This Grauniad essay on Robert Byron raises an interesting question. Y’know the chap – wrote The Road to Oxiana, very typical Eton’n’Oxford gay aesthete, pretty much a standard template for 1890s-1950s British travel writing, obsessed by foreign architecture but didn’t care for the people over much. Consider this: Byron wrote that the catalyst for his…
Read More Alternate OxianaI’ve been tagged with a Gordon Brown-related meme by Tom “The Green Ribbon” Griffin. 2 things Gordon Brown should be proud of A sensible monetary policy, based on rules rather than “judgment”.A sensible fiscal policy, based on rules rather than “judgment”. 2 things he should apologise for Supporting the war in Iraq, while pretending that…
Read More Meme timeA commenter asks about non-fatal casualties in the British sector in Iraq, suggesting that the mass firefight in which Major Paul Harding was killed might be going on all the time. You ask, we answer. Here’s a chart showing UK wounded in action, by admissions to field hospitals, and killed, from June, 2006, to May,…
Read More CasualtiesPerhaps that should be in Every Boy’s Handbook? RSA reports on an online shop set up specifically to drain stolen credit cards. A card costs between $2-5 a throw, presumably reflecting a low success rate in sucking them dry. Setting up a merchant account and DIYing, as most of Landslide’s customers did, is clearly the…
Read More HOWTO launder dodgy credit cardsDoug Farah‘s book on Viktor Bout is out. You can read an excerpt in this month’s Men’s Vogue, which is certainly a fittingly Hunter Thompson-esque scene for him, and an interview. Salient points include this: I think one of the most startling moments for me was when we were talking to Treasury Department people doing…
Read More Book alert: Doug Farah vs Viktor BoutThis comment of Dave Bell’s at Charlie Stross’s left me thinking of something. Bell refers to a pocket handbook of crop yields and other agricultural data. I’ve always liked this kind of thing – having the data on hand for anything, however weird. Somewhere around I have a copy of Every Boy’s Handbook as given…
Read More Every boy’s handbookOK, remember this post on the Labour Party’s “Faith Task Force”, academies, and the PR man to the Saudis, BAE, and HIV-quack dictator Yahya Jammeh? For a start, it’s drawing referrals from the Conservative Party’s network. This story in the Torygraph gives more detail: it’s the PM’s pet priest, Michael Seed, who introduced Bailey and…
Read More Cash rules everything around meMaking a late challenge for the title of the most offensively authoritarian Blairite, with only a week to go: David Triesman, the former Labour General Secretary and now “The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Deportations.” He apparently thinks that nationality can be determined through…yeees..biometrics. Or DNA sampling. Or something, you know, sciency. Perhaps maglev, or…
Read More A late run up the blindsideThis interview with the architect of MySQL looks very cool indeed. Rather than just hoicking data out of files on a big hard drive, the latest version can use a Web site, or multiple Web sites, as a source of data on which database operations can be performed and the results served up to something…
Read More When the Web is your monster databaseIt’s incredible what you can find out if you read the newspaper closely enough (said I.F. Stone, apparently). He wasn’t wrong. Yesterday, a soldier from the 4th Battalion, the Rifles (ex-Green Jackets, for those who aren’t keeping up..) was killed in Basra. Note the detail, though: Major Harding was killed by mortar fire onto the…
Read More News in Brief