Webbed!
Yeah, well it’s been cold round here.
Quote of the Day
”Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is as deep as Exxon’s commitment to clean energy.”
- Dave Karpf
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Norah Jones | Don’t Know Why
Long Read of the Day
Wrecking Balls
Tina Brown is on Substack, and bloody good she is too. Here’s how her latest blast opens:
In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed…
Includes a pic of the Cybertruck inferno next to the entrance to Trump’s pad.
Note to No 10: one speed doesn’t fit all when it comes to online safety
Yesterday’s Observer column:
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) is an admirable online community of fixed-gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London. Sadly, this columnist does not qualify for membership: he doesn’t reside in (or near) the metropolis, and he requires a number of gears to tackle even the gentlest of inclines – and therefore admires hardier cyclists who disdain the assistance of Sturmey-Archer or Campagnolo hardware.
There is, however, bad news on the horizon. After Sunday 16 March, LFGSS will be no more. Dee Kitchen, the software wizard (and cyclist) who is the core developer of Microcosm, a platform for running non-commercial, non-profit, privacy-sensitive, accessible online forums such as LFGSS, has announced that on that date he will “delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS”.…
Books, etc.
The Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago this Spring
Richard Ford wrote this about it:
“I believe it is one of the maturest, more sophisticated and seamless books I have read, and I don’t fault myself for not getting it back in 1964, since it has, I think, more to teach an older man than a young one.”
My commonplace booklet
John Banville, the distinguished Irish critic and novelist, is working on his memoirs.
The writer toiled as a subeditor in the 1970s. Recounting this period in the interview, he recalled returning home late one night to his then wife, the American artist Janet Dunham, who died in 2021.
“Janet had been asleep for hours and the house was in total darkness, so I didn’t turn any lights on. I just got undressed and crept into bed beside her, this lovely, warm body. And she turned over and things got amorous, as they do. Given the circumstances, it was quite quick and quiet, you know. And afterwards there was a bit of a pause, and then, with her superb sense of comic timing, my wife said: ‘John, is that you?’”
From a lovely Guardian interview
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- How Ernest Wright Makes Scissors.. Ever noticed how terrible mass-produced scissors are? Me too. Which is why I loved this video. The Kutrite model is what emerges from the production process. It might seem expensive, but it’ll last your lifetime, and maybe your grandchildrens’ too.
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