Unknown Pleasures in icing

Every slice a veritable division of joy (via dangerous minds)

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects.

A poor man’s connoisseur guide to happy living in one of the most expensive cities in the world

This is the best idea for a travel book since Daisann McLean’s Cheap Hotels.

Apparently, it is the first book in a series of city guides created by Norwegian graphic designers Your Friends, in collaboration with Sondre Sommerfelt, writer and editor and Knut Bry, photographer.

I agree with Edward Daly. What Northern Ireland needs is a Truth and Reconcillation commission. South Africa had one and is now enjoying the fruits of hosting the World Cup.

“In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Citation

Oxford montage

And yet, although the people shouting about the Murdocracy are wrong about the present, they may be right about the future. For all the fine journalism it produces, News International is like a mafia family that has gone legit. Most of its business is respectable, but it retains the option of turning nasty to get its way.

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3083/full

Reading the Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet

I have just started The Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet, David Mitchell’s latest novel. It revolves around the man-made island of Dejima built by the Japanese in Nagasaki bay for Dutch traders, during the country’s prolonged period of cultural isolation between 1639 and 1856.

Here’s a rather charming scene of a Dutch dinner party from the period painted by Kawahara Keiga. Note the hook noses of the “southern barbarians” dining greedily on wine and huge plates of meat, their complexions as pale as porcelain. Notice also the Batavian servant in the background, beturbuned and barefoot and bringing a rather limp cut of meat to the table. It’s a fascinating period and a (so far) fascinating book

Two privately educated white male millionaires stepped through the door of Downing Street this morning to usher in an era of new politics – if that’s new politics, I preferred the old style.

http://www.northumbrian.org.uk/leaving-the-liberal-democrats/

This isn’t the internet election we were all expecting. It is the rolling news election. It rolls on and on and on. #GE10 #hungparliament

Just downloaded the delicious extension for google chrome. Last rights for firefox?

Billy Bragg: “A fairer voting system may be at hand, if Nick Clegg holds his nerve and makes PR the price for any coalition. That’s why hundreds of us donned the colour purple on Saturday and marched through the streets of London to demand that the Lib Dems deliver on their historic commitment to a fairer voting system. The Purple People come from many parties and none, all of us determined to make everyone’s vote count for something at the next election. Why purple? Because it is the colour of universal suffrage, used by Chartists and suffragettes when they campaigned to extend the franchise.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/10/electoral-reform-purple-person

Simon Cowell, empirical philosopher John Locke, Page 3 girls – and the election: all in one story: http://gu.com/p/2gn77/tw

Salt’s Mill, Saltaire

New blog post: Just back from a weekend in Yorkshire where we took Darling Anna and baby button to see Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, near Bradford. Famous for its David Hockney gallery, I had feared that, like rain on sandstone, the years since my last visit might have eroded the mill’s artistic vision. Not a bit of it. Salt’s Mill remains just as good as any gallery in the country.

Good old Vince Cable: “I just find it utterly nauseating all these chairmen and chief executives of FTSE companies being paid 100 times the pay of their average employees lecturing us on how we should run the country. I find it barefaced cheek.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/09/vince-cable-business-national-insurance

The sun sets over the Severn

Here’s the view of my walk home from work and my first photomontage. Not quite David Hockney, I know.