A friend’s daughter brought back this tasteful memento from a recent sojourn in the People’s Republic…
Stansted ab initio
I’m always fascinated by early doodles. Here’s Norman Foster’s first sketch for Stansted airport (from Catalogue: Foster and Partners, Prestel, 2005; reviewed in the London Review of Books, 22 June 2006). At first sight it looks trivial. But actually it conveys the radical idea underpinning the design — which was to put services under the terminal, thereby enabling it to have a light, airy roof.
iDon’t
iDon’t — a lovely (and subtly effective) site which attacks iPod conformity. With those white earphone cables becoming ubiquitous, the iPod is losing its cool image. It’s becoming the aural equivalent of Marks & Spencer knickers: what your parents wore — and what you wouldn’t be seen dead in! The site is sponsored by SanDisk, makers of an inexpensive MP3 player.
Open source news
Perceptive column by Jeff Jarvis. Excerpt:
A week ago, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made quite a stir when he announced that some articles destined for the newspaper would now go to the web first. This may not seem like a big deal, except to the journalists whose circadian rhythm of meetings, deadlines and drinks will now suffer chronic jetlag. And you might say that this is being done already as major newspapers put updates online. But in giving the web priority over the paper, the Guardian is handing its crown jewels, its polished final product, to the future. And that is changing the nature of that product.
When the paper puts an edited story online hours before the old evening deadline, it means that readers may then react, asking more questions, offering more facts. And that means the reporter can augment that story for print. Thus the simple act of exposing a story to daylight before the dark of print can improve the journalism in it. After publication, this continues as readers offer more help and the story is updated online, in its text or in the discussion around it. This needn’t become an endless edition. But it is the end of news on the stone tablet. News becomes plastic. And news opens up…
Gordon Brown: my secret passion
Hi,
One of the loveliest things about being born Middle English is you grow up with a profound love of its non-rugged countryside. Middle England is renowned for its breathtaking flat bits and, like many a hardy Middle Englander, I’ve made it something of an ambition to walk across all 284 of its flat bits before I’m 60. Sometimes, there are gentle hills and the views from the top are slightly more breathtaking. They make the three-minute climb worth it.
I also have a profound love of all Middle English sports, apart from croquet. Cricket is a great obsession of mine. I love the thrill of watching the bat-wielder hit the puck and try to get it into the hands of one of the men standing away at the other end of the field. No wonder there’s an enormous cheer when he does get it into the hands of the faraway man, because that sort of accuracy deserves enormous recognition.
Middle English pastimes are also enormous fun and are something I look forward to after a day in the office or a gruelling trip abroad to my Kirkcaldy constituency.
I love pork scratchings and on Friday nights, look out, because I hit the cider.
Saturday mornings are reserved for jam-making, so I was pleased to hear last week that Waitrose is going to sell misshapen fruit at knock-down prices for all jam-makers. This is the sort of enterprise that makes Middle England the powerhouse of industrial nations.
After all, it was a Middle Englander who invented the hovercraft. Anyway, next Saturday morning, rest assured, you’ll find me outside Waitrose’s door, with my apron on, and a wicker basket, simply panting with excitement. Just let me at those bulbous apricots. Mmmm, jam. I simply can’t express too much how I love it and I hope that’s coming across.
Then, after jam-making in the mornings, Saturday afternoons are left free for morris dancing. Sarah always teases me about how nuts I am about morris dancing. I pour my heart and soul into it, but it’s something I like to do on my own. After a tedious meeting in the City about money or some such, I hop straight on to a train into the Middle English countryside with a bag of bells and a stick. Then I go to a secluded clearing or dell in the woods and morris dance to my heart’s content. Then Sarah picks me up and we both go off for a late-night pub lunch. She keeps this magic spot secret, which is why there are no visual records in existence of me ever doing it. I’m extremely grateful to her for that. She keeps me very very un-dour.
Gordon
Taking on copyright abusers
This morning’s Observer column…
This year, Bloomsday was marked in somewhat different ways. In Dublin, the festivities were cancelled because of the state funeral of Charlie Haughey, the former Taoiseach. Such restraint was entirely out of character with the spirit of Bloomsday, for Haughey was as colourful a rogue as any encountered by Leopold Bloom on his perambulations on the day in 1904 on which the novel is set. The correct thing to do would have been to infiltrate the obsequies, thereby highlighting the absurdity of a political establishment seeking to pretend that Haughey had been somehow a statesman of note.
The failure of Joycean nerve in Dublin was, however, offset by a laudable display of spunk in California, where Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University filed a legal suit against James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, in a US district court, accusing the administrator of the writer’s estate of ‘copyright misuse’.
Given that the entire publishing world has been legally intimidated by Stephen Joyce for decades, this is a landmark action. And the case will be followed with interest in every jurisdiction in which works on James Joyce are published….
WorldCat
Wow! Something I should have known about — Worldcat.
WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.
I’ve just used it to look up a rare book and it told me which libraries in my part of the world have a copy.
China now blocks main Google site
I missed this BBC NEWS report (dated June 7), and only picked it up when reading Owen’s Blog…
Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.
Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google’s international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.
But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.
The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.
“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
“Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” the organisation said…
It was only a matter of time, of course. But it makes the Google boys look even more naive than I had thought.
Abandon hope…
…all ye who enter here.
House of the rising son
Cory Doctorow is leaving London for a year. He’s off to LA to write a book. Walking through Cambridge yesterday I passed a lovely 17th century house in Northampton Street and thought it would make a perfect residence for the great campaigner when he returns.