Japanese artist and jeweller Shinji Nakaba specialises in making tiny wearable sculptures. The pieces come in all shapes and sizes, but his most prolific series involves human and animal skulls carved from oyster pearls and attached to rings, necklaces and brooches.
This week I thought we’d have a wartime offering from the cartoonist Jon, famous for his “Two Types” — eccentric British Army Officers so often encountered in wartime.
They just do not get it, do they!
According to today’s news feeds (for example here from the BBC) Rebekah Brooks is to return as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper operations.
This is the woman who was acquitted (yes, OK, she was found not guilty) of phone hacking last year, having not known, or forgotten, large chucks of what was happening in her empire over a period of something like 10 years. Others were allowed to take the fall.
OK, I accept it is Murdoch’s right to appoint anyone he likes to his organisation (providing they fulfil the legal niceties). As Evan Harris of Hacked Off has observed (quoted in the Guardian a few days ago)
Mrs Brooks’s successful defence at trial was that she was such an incompetent executive that she was unaware of industrial-scale criminal wrongdoing in intercepting voicemails and bribing public officials, and unaware of the vast conspiracy to cover it up, despite her admitting to destroying millions of emails and putting the company’s reputation before cooperation with the police.
This doesn’t seem to be a very encouraging sign in one expected to lead an organisation — any organisation.
Moreover to me this also says much about the Murdoch empire’s total disregard for ethics and morality. As the shadow Culture Secretary and others have said (also in the Guardian) it sends a massive two fingers to the British public and, I suggest, a high-five to the wealthy and influential who seem to be able to can get away with almost anything they like.
However legal it is, they basically just do not seem to get how cynical this is.
The Bank of England is introducing plastic money. Specifically polymer banknotes. They start in the autumn of next year with a new £5 note, followed by a new £10 note in 2017. And, it has been announced today, a new £20 in 2020. Which will leave only the £50 note made from paper.
According to the Weird Universe website, quoting the Houston Chronicle of 12 August 2010 …
Playboy magazine has long published an audio edition, and the Library of Congress produces a text edition in Braille. However, as a Houston Chronicle reporter learned in August [2010], a Texas organization (Taping for the Blind) goes one step further, with volunteer reader Suzi Hanks actually describing the photographs — even the Playmates and other nudes. “I’d say if she has large breasts or small breasts, piercings or tattoos,” said Hanks. “I’ll describe her genitalia. I take my time describing the girls.” “Hey, blind guys like pretty, naked girls, too!”
Nick Catford
Burlington; The Central Government War Headquarters at Corsham
Folly Books; 2012
This is a large, coffee table-sized book full of photographs and maps of the now decommissioned and abandoned government bunker under north Wiltshire.
Nick Catford is one of the country’s most expert and specialist historians and investigators of underground Britain, and especially wartime/military and railway infrastructure, with several books to his credit. He is also an excellent photographer and a leading light in Subterranea Britannica (SubBrit). Which means he gets access to places most people wouldn’t and he’s absolutely the right man to write this book.
The first almost 50 pages provide a blow-by-blow history of the Corsham bunker from the mid-1930s through to it’s demise some 10 or so years ago, but majoring on its Cold War incarnations since the mid-1950s. The reminder of the 215 pages are filled with glossy photographs and charts of the layout of the various areas of the bunker, showing how each area would have been allocated and the now abandoned state of the site — complete with stored hardware, furniture, etc.
Oh dear, dear.
From 5 October retailers in England are required by law to charge 5p each for single use plastic carrier bag. Except when they don’t.
It’s all well and good, and very laudable, in theory. But as with all legislation the devil is in the detail.
For lots of reasons this week and next we’ll be taking our weekly photographs from the archive. First off here’s one from almost exactly five years ago. Eeek! Is it really that long? It seems like only a few weeks ago.
