Small Beds and Large Bears

I used to love The Register. It stood up for digital rights, stuck the knife into governmental IT projects, shone the light on ID cards and gave due attention to the largely pointless and wasteful intrusions of technology in the form of CCTV or the database state. But for the past twelve months or so, [...]

Nobody writes polemics quite like Monbiot’s tirade against Hazel Blears (via many, including looby):
The only consistent political principle I can deduce from these positions is slavish obedience to your masters. Theyworkforyou sums up your political record thus: “Never rebels against their party in this parliament.” Yours, Hazel, is the courage of the sycophant, the courage [...]

In Vanity Fair, Thackeray continues to refer to the most morally upstanding member of his bizarre collection of characters as a hypocrite:
Conducted to the ladies, at the Ship Inn, Dobbin assumed a jovial and rattling manner, which proved that this young officer was becoming a more consummate hypocrite every day of his life. He [...]

I’ve tried to think of ways of explaining why the LRB is such a fantastic publication, and why everyone who counts themselves a reasonable, informed human being ought to subscribe to it (much as they should also pay at least some attention to Private Eye), and promise never, ever to read such smugly Radio-4 quasi-debating [...]

In the late 1990s I used to read the NME as religiously as rgl would buy it and I would visit to steal his coffee. As he eventually had a subscription (to which he might no longer admit) then that was fairly frequently. Back then it wasn’t necessary to read the magazine ironically: pre-Select meltdown, [...]

CRB alerted me to a comment that might have been made by Charlie Brooker on his own column this morning. I should stick it here in case, as CRB phrases it, “the Guardian’s comment police get to it,” although that seems unlikely now that everyone and his dog have responded to it.
It’s normally considered infra [...]

Borders has one of the best selections of obscure, niche-market magazines in Oxford. For all its multinational rapacity, and its attempts to package, brand, pre-chew and mulch down literature that a bookshop ought to treat with at least a little more respect, it’s almost the exclusive distributor of such as the is-it-or-isn’t-it-defunct new consumer magazine [...]

It’s always difficult to separate out what Schadenfreude and general disapproval is prompting us to believe will happen, from what the signs actually tell us is going to happen, especially when it comes to predicting the outcomes of the reckless behaviour of the best mate we all love to hate, the United States.
From hairyears comes [...]

Zoe Williams is one of the most talented columnists working for the Guardian, but you’d never believe it from the comments her columns attract. She writes everything with her tongue lodged so far in her cheek that you can’t see the links for the irony; but she seems to be read largely by humourless Daily [...]

Hatmandu mentions he’s currently insulating his office space, which suffers a lot more than our house from the chills.
Rather encouragingly, the Ecohome woman told us at the climate-change meeting last Thursday that almost every step you take towards decent insulation yields noticeable results, either in increased comfort or in decreased heating bills. To a point, [...]