Did you know you can still get a ticket for £20 to see England vs New Zealand and Australia vs Fiji at Wembley next week? Those are the three best and four hardest Rugby League sides in the world, probably the biggest concentration of all-round athleticism you’re ever likely to encounter. It’s a pity the…
Read More Public service announcementNow this is really interesting. The Grauniad talks to some drug dealers about how they use bookies’ video roulette machines to launder their earnings. The main reason to do this is that they issue receipts, which permit you to explain to the police (and also the Revenue) why you’re carrying so much cash. It’s also…
Read More A case study in cluster spillover from the financial services sectorI’ve recently started reading Ralph Miliband’s Socialism in a Sceptical Age. Partly because someone on twitter wants to quote Ralph every time Ed says something, here are a couple of points so far. RM felt that the power of Big Media was akin to the power to raise a private army, and he says this…
Read More A little Ralph Miliband bloggingAmazingly depressing news about Steve Prescott. I remember his second try at the 1996 Challenge Cup final vividly – spotting he wasn’t going to reach a chip kick from Bobby Goulding, he kicked it ahead on the volley as if it was a football, and guarded the bouncing ball closely until he was certain of…
Read More Steve PrescottThe current top adverts served to my GMail account are: Ladies’ Coats and Jackets – Plus Size 12 to 32 Navy Nightdresses – Amazing Choice of Comfy Nightwear From Cute Cotton to Sensual Satin! Need a New Bank Account? Need No-Win No-Fee Legal Advice 1000 Leaflets Only £15! Google thinks I’m a curvy, litigious woman…
Read More Data pointOK, still reviewing this book. Can’t really bring myself to Buzzfeedise it. Anyway, we’re moving onto Afghanistan and to “lessons learned”. Who else stood out? Chris “not that one” Brown writes about the NATO HQ in Afghanistan; I looked that up in the index because I can’t think of a single interesting point from his…
Read More Blair’s Generals III: The BlairingA few weeks ago, I did a partial review of Blair’s Generals, a collection of essays about the wars since 1997 by the generals who commanded British forces in them, organised and edited by Hew Strachan at KCL and heavily censored, as it turned out, by the MoD. Here’s phase two. Nick Parker says the…
Read More More of Blair’s generals.OK, so. John Band and Oliver Rivers decided I was going to write in Buzzfeed house style for the next whenever, and it’s substantially less annoying to write than gawkerese or Belle Waring. Here goes. Thousands will die or maybe they won’t The Guardian‘s Seamus Milne isn’t happy about energy prices, much like Ed Miliband…
Read More 3 amazing facts that show Hopi Sen is wrongThe catalogue of the Foreign Office’s secret archive at Hanslope Park is available on data.gov.uk and it is as cool as you may have hoped. Literally every mark in here exudes history. It also reminded me of the J.G. Ballard short story The Index, a novella that only exists as its own index. I mean,…
Read More the indexThis is a fascinating and shocking story. The main problem with the auto-enrolment pensions system seems to be that the middleware that links Company X’s payroll solution to the pension fund is stupidly expensive. And I mean stupidly expensive, like £50 a signup plus £50 a year per-head recurring. As a result, the financial advisers…
Read More Digital disruption disrupts, except when it doesn’t