Let’s start with a brilliant resource for all Brit bloggers: localmouth, a way to find local blogs wherever you are in the UK. Hover somewhere near Oxford and you might find mine. A wonderful example of the way intelligent networked pluralism helps mobilise human creativity without busybody official statist help. […]
Last week I went to a preview of a new film called Storm. Here is a New York Times review which conveys the gist of it. The story centres on a Bosnia war crimes trial at the ICTY. A Bosnian Serb military officier is on trial, but the case against […]
Edging back to normal life again after three days running around bewinter’d Poland. What a pleasure to be in a country able to cope sensibly with snow. Far from snow is Haiti. Ben Macintyre blames the French for brutalising Haiti into paying ruinous reparations for its temerity in wanting to espouse […]
Perusing Hacker Factor I found this notable device, a Gender Guesser programme for (yes) guessing the gender of a writer from 300 or so words of prose. Worth a try. So I cut and pasted this passage from a recent blog entry of mine: The strength of the Iranian protest […]
At Philobiblon. Always feminist. Which takes one to intense and dense analysis of something I’d not heard of before, namely lazy transphobic cis feminism. Eeek. Wikipedia helps on Cisgender, but not much: Cisgender is a neologism that means "someone who is comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth" […]
One of the typical BBC-style clever retorts to those who say that our language is not declining goes thus: Languages evolve, as we all know. They have to. Duh. English now is far removed from the language of Henry I. If technology and texting and the rest are causing English […]
So we wheezed our way up the windy hill to see the legendary White Horse near Uffington, an elegant ancient horse motif cut into the Wessex chalk uplands. When we got there, two things immediately struck us. First, the Horse is not obvious. All you can see are slender lines […]
Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims. (Update: picking […]
Deep, deep as we are plunged into the part of the year when the newspapers move at last to the Subjects which Really Matter, I note this article in my own newspaper the marvellous Guardian which dwells on the etiquette of, hem, peeing in the shower, preferably when the water is […]
Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, who is gay, has started writing personal letters of congratulations to British diplomats who show public support for gay rights. He is praising them for such support even if it draws anger from national governments or local homophobic groups… In a letter to […]
