Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don’t dumb me down I love Ben Goldacre’s pieces in the Grauniad. Here he summarises what he’s been doing in his Bad Science column for the last couple of years. Always entertaining and, curiously, reassuring – as one of the Humanities graduates he mentions in the article, I would otherwise… Continue reading Don’t dumb me down
Guardian Unlimited | Cartoons | 07.09.05: The Bush family and Hurricane KatrinaAs usual, Steve Bell gets to the point. This is after Barbara Bush’s brilliant insight that the people evacuated to Texas have actually been lucky: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is… Continue reading The Bush family and Hurricane Katrina
I’ve been tagged, from the film of the same name, to answer these questions. Here goes:1. Number of books I have owned: I really don’t know. In the room where I sit now, I estimate there are about 500 books. In the rest of the house posibly another 2000 or so. In my office, maybe… Continue reading Books
On Saturday, I browsed around a Liverpool bookshop. It’s a co-op, with a radical ethos, and “alternative” atmosphere. It has a table with a pile of petitions on it, and a very extensive Mind Body and Spirit section. You know the kind of thing. I was looking for a particular book in the fiction section,… Continue reading Wimmin Only
Guardian Unlimited | Life | One side can be wrong …and further to the musings on religious belief below, let’s not forget that the Reverend Dubya, currently failing to organise a piss-up in a brewery, is also keen on the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution in America’s allegedly religion-free schools. Richard Dawkins… Continue reading One side can be wrong
It’s difficult to believe the scenes we are witnessing on TV originate in the richest and most powerful country in the world. I noticed that at the time of declaring a state of emergency, the Louisiana governor advised the people to pray. Since that didn’t work, apparently, the anarchy is to be controlled by –… Continue reading New Orleans
dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator This handy tool should be on the desktop of all in management. It will provide an instant important sounding but meaningless phrase to chuck into a meeting. Promotion beckons for all who use it, I’m sure…
University of Bums on Seats – Welcome My boss sent me a link to this – she thought (rightly) I’d be amused. The trouble is, many of us who work in HE see this kind of thing as only marginally exaggerating current trends. There will come a point when this won’t look particularly like parody.
BBC NEWS | England | Northamptonshire | School gives pupils f-word limitAnother brilliant educational initiative. I wonder where they got 5 as the limit? Is there a sliding scale of punishment? If you use the offending word 15 times in a lesson, do you get twice the detention you would have got if you’d used… Continue reading The f word
We spent some time staying with friends in what I thought was Surrey this week- except that their local council has decided to call itself Elmbridge, presumably on the basis that it sounds nice, as there doesn’t actually seem to be a place called Elmbridge in the vicinity. But hey, why should that stop a… Continue reading Meaningless slogans once more