Scanning over the basic facts of Sarah Palin’s life, I was immediately struck by the fact that 40% of her children are named after witches.* This may say more about me than it does about her.
* Piper and Willow.
Posts tagged with ‘politics’
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On Sarah Palin
31 August 2008 – 7:42 pm
‘Occupational Hazards’ by Rory Stewart
29 August 2008 – 1:34 pm
Occupational Hazards is Stewart’s account of trying to administer Maysan province in southern Iraq. He’s obviously an interesting character; to quote his author bio: ‘After a brief period in the British army, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and then joined the Foreign Office, serving in Indonesia and Montenegro, Yugoslavia. From 2000 to 2002 he walked six [...]
Links
18 July 2008 – 11:00 pm
Silver Lake on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Autochromes are a kind of early colour photography. This one is particularly fabulous, but check out the whole set.
(del.icio.us tags: autochromes photos )
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
OK, fair's fair, this is quite funny.
(del.icio.us tags: Kansas politics )
Marc Steinmetz [...]
Links
10 July 2008 – 11:00 pm
Rhagor | Help us find out more about the mysterious alien “Ghost Slug”
New species found in Wales: 'Unlike most slugs, the Ghost Slug is carnivorous, killing earthworms at night with blade-like teeth, sucking them in like spaghetti. It is also unusual in having no eyes (it is probably blind) and is almost completely white.'
(del.icio.us tags: [...]
An observation
31 May 2008 – 9:13 am
If there’s one lesson I hope everyone concerned has learnt from the current US election cycle: it’s a really stupid idea to disenfranchise a whole bunch of your constituents for any reason. I’m thinking of the debacle surrounding the Democratic primaries in Florida and Michigan.
Of course it has only become such a thorny issue because [...]
‘The Century of Revolution’ by Christopher Hill
28 April 2008 – 11:53 am
The full title is The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; i.e. the century in question is the longish C17th from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Queen Anne. I guess most centuries are centuries of revolution somewhere, and in one way or another, but the C17th was the only time the English have had an actual [...]
China hoist by their own petard
6 April 2008 – 5:10 pm
BBC News:
“Thirty-five arrests have been made after clashes between pro-Tibet protesters and police as the Olympic torch made its way through London.
Of course, in the parallel world of the Chinese official news machine, the only thing interfering with the movement of the torch was a sprinkling of snow. Actually, to be fair, there is an [...]
‘From Russia’ at the Royal Academy
26 March 2008 – 5:18 pm
This is a seriously impressive exhibition. The full title is ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg‘. It starts with a little room of Russian paintings from the start of that period; then you get a whole load of French paintings that were collected by two Russian art collectors, [...]
Modernism and politics
25 March 2008 – 10:34 pm
A discussion of modernism and politics starting at Alfred Corn’s, then Baroque in Hackney then George Szirtes here and here.
I suppose we tend to associate modernism with left-wing politics because we feel that people who embrace radical and new aesthetics would probably have radical instincts in politics as well: whatever else modernism was, it [...]
Tippety-tap
20 March 2008 – 10:56 pm
In celebration of this very amusing put-down of President Bush, here’s a bit of the master himself:
1984 by George Orwell
19 March 2008 – 2:11 pm
I picked this up to read again because I’ve just read a biography of Stalin. I think I first read 1984 when I was really quite young — certainly no older than my teens; in fact I may have made a point of reading it in 1984, when I was nine or ten — and [...]
Tibet and the Olympics
16 March 2008 – 11:42 am
It’s going to be really interesting watching the Olympics unfold. There had already been rumblings, with the protests last year in Burma and pressure over Darfur, but protests in Tibet bring it that much closer to home. And as the Olympics get closer, and more and more media attention is focussed on Beijing, the Chinese [...]
Yay for Blasphemy!
7 March 2008 – 9:39 am
Or, to be more exact, yay for legal blasphemy. We’re not quite there yet, but the House of Lords has voted to abolish the offence of blasphemy in British law.
The current situation, with special legal protection for the Church of England, was obviously ludicrous in a modern multicultural society; but then in a country where [...]
‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore
3 March 2008 – 12:33 pm
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a biography of Stalin, focussed on his domestic life and the tightly-knit group of people around him: his own family, and politicians, bodyguards, and their families.
As a piece of history, it’s very impressive. It’s clearly the result of a huge amount of research by Montefiore: he [...]
Irony of the week
16 February 2008 – 9:36 am
The Chinese government expressing their sadness and shock at the idea that anyone would be crass enough to sully the Olympic spirit with the grimy taint of a political agenda.
Primarily peculiar
8 January 2008 – 3:35 pm
Is it just me or is the American system of state primaries really bizarre?
And I don’t just mean the Iowan ‘we don’t believe in the secret ballot’ thing. The very fact that the results in Iowa and New Hampshire take on great significance is a clear sign that something isn’t working properly. I mean, no [...]
Those crazy Brits!
30 September 2007 – 4:37 pm
There’s speculation that we might have a general election soon; November 4th was a date I heard suggested on the radio today. Which means, since we don’t have any kind of hand-over period, that we might have a new government and a new Prime Minister on November 5th.
To those of you who live in countries [...]
China, the Olympics, and antiquity diplomacy
28 September 2007 – 12:10 am
I was just watching Question Time on the BBC, and the panel were asked what ‘we’ should do about Burma. Simon Schama was on the panel, and he suggested that, if China was stubborn about blocking any action via the UN, we should have a mass boycott of the Beijing Olympics, since Burma is a [...]