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What BPS looked like when it only had two chimneys. Far superior to the inelegant, badly proportioned current version, imho.
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via MAKE
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via panopticist
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A bookish blog, focussing on the pictures rather than the words
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Volunteers wanted for an experiment to test the psychological impact of a journey to Mars
Month: July 2006
The foxes have cubs at the moment. The foxes are pretty tame in London, since no-one hunts them, and once or twice I’ve seen the cubs playing on the lawn. Mainly you just hear them; squawking, screeching and making a high-pitched twittering like angry plovers.
The foxes and cats seem to co-exist in a state of cautious truce.
Links
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some insight on the current Monica Ali/Brick Lane fuss
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a blog about funk carioca / baile funk. I think.
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Because god forbid people should actually use sight, touch and smell to choose produce. via wmmna.
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pronoun use and politeness in Korean, English and Japanese
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“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
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“I’ve started reading Tostoy’s War and Peace. Here’s a running list of its characters in the order of their appearance or, in a few cases, their first mention. I’ll come back periodically to update the line-up and descriptions. Mostly to help me keep trac
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an above-average article about Wikipedia
9rules strikes me as potentially a great idea. It’s basically a conglomeration of blogs, each of which has been approved as reaching a certain standard of quality.
The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.
They have periodic application periods when they winnow out the sheep from the goats and accept the sheep. The approved blogs are then sorted by subject.
Since blogs are many and multiplying, any way of finding the good stuff has to be a good thing. But I decided to look at the blogs which have been accepted into the 9rules Writing Community. It hasn’t given me great faith in their quality control. One of the various principles they claim for themselves is that
A nicely-designed site might draw readers in, but it’s the content that keeps them coming back.
But given that at least two of the ten in their ‘writing community’ are blogs which are nicely designed but whose content is seriously poor (1, 2), I find myself unpersuaded. The most likely scenario is that the people who selected the blogs just weren’t very literary by inclination; my point really is that they aren’t doing their credibility any good.
In the interests of balance I’ll point out one more 9rules literary blog, PoetryReviews.Ca, where they review Canadian poetry books and seem to do a good job of it.
But generally the 1rule which is most important seems to be ‘style over content’. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps the many good blogs that can be found among my long poetry blogroll just haven’t applied, so 9rules don’t know what they’re missing.
Links
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cool, if a tiny bit sea-sickness inducing
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vernacular photography. via Coudal
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572 scanned plates from Professor Dr. Otto William Thomé’s The Flora of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, around 1900. via Coudal.
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Coudal Partners have all the good stuff
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Endlessly entertaining.
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blimey