Amazon v the high street

Posted on by

First Observer column of 2012.

Now’s the time of year when columnists are expected to peer into crystal balls. Not being able to find such a device in his local Apple shop, all this columnist can do is to speculate on the implications of some developments that are already highly visible.

Online shopping, for example. A glance down any high street confirms that Amazon & Co is beginning to make inroads into the urban landscape. The costs of running a bricks and mortar shop – in rent, rates, inventory, theft and wages – together with the wafer-thin margins of most retailers (excluding Apple and other purveyors of luxury goods) meant that it was a knife-edge business at the best of times. But the combination of recession and intensified competition from online is proving too much for some retailers, which is why high streets are beginning to have a gap-toothed look…

Blogger of the Year

Posted on by

Most years, Dave Winer nominates the person who, in his opinion, should be recognised as Blogger of the Year. This year he fingers Richard Stallman as a possible contender for next year. (What? You didn’t know Stallman blogged! Er, neither did I, until Dave told me.) But his Blogger of the Year for now is Seth Godin.

This would be fine except for one thing. For me, most years, Dave Winer is generally Blogger of the Year. He’s the most consistently interesting, perceptive and wise commentator on things that matter to me. Long may he reign.

The road in winter

Posted on by


The road in winter, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Ever since we first saw them, F & I have been fascinated by David Hockney’s series of paintings of roads in his native Yorkshire, and so we’re always on the lookout for “Hockney Roads”. Driving to Norfolk in the rain yesterday we suddenly came on this view of the road to Ringstead (my favourite village), stopped the car, and I took this shot through the windscreen. The light was amazing, and it only lasted for a few seconds, but this captures it. Shot with a 90mm f2 Summicron.

Larger size here.

A novel use for duct tape?

Posted on by

From Reuters.

(Reuters) – Two Arizona parents were arrested by sheriff’s deputies after apparently posting pictures on Facebook that showed their children, an infant and a toddler, bound with duct tape, authorities said on Thursday.

Coconino County deputies arrested Frankie Almuina, 20, and Kayla Almuina, 19, on suspicion of two counts of child abuse on Wednesday at their northern Arizona home after being alerted to the photos by an anonymous tip.

The children, a 2-year-old toddler and a 10-month-old infant, were seen online bound with duct tape on their wrists and ankles with their mouths taped shut, Commander Rex Gilliland told Reuters. One of the children was shown hanging upside down on an exercise machine.

The parents told investigators that the photos, posted on the mother’s Facebook account, were a joke and that the children were not harmed, Gilliland said.

If this hadn’t been filed by Reuters, I’d have thought it was a hoax.

Tolkien: the unlikely revolutionary

Posted on by

I’ve never seen the point of Hobbits et al, so hadn’t really thought about J.R. Tolkien until (a) I was asked to buy a copy of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings for someone as a Christmas present and (b) I came on this piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. What captivated me were its opening paragraphs.

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written, thereby inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry.

Assertion

Posted on by


Assertion, originally uploaded by jjn1.

George Orwell likened advertising to “the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket”. Perhaps that was because the advertising is his day was so crass — like this ad which probably dates from late Victorian times. But here’s a terrible thought: maybe this looked cool and clever to those at whom it was aimed. And maybe our own oh-so-cool-and-clever advertising will look just as pathetic and dated to our great grandchildren.