Bush`s favourite picture

And an explanation here.

Music

Rap superstar 50 Cent and Jimmy Shand mashed up by someone cheeky.

An old documentary on spin

Click on the video and you can make it a bigger image in Youtube.

The Northern Rock problem

It seems there is a bit of a problem with Northern Rock, the bank that sponsors that other great and discredited north eastern institution Newcastle United. The solution is so blindingly obvious that it amazes me that no one has thought of it before me: put Kevin Keegan in charge.



While they are at it they might put the whole of the UK mortgage sector in the hands of the Messiah.

Techno Victoriana

The Japanese are in on this steampunk thing. Keep up!

The steampunk raptop
The steampunk desktop

Funny. Some of the delight in mechanical detail reminds me of a book I read about the Mavo artists in early 20th Century Tokyo. They often used mechanical environments and aggressive abstract shapes suggestive of riveted steel. But they were very different, the exact opposite in fact: they were all about the future - ripping apart the past and present to smash themselves into futurist reality in which man and mechanism could be reconciled.

Now, it seems, those unsettling industrial and mechanical objects and environments have become reassuring. Steampunk has its roots in long established tendencies in science fiction, comics and anime films but I think the mechanisms it fetishises definitely have a partly nostalgic appeal. This attraction seems oddly connected with neo-Arts and Crafts yearnings like this. Strange really: the mechanisation and industrialism that worried the Arts and Crafters has become part of the same sort of alienated yearning for something solid and meaningful in the past. As Arts and Crafts showed, nostalgia like this can be very fertile soil for creativity. As fertile as futurism?



Okada Tatsuo in the "Gate and Moving Ticket-Selling Machine", 1925
from "Mavo" by Gennifer Weisenfeld

Queen Elizabeth

Ah, the Royal Yacht Britannia may have reached the end of her sailing days and the QE2 be nearing her dotage, but another legendary royal ship still sails! The "Queen Elizabeth", a Japanese love hotel, rises majestically beside the motorway leading from the Shonan coast to Yokohama. It made me swell with patriotic pride just to see her. Must go there one day for a monarchical bonk.

A scary thought ... for me anyway

Democrat party candidate - Ron Paul on an independent ticket = President Neo Con

Union leakage

Earlier this week a Labour MP called for the Union flag to be redesigned to include the Welsh. Well, the Japanese internet chatroom 2Channel (a phenomenon in itself) has come to the aid of the cause. The music adds to it.

The Real News Network

The Real News Network is an interesting project to create an international English-language television network which is funded by its viewers, instead of by advertising. I should add, from a British perspective, that it obviously also not licence fee funded.

I think this is important because it allows a much more sharp edged and analytical coverage of world news. I think we need more than the bland consensual broadcast news of the type that comes, in different ways, with advertising and the licence fee. The problems electorates are confronting will not be addressed by uncritical understandings of the world.

I think projects like this are likely to proliferate as the internet and TV merge. Of course, I will disagree with many of the services that will spring up and there is a risk of Balkanisation. But, anyway, it is nice that one of the first in this line is so gloriously radical and right up my street.

The trailer:



The reports:









Although, I have to say, on that last one, that the tenor of the report shares the same inability to interact in a respectful way with Muslim countries that seems to bedevil us. The assumption seems to be that we must make countries "secular" or face disaster. I think, by trying to make countries "secular", we are inviting disaster.

Scalded lawn

Mum and Dad didn't often ask me to do the lawn. Perhaps it was the terrible scalded bald patches my mower runs left all over their lush grass.

Anyway, I invested in some hair clippers this weekend. Due to retreating Barnet issues, I decided recently to revert to a more buzz cut look. I was quite pleased with what the barber produced but it occurred to me that there was no point in paying a pro to buzz cut when I could buzz away with my own set of cheap clippers.

Yesterday, I got buzzing. Can't say there are no scalded patches at all. The bit where I forgot to put the length cover on the razor and just buzzed straight into one of my more follicle free regions was particularly unfortunate. However, from some angles in some lights, you could hardly tell the difference!

No illustrations.

The academic job market

My wife is an academic and that has given my the dubious privilege of getting acquainted with the academic job market. It is absolutely appalling. Even my own field of journalism, with its spectacularly discriminatory hiring practices, is a paragon of fairness by comparison.

In the Japanese academic job market, things are very bad indeed. They like to hire well connected young things through gerontocratic patronage networks based around old school ties. Jobs are often not advertised and people will just appear in tenured positions without anybody even knowing the position was up for grabs. There is also a general practice of not hiring people to permanent jobs if they are over a certain age. Of course, this means those who are not in the patronage networks can never get a job and that women (who have babies, don't you know?) and people from non-privileged backgrounds who take round about routes through their educations are being excluded. Japanese academia is corrupted and cheapened by these practices.

But it isn't only Japan. I have written a couple of articles about racism and ageism in British academia. The ageism thing is particularly pernicious because it acts as a proxy for all sorts of other discrimination. It is still common to have research grants that limit their applicants to, say, being under 30, with was really only relevant to past age when everybody was a Bryll creamed young chap straight up from Oxford with spiffing references from old Toady. Of course, if you don't get research grants, you don't get up the ladder and never even reach the job interview stage.

None of this would matter if there weren't thousands of people trying to get by in the highly casualised and exploitative work environment of non-tenured academia. A majority of people don't get proper jobs until their late 30s. Many are still knocking on the door long past that age. They are often paid poorly, don't have pensions etc. and have no job security. It is almost impossible to do small things that people in other lines of work take for granted. For instance, buying a house.

Until today, however, I had no idea that academia, when it really tries, can get so much more discriminatory:

Hooray for the Mississippi State University for the "oddest job ad of the season".

(My wife, by the way, seems to be one of the lucky ones but is no more impressed by the situation than I am. A lot of academics hate it.)

True Iraq death toll

Suicide epidemic among US`s Iraq forces.

The origins of Hip Hop

From Danwei.