All 218 U2 songs, ranked from worst to best, not including the new album (which is okay, but has nothing to match “California”, which should be a lot higher than number 121 on this list. Good list, though).
Radio Garden took me right back to listening to longwave radio in Nuku‘alofa in 1993.
The incredible sound of the Taonga Pūoro (via Mefi).
An interview with Ursula K. Le Guin. After a childhood and young adulthood reading mostly science fiction, I ended up feeling that Le Guin and Philip K. Dick were the apotheosis of the genre, and that’s pretty much where I’ve been ever since.
How Hong Kong failed Madagascar’s domestic helpers.
If you tax the rich, they won’t leave. The author was featured recently on Ed Miliband’s and Geoff Lloyd’s new podcast, Reasons to be Cheerful (which is my podcast discovery of the month—surprisingly compelling and entertaining stuff from Labour’s ex-leader).
The real price of Brexit begins to emerge. Exodus of foreign workers leaves British employers in the lurch. You can’t always get what you want.
19 December 2017
How did I miss the Ramen Burger? Here’s how to make your own, plus a selection of miscellaneous links (Trump/Brexit excluded, for the moment).
Read More · 28 October 2017
Another batch of links on politics and other miscellany.
Read More · 2 October 2017
I’d better get a post up if this blog isn’t to go a whole second month without any. The summer holidays took over: first I was out in Australia for a few weeks with the kids visiting family, and when we got back I began decluttering, culling five hundred old books and listing a bunch on Amazon, carting stuff to charity shops, auctioning on eBay, and tidying up things that had accumulated over the years. All still ongoing. We’ve also had trips to Glasgow, to Glentress for mountain-biking, a few Fringe shows, friends visiting, and the kids going back to school; and a disaster or two, such as our son’s new bike getting pinched last week.
So there hasn’t been much time for stopping here to comment on the state of the world, sorry as it is. Not that much has changed since the last times I did: Brexit is still a shambles, Trump has dropped all pretense of being anything other than fascist, and the climate is still inexorably changing.
But I do have a ridiculous backlog of links to post, so here’s a selection.
Read More · 28 August 2017
Time for an update on U.S. politics. Events are moving faster than any occasional-links-posting blog, so I’ve skipped the more ephemeral links and focussed here on some more lasting ones.
Read More · 13 June 2017
I couldn’t vote this morning as I usually try to, and have had a vague dread all day of being hit by a bus before I can get to the polling station this evening.
Despite my bitterness over the line Jeremy Corbyn has taken over Brexit, and being convinced in the early weeks that we’re doomed, I’ve found myself caught up in hope borne out of recent opinion polls and my Twitter bubble that he, and the decent Labour policies he brings with him, might get over the line, or over enough of a line to form a minority government, or something, anything. Anything other than the bumbling, evasive, heartless, smug authoritarianism of Theresa May and her party, which promises to ramp the past seven years up into an exponential curve of awful.
But we’re probably doomed.
Here are some links I’ve been neglecting to post here in the interim.
Read More · 8 June 2017
A Trump- and Brexit-free assemblage of links.
Read More · 15 March 2017
And so we collapse into 2017, waiting to see just how dire the Trump administration will be, whether Brexit really will mean Brexit, and who next among the West’s democracies will follow Britain and the US down the road to nowhere. It’s enough to take the wind out of any little-read blog’s sails. I do have a few ideas about more substantial projects for coming months, but for the moment only a few links.
Read More · 10 January 2017
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