There’s … some commercial farming, although Londoners do largely import their food, with an increasing number of community growing schemes and an established network of 30,000 allotments. South London has an underground farm in an old bomb shelter, and an edible bus-stop.
Another from the archives this week. I’m horrified at how long it is since we were in Axmouth, Devon. This is a shot of their delightful churchyard, just across the Axe estuary from Seaton. And I remember having some gorgeous Dover Sole for lunch in the pub.
This is such a wonderful picture! The Rolling Stones at the Adelaide Oval preparatory to recommending their Australian tour. Just which geriatrics home have they been let out of for the day?
While we’re on about politicians, George Monbiot had another side-swipe on Tuesday 21 October in his Guardian column: ‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings.
Basically he’s on about the euphemisms that politicians, governments, and indeed companies, use to disguise — from themselves and (they think) us — the horrors of what they get up to. For example:
The [Dept of Work & Pensions can talk of] using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”
Hills, forests and rivers are described … as “green infrastructure”
Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”.
Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians … in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”.
People, aka. human beings, can be referred to as “personnel targets”. And then there are the old favourites: “neutralising”, collateral damage” and “extraordinary rendition”.
Dictatorships, and those wishing to conceal what they’re up to have always spoken thus: for example look at Communist Russia and Communist China.
Gawdelpus!
This article from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian on 17 October takes a swipe at politicians’ panic over Ebola — a classic case of the politics of fear.
But in amongst it all he has another couple of telling comments.
… air travel which, in the digital age, is almost all non-essential …
Ah, someone else has woken up to this! It’s time business and politicians did too and realised they can operate just as efficiently and more productively using electronic communication, teleconferences etc. and not flying people around the world. Hey look! Even Joe Public uses Skype!
Oh and no, holidays in the Maldives, Morocco or Thailand are NOT essential either!
The political scientist Louise Richardson wrote in “What Terrorists Want” that it is precisely what western politicians seem happiest to give them: they want to make us fear them. “By declaring war on terror,” she says, “far from denying al-Qaida its objectives we are conceding its objectives. That is why a war on terror can never be won.” It is a terminological admission of defeat.
Yes! Something else I keep saying. Stop giving the “terrorists” the oxygen of publicity. Stop splashing every threat, murder, bombing all over the front pages f every newspaper and news bulletin. All you’re doing is giving them publicity, which is precisely what they need.
No, I’m not saying shut our eyes to what they’re doing and/or don’t report it. Just make it low key, as in “In other news …”.
And finally …
A democracy must know what it should fear … [but] … Freedom from fear is a human right. We pay politicians to guard us from terror by not terrifying us.
Jenkins’s article is worth a read.
We are further away in time from Sid Vicious’s 1977 Sex Pistols than they were from the end of World War 2.
This week’s photograph is another from our recent trip to Norwich. Somehow that day we were running slightly ahead of schedule and we had 20 minutes to kill before Sunday lunch. So in true style we set off to find Bawburgh village church.
More links to interesting articles you may have missed.
Have you ever wondered how glow sticks work? Well wonder no more because here’s the explanation. I love those aromatic dye molecules; they’re similar to the ones I used when I was a post-grad student.
So chemicals are bad then? Well not so much. Five myths about the chemicals.
Want to avoid getting cancer? The Cancer Code provides a 12 point guide to avoiding unnecessary risk.
OK so let’s have something a bit more light-hearted …
There’s an interesting new resource from the BBC … the BBC Genome project.
It contains the listings information (TV and radio) which the BBC printed in Radio Times between 1923 and 2009 … and you can search the site for BBC programmes, people, dates and specific Radio Times editions.
That means you can find when a particular programme was broadcast, who appeared in a particular episode of your favourite comedy series and even what was being broadcast the minute you were born.
Now this latter I find sort of scary. Having been born in another century and on a different planet — ie. before we had 24 hour, wall-to-wall TV — I was totally unsure what I’d find being broadcast when I appeared.
