Posted in amerika, belief, christianity, cliques, enmity, establishment, friends, geography, here, location, love, metaphor, organisations, people, politics, pragmatism, race, responsibility, society, understanding on June 1st, 2010 1 Comment »
My country has no flag. Its has no national anthem, although some of its citizens are partial to folk music and Morris dancing. No seething, populous crowds cheer my country on, with loud or incoherent cries in the street. Its citizens do not rally round meaningless symbols and engineer fake outrage at nonexistent bans, nor [...]
Posted in art, cultural, far_left, love, metaphor, music, politics, public, society, songs, technology, transport, understanding, web on April 13th, 2009 No Comments »
Forward! with the great people’s construction project! May great successes befall the imagining of your beneficient representation through the medium of collectively owned urban transport infrastructure! Celebrate the greatness of both our interpersonal bonds and the proletariat’s cultural simplicity, through enhanced technological efficiencies!
Along with being uploaded to YouTube, Inaugural Trams (featuring Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy [...]
I’ve been accused recently of harbouring a religious zeal about climate change: in fact, it’s been suggested by my attendance at a lecture given by Monbiot in the Sheldonian back in late 2006 formed the basis of a conversion narrative. This is a personal story arc whereby some particular event, involving hearing a speech given [...]
Posted in art, artificial, cliques, communication, development, diary, entertainment, experience, far_away, instant_messaging, location, made_our_own_fun, media, metaphor, music, nu-media, occupation, online_applications, society, speculative_tech, technology, understanding, web on January 21st, 2008 4 Comments »
Saturday saw me largely confined to the house with my bad back, which meant I missed a party in London and was feeling particularly fed up. I decided, rather impulsively, to drink something and wander round the internet. Only at the time I considered it extending my experiences beyond the paradigm of normal partying.
Re-reading that [...]
Jonathan Jones refutes the charges against Heart of Darkness, but I’ve never really been convinced there’s a case to answer at all. In paragraph 38 of the original essay by Chinua Achebe lies the oft-quoted (by Jones too) complaint of:
the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the [...]
Posted in art, arts_and_crafts, body, cars, cliques, environment, fatigue, geography, location, metaphor, oxford, person, psychogeography, society, transport, understanding on March 19th, 2007 3 Comments »
On Saturday I followed the herd and went to Luminox, the performance-arts event that took over Oxford’s Broad Street for three days. It’s difficult to describe the premise—vast numbers of ceramic pots and metal sculptures, all belching fire, but not in the Rammstein mode that such an arrangement might bring to mind—but the purpose was [...]
I wore a red poppy this year, for the record. Partly this was because, as I say, I was attending on behalf of my Grandad and I know what he’d wear. If you asked my Grandad, and many people like him, whether or not the wearing of red poppies glorifies war, he’d look at you [...]
While editing a list of competencies for new employees, I’ve had to correct among other things
IT sills
member s
endeavors
‘Goes the extra mile
and then trawl it for instances of adjectival list items interleaved clashingly with verbal ones. I balked at rewriting the long list of “Personal Contribution” adjectives to match the phrasing of that extra-mile saw, but [...]
Everywhere corporate that I’ve ever worked for has always, without ever enforcing or codifying it, developed a house style of euphemisms for the word “problem”. The most immediate synonym would be something like “difficulty”, but that simply doesn’t take enough of the sting out of the communication. Substitution must sweeten the pill, suggesting that nobody [...]
