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 body, commerce, consumers, discomfort, drink, opinion, organisations, person, politics, rants, society on April 1st, 2010 2 Comments »
Teabags with tags are a pain in the arse. I mean, the idea seems sound—a heat-resistant paper handle to lift out a nearly boiling teabag—and probably did have a function before the invention of the spoon. These days, though, a tag is largely redundant unless you’re the sort of person who finds their experience of [...]
Posted in anger, body, class_warfare, cliques, commerce, dickheads, emotions, employees, industry, loyalty, morality, opinion, organisations, person, politics, rants, services, sleep, society on October 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »
One of the tasks you have to attend to (desultorily) when you move house is changing one’s address with banks, utility companies and now the DVLA. Last night I had just finished addressing envelopes for both licence and car registration, when I heard on the radio that the postal workers’ strike would begin tomorrow viz [...]
Posted in business, cliques, commerce, development, far_away, friends, location, occupation, organisations, society on August 30th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’m off to a conference tomorrow for a day or two tomorrow. It’s possibly the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had to better myself in my career and in a community I respect, and a great responsibility for me to help my employer and co-workers through presentation of a good corporate face to others and intensive [...]
While planning on the phone for his arrival in Oxford tomorrow, I just referred to Looby as, er, Looby. He isn’t called Looby. Well, you know: any more than I’m called “sbalb” or “smallbeds”. It confused him quite a bit, and then his confusion confused me. I’m about to go upstairs and fox the hell [...]
Posted in cliques, dphil, mind, occupation, organisations, past, person, research, society, time, understanding on February 23rd, 2009 5 Comments »
I decided to cancel my membership of the Institute of Physics. I’m no longer working in the industry or academia generally, so the organisation wasn’t really offering me anything any more. The monthly journal was interesting enough but ended up skimmed rather than read, certainly compared to the way I devour the LRB or Private [...]
Posted in instant_messaging, media, nu-media, organisations, radio, services, society, technology, television, web on January 27th, 2009 No Comments »
The BBC has twin, conflicting pressures that give its web presence a certain flavour. On the one hand, because public service broadcasting does have a certain freedom, then it can adopt technologies quite early, if only on the small scale. This is the driving force behind fringe successes like BBC Backstage.
On the other, whole strata [...]
Posted in art, business, charity, entertainment, festivals, humour, made_our_own_fun, occupation, organisations, society, time on March 16th, 2007 3 Comments »
Comic Relief is upon us, making today, Red Nose Day, the least humorous day in the British calendar. I appreciate I’ve never been much of a joiner (actually, I am a joiner—well, a bit—but I’m easily bored and hence just as much of a leaver) but there’s something about institutionalised fun that makes me grind [...]
A well-meaning environmental organization has some of the best publicity it’s had for ages. At the point of publicizing, it trumpets its email newsletters and gives out its website address.
On inspection, the website is broken. The newsletter link leads to an error. The contact-us link leads to a web form and a land-line telephone number. [...]
