It’s the 10th anniversary of that squib of a musical revolution, Britpop. The Guardian has an interview with some of the players from the time and it includes this rather precious exchange:”The underbelly of it was all quite sinister to me, despite how it might have seemed on the outside – champagne with Tony Blair […]

If you live in Ireland or Britain and are planning your TV viewing this evening, I recommend that rather than looking at Ricky Gervais’s rather flat Extras, you catch ex-CIA Robert Baer’s programme The Cult of the Suicide Bomber on Channel 4. Last week’s programme lucidly explained how suicide bombing evolved during the Israeli occupation […]

In keeping with my less-than-frenetic pace of blogging during the summer months (I have a life, you know), I’m just getting around to drawing your attention to an interesting piece in last Sunday’s New York Times on “The Xbox Auteurs“.The article describes how a bunch of call-center employees, who also happen to be Halo fanatics, […]

Soon after the fall of Baghdad or maybe it was around the time President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the banner “Mission Accomplished” looming over the flight deck, I listened to a BBC World Service progamme on the state of the World after the Second Gulf War. Although the commentators were divided […]

According to her op-ed piece in the Guardian, Lionel Shriver–author of We Need To Talk About Kevin (see interview in ThreeMonkeysOnline)–lived in Belfast for 12 years. She uses this background as a platform for her views on the “stupidity of the Troubles.” She makes some reasonable if not massively original points–for example, Irish people like […]

Remember �disintermediation�? It was a polysyllabic buzzword much beloved by Internet gurus during the height of the dot.com bubble. It basically meant cutting out the middle man, those retailers, agents, and, well, intermediaries that stood between the customer and the product they wanted. It was clear what disintermediation could deliver�the �Information superhighway� would pave over […]

Much as I inexplicably loath the entire Harry Potter phenomenon, I think the actions of this guy are a little excessive. Indeed, in some ways his behavior is as anorakish as those he annoys the hell out of.Link via the cornucopia that is blogdex.

To busy/lazy to provide the usual verbosity. Instead, I merely offer a link to a document that will be/should be discussed a lot over the next few days: The Iraq Body Count’s “A Dossier of Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003�2005.”It contains the following disturbing breakdown of responsibility for civilian deaths, numbering around 24,865 and counting:* […]

In the wake of the London bombings, I’ve been wondering why the “respectable” political class (i.e. MPs who are not George Galloway) has been so emphatic about the absence of any link between terrorism in Britain and the invasion/liberation (tick according to your credo) of Iraq. If the Labour Government is certain of the righteousness […]

I’ve been meaning to giving a nod to this entertaining article in LA Weekly describing Michel Houellebecq’s alcohol-fuelled sojourn in southern California. Among other things, it reveals that: “Perhaps There Is an Island, Houellebecq�s forthcoming novel about cloning, will be published in France at the end of the summer. […] de Brunhof [a literary agent […]