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WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?
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WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?

Want to know more about the place you were born, the town you grew up in, or the city you’ve just moved to? http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/index.jsp gives you a detailed look at the history of places in the uk. It&#8[…]

FT TOP 100 FILMS 11: CLUELESS
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FT TOP 100 FILMS
11: CLUELESS
Whodathunk that the highest paid alumnus from Clueless would be Brittany Murphy?
This plays in nicely to the pieces written about Mean Girls and Saved! over the last couple of days because Clueless is their loving parent[…]

Beyond Zone 7
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Beyond Zone 7: Beer in space – of course it has been tried. It would be stronger than earth beer according to drink scientists but you would need to drink it out of a plastic bag. This suggests to me that space beer is in fact Tennents Super.[…]

Nothing to see here…
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Nothing to see here…
…but Popular is, how you say, ‘back’. And it has something that Alan tells me I shouldn’t actually call a graph.[…]

Auguste Bartholdi
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Auguste Bartholdi
What’s the biggest gap between the fame of a sculpture and the obscurity of its creator? I can’t think that anything beats this man’s most famed work: the Statue of Liberty. (He created the original, and Gustave Ei[…]

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Internet Explorer Must Die
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Internet Explorer Must Die Part 2351
What’d’ya know? Mozilla.org seems busy today.
I find the fanaticism surrounding Firefox alarming and puzzling. According to BBC news, “Fans of the software have banded together to raise cash to p[…]

Pub Science
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Pub Science
This is the first in a (possible) series of experiments in thepubology. It has become clear that greater rigour may be necessary in our understanding of the pub.
Experiment #1: The Railway
The proposition which we will set out to test is[…]

Douglas Coupland – Eleanor Rigby
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Douglas Coupland – Eleanor Rigby
I always look forward to Douglas Coupland books.
In typical style, Eleanor Rigby is buzzing with ideas; Liz is a grown-up Coupland character (someone who would have received less sympathy in earlier novels). She[…]

How to tell a film is based on a book: 1: A Home At The End Of The World
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How to tell a film is based on a book:
1: A Home At The End Of The World
Lots of stuff happens. Very little of it makes any sense. The characters tend to be uncommunicative and quiet, you can tell there is shedloads of internal monologue going on in[…]

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge…]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.
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Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of th[…]

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  1. Yes, he’d been “…making this since FOUR—TEEN YEARS OF AGE”. As if this culmination of exquisite ingredients could ever let…