Jolly good, wot! Anyone for tennis? That'll be ten ponies, guv. You're the epitome of everything that is english. Yey :) Hoist that Union Jack!

How British are you?

this quiz was made by alanna

posted by James Russell | 6:39 PM

American city prepares to triple in size.

posted by James Russell | 5:29 PM

Thou shalt not make sarcastic references to the Taliban.

posted by James Russell | 5:23 PM

Seattle still doesn't love Jimi Hendrix.

posted by James Russell | 5:13 PM

Yahoo censured over offensively gay TV ad. Meanwhile, me wonders how I came to have a string of gay-themed posts in a row like that...

posted by James Russell | 5:11 PM

The secret court of Harvard.

What began in 1920 as an inquiry into a student's suicide ended in Harvard University convening a secret tribunal that labeled 14 men "guilty" of being homosexual, and forcing the students among them to leave not only the school, but the city of Cambridge.
The history of the body known only as "The Court" remained hidden for more than eight decades. Then, this year, a student reporter searching the school's archive came across a file labeled "secret court".
The pages that file contained, first reported in a recent edition of the Harvard Crimson's magazine, describe Harvard's desperate attempts 80 years ago to hide from public view a secret gay subculture on campus.

posted by James Russell | 5:09 PM

For some reason Benjamin Britten's gayness continues to pose problems for people.

Critics and scholars squabbled over Britten's worth throughout his lifetime, but they all assumed that art was beyond sex. Within a year of his death in 1976, however, a tense debate about the artistic implications of Britten's love of men and boys had begun.
A quarter-century later, Britten resembles Patroclus in The Iliad: He's the body in the middle of the field that everyone's fighting over. As of now, the advantage seems to have passed to gay and lesbian scholars who see Britten as perhaps the most important figure in the gay history of classical music.

Of course, if you believe some people, that would probably include most classical composers who ever lived...

posted by James Russell | 4:54 PM

The new Christian rock.

Tonight is Dallas, Texas. Delirious? are playing the 7,000-seat basketball stadium at SMU, also known as Southern Methodist University - their 60th American concert of the year. Radio 1 won't air their music, they have almost no profile in the British media, but in the past 12 months they have played live to one million people in 10 different countries and sold two million albums. [...]
Delirious? are the leading British exponents of the new Christian rock, a hard-working, ambitious band on the rise, usually able to sell out 5,000- to 10,000-seat arenas in America.
Earlier this year they headlined a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania with 80,000 people in the audience, their biggest gig to date. Last time they played Dallas, they drew a crowd of 10,000 under their own name. 'We must have been crap,' says Jon Thatcher, because tonight the stadium is three-quarters empty.
Later they find out the reason for the poor turn-out: the Billy Graham evangelical crusade is in town and has siphoned away most of their fans. [...]
Delirious? have sold out Wembley Stadium, for example, with virtually no radio airplay or media hype. Their singles usually reach the lower end of the Top 20, and all three of their albums made it into the Top 40, but this undervalues their true popularity in Britain. None of their sales through bookshops and mail order - which constitute the majority - counts towards their placing in the pop charts.

posted by James Russell | 4:49 PM

Man convicted of attempted rape of non-existent child.

posted by James Russell | 4:28 PM

I had a feeling I'd regret doing this, and normally I can't stand people making trainwrecks of themselves, but couldn't resist... as a follow-up to the post about the almighty storm in a teacup over at the Greatest Jeneration, here's the latest. That "thought crime" post? Here's what's left of it:

[I deleted this post--doesn't happen often!--due to ennui, nausea and a sudden onset of maturity and perspective!
I could give a rat's *ss about delinking!
To quote the dialogue from Ed Wood's epic film "Plan 9 from Outer Space": "Stupid, stupid, stupid!"--J.T.]

Here Jen demonstrates the effects of her enlightenment:

But those blogtrolls were RIGHT! Who knew? I *don't* want Leftist Liberal invective, vitriol and verbal abuse disguised as "feedback!"
I don't want to hear The Other Side®D.N.C.!
I'm not even really interested in the "Centrist" Middle and if you're smart, you won't be either.
I don't care if you call yourself a "Conservative" Dimocrat or a "Liberal" Republican: I call you an IDIOT.
Take it outside and don't come back!
So, I nuked the Comments section! Whoo-Hoo!! This could be *too* fun!
You'll have to email me if you have something to say about the blog and if you're nice, I'll email you back (more likely than not)!
Have a nice day and don't forget to vote G.O.P.--We're bigots. We're intolerant.
And they don't call us the Right for nothing!

