents of the sodding patriarchy. How poverty changes your mind-set - that Cracked article from a couple of years ago now has research to back it up "Contrary to the refrain that bad decisions lead to poverty, data indicate that it is the cognitive toll of being poor that leads to bad decisions. And actually, decisions that may seem counterproductive could be entirely rational, even shrewd." From 'barely ...
Tue 27th
10:55
LibLink: Jenny Randerson: The drone market is a bit like the Wild West. It needs some rules to make ...
Lib Dem Transport Spokesperson Jenny Randerson has written for Politics Home about the need for regulation of drones for safety reasons. So why are they a problem? Apart from the obvious terrorism and defence related issues, there are some more ordinary dangers: In 2016 the police dealt with 3,456 incidents involving drones; that was 12 times the number of incidents logged in 2014, so the problems - like drone ownership - are growing rapidly. Possibly the greatest risk is to aircraft. Drones can smash the windscreen or break the rotor blades in the case of helicopters, which would bring the ...
Although he was speaking in another context the Chief Rabbi, in this morning's Radio 4 "Thought for the Day" made a point very pertinent to the sanctimonious indignation presently surrounding the flaws in the behaviour of some of the operatives in OXFAM and other aid agencies. His point was that many if not most of the heroes of the Bible were flawed characters. I'd like to cite all which mentioned but the talk is not, as I write, yet available on the BBC's "Listen Again" facility, and my memory isn't what it was. But I can remember he cited Jacob, ...
For the past 28 years I have kept a diary. I started off writing it by hand. After 14 years technology caught up with me and my diary was written on my laptop. Technology is catching up with me again and I'm experimenting with a video diary. This is my first attempt, filmed yesterday. Half the day was spent in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle where my friend Richard has had
... was extremely happy-making. Silly, gory, and massively over the top as ever. YAY! Roll on next week! [IMG: comment count unavailable] comments
As the various agendas around Brexit unfold before us, it is becoming clearer that the slogan 'take back control' means different things to different people. For the government, various court cases and procedural manoeuvres in Parliament suggest that it means by-passing MPs and Lords to get their way. For some hardliners, it means harking back to the days of empire, creating an immigrant-free society in which the values of Colonel Blimp can prevail in all the best London clubs. For most Brexiteers however, it is a vague sense of not being told what to do by people in remote bureaucratic ...
Quite a few questions about gritting this morning. Below is the map of roads are on gritting routes. Obviously in bad weather "essential routes" (those which provide access through the borough and maintain local access to critical services such as hospitals, ambulance stations and key points in the food and fuel distribution networks) will be treated first. Click on the map for the full map of the borough.
Sutton's Local Plan received approval at the Council meeting on Monday 26th February meaning that its stronger planning policies can start being applied to new planning applications from today. This means stronger protection for Areas of Special Local Character and backgarden land, policies to stop our shopping areas being swamped with takeaways, limits to conversion [...]
Albania is a small European country tucked away in the Balkans but for forty odd years from the end of the Second World War its people suffered under one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. Liberals cherish freedom and liberty, if you want to look for an example of the opposite authoritarianism with a capital A it could be found in Enver Hoxha's Albania. In his excellent book Blendi Fevziu paints a graphic picture of a nation in the grip of fear. Hoxha's rise to power was in many way accidental, he was handpicked to lead by a ...
I haven't ever given a lecture to nursing students before, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so last week. but it was also a bit of an eye-opener. I know the NHS is formally committed to 'co-production' in theory – though I'm not sure how they define it – but I don't think I had realised quite [...] The post Imperialist public services and why they don't work appeared first on Radix.
Tue 27th
08:13
The politics of hate and division – It's peddled by many mainstream politicians and is almost ...
The Guardian has this opinion piece on its web site – see link above That we live in rather desperate and potentially dangerous political times is a given sadly, so this piece by James Graham is an interesting wake up call. I have commented before about how Liberals were always looked upon with a fondness by the electorate generally but ever since Charles Kennedy stood out against the Iraq War, whilst Labour and Tories alike were on a war footing, attitudes have changed and some now have very negative attitudes to Liberals. At first I found this rather odd ...