Maturity, perspective and stupid stupid stupid all right...

posted by James Russell | 4:21 PM

Rob Corr unearths an Australian blog I hadn't previously encountered. Another one for the blogroll, perhaps...

posted by James Russell | 4:10 PM

Ken Parish delivers a serve to Tim Blair. Ken's post is based on this typically hysterical screed against Phillip Adams from Tim, and it's a good one. Sample:

By "hand[ing] him a portion of their wages", I presume Blair is referring to the fabled 6 cents per day each taxpayer is said to contribute to the ABC. So what is Blair actually saying here? That Adams should work for nothing because he's "rich"?  That the "rich" have no right to express opinions, or to have them taken seriously? A strange attitude for a self-styled conservative and believer in free-market economics. Or is it only rich lefties who have no right to express an opinion, and only rich conservatives who should be paid for their labour?
Moreover, how big a portion of the wages of the poor? Well, from memory, the ABC's annual budget is around $60 million. Adam's salary represents 0.2% of the ABC's budget. So if that 6 cents per day figure is an accurate estimate of the average taxpayer's contribution to the ABC, each of us pays 0.0012 cents per day towards Phillip Adams' salary. Do you feel suitably outraged?
Is he also implying that the ABC should be abolished (so we no longer hand "a portion" of our wages to its greedy employees), leaving us all to the benevolent, public-spirited media offerings of Kerry Packer and Blair's boss Rupert Murdoch? That would at least be more consistent with standard conservative thinking. However, if that's what Blair means, why doesn't he just come out and say so, instead of slyly suggesting that Adams is somehow bludging on the taxpayers by daring to accept a salary?

UPDATE: Tim Blair has descended to actually take part in a discussion outside of his blog for once. You'll find his answers in Ken's comments.

posted by James Russell | 4:00 PM

George Harrison's will made public, with some surprises attached.

Former Beatle George Harrison did not leave a penny to the Hare Krishnas or any other charity in his £99 million ($A274 million) will, which was made public on Friday.
At the time of his death from cancer a year ago, it was reported that he had left about £20 million to the faith he embraced in the 1960s.
However, his will reveals that he left all his estate in Britain to the benefit of his wife Olivia, 54, and then to his son Dhani, 25.

posted by James Russell | 3:40 PM

Member of New York's finest suspended for not arresting homeless bum.

posted by James Russell | 3:37 PM

Minister: keep Christ in Christmas too, eh?

Federal Multicultural Affairs Minister Gary Hardgrave yesterday urged department stores to incorporate nativity scenes in their Christmas window decorations to keep Christ involved in the celebration, echoing the sentiments of Prime Minister John Howard, who on Friday also slammed political correctness.
Some Victorian kindergartens and child-care centres have banned Father Christmas, replacing him with figures such as clowns to avoid offending minority groups.

Ask the kids who they want and I reckon they'll take Santa. Jesus doesn't bring them presents, after all...

posted by James Russell | 3:35 PM

Are US troops packing enough protection?

As the Pentagon girds for possible military action against Iraq, it is having problems providing US troops with state-of-the-art protective gear against chemical and biological attacks, representatives of both parties said last week.
Their worries have been buttressed by the General Accounting Office, which recently reported "continuing concerns" about equipment, training and research. The office said that for six years, "we have identified many problems in the Defence Department's capabilities to defend against chemical and biological weapons and sustain operations in the midst of their use".
The chairman of the Government Reform Committee's National Security Subcommittee, Christopher Shays, said the latest problem Pentagon officials uncovered involved gas masks that had the wrong gaskets and would require extensive inspections to ensure they were functioning properly.
Mr Shays said he was also concerned about the Defence Department's inability to manage millions of protective suits so that units likely to deploy to the Persian Gulf received the highest-quality gear, with 250,000 defective suits unaccounted for in the Pentagon inventory.

I think the Pentagon needs to talk to Michael Jackson. After all, those veils his kids wear are supposed to magically protect them from kidnappers, so he could probably give them tips...

posted by James Russell | 3:31 PM

Michelangelo: refuting the myth of the poor starving artist?

Michelangelo, the Renaissance artist and sculptor renowned for his stinginess, was much richer than his rivals and may have been one of the wealthiest artists in history, according to a new book by an American academic.
During a long career, which produced icons of Western art such as the statue of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, Michelangelo accumulated a fortune which would be worth more than $US46 million ($A90 million) today.
The estimate has been calculated by Rab Hatfield, a professor of art history at the University of Syracuse in Florence, who published The Wealth of Michelangelo (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura) after stumbling across two previously unknown bank accounts belonging to the artist. The discovery enabled Professor Hatfield to track Michelangelo's expenditure on products such as marble and wine and the income he received from his patrons.

posted by James Russell | 3:27 PM

I don't suppose anyone's too surprised by this.

posted by James Russell | 3:24 PM

Hello to everyone who's been visiting from Doc Searls' weblog, according to my counter stats there's been rather a lot of you. I'm just a little mystified by the linking comment itself, though...

Metafilter says metaphors can blow up in your face.
Blogs too, perhaps. Let's give it up for Hot Buttered Death.

Having read the Metafilter thread he also links to, I'm not exactly sure how to take that...

posted by James Russell | 12:38 PM