Blog posts

One of the things an impending wedding has led to is considerably more time in home outfitting shops of various sorts. I’ve found that impending need and/or possible means makes a visit to Ikea or Crate and Barrel considerably more attractive than they had been hitherto. But sometimes I need a break. And that’s what I thought I’d get as I visited the toilets in the Michigan Avenue Crate and Barrel yesterday, but it was not to be. The only item of note in the small room was an exceedingly mediocre still-life piece, of a set of bright red flowers. When we were studying art in school, we were always told that such things would get mediocre grades. They show technical proficiency (just about) but little idea of the expressiveness of art. ...

“Have a very, very happy birthday,” the woman in the United Airlines uniform said to me as she handed me the boarding card for my first experience of business class. It had been the airline staff member who checked me in who first commented on my impending celebration, and who triggered the idea to mention that later on and see if an upgrade was in order. Apparently so. In fact, it’s not been quite so pristine as it always looks when walking through trying to find the seat I’ve been allocated further back in the aircraft. The casing around my screen was slightly cracked, and the footrest is at just the wrong height for me to lie right back. But neither of those really detracts from being handed a glass of champagne before take-off, a constantly flowing supply of pinot blanc, or a seat that reclines without crushing at least one other passenger. ...

In between last minute travel insurance purchasing and filing forms to request a police certificate (policy bought, forms sent off) I’ve been trying to understand Conservative education spokesman Tim Yeo’s statement to the NUT conference yesterday. Historically, British state schools have had ‘catchment areas’ and first priority for entry to those schools goes to those who live within that area. There are some exceptions to that, such as for church-aided schools which are allowed to set their own admissions policies. But in general that’s how it stands, and Tim Yeo is quite right to note that this system is open to abuse as parents buy their way in to areas with well regarded schools. ...

I was very pleased to discover last night that select tracks from the new Pedro The Lion album (released in the US on April 27th) can be streamed from the album’s website. And Grassroots Music have a new interview with Over The Rhine. It’s not the best interview with them, but they always have something to say worth listening to. UPDATE: As per the always appreciated jp/p’s comment, the Pedro album is out on May 25th. Don’t believe everything you read on email lists (or blogs). ...

As cable giant Comcast seeks to buy out the Walt Disney Company and I try to work out if they’d be the best broadband provider for me, it’s a little disturbing to come across stories such as this one in the Philadelphia Inquirer alleging that Comcast are yet another major corporation engaging in union-busting activities. As a potential customer I thought I might email Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and tell him that I was a little concerned about this. But his email address seems a little hard to find. So too, for that matter, do any internal email addresses for senior staff at Comcast (these addresses are usually easy to infer once you have an example). The closest I have managed to come is to get the email addresses of some media contacts. They don’t advertise them on the website but have made the mistake of leaving them in the HTML code of this form. Sadly Brian Roberts doesn’t have an email address in the same format as his media relations staff. That email bounced. ...

A very brief entry for today. atu2.com have a great article from the Santa Cruz Sentinel: Rock of Ages: The Passion of Judas. Well worth a glance this Easter.

Friendster, one of the buzz sites on the web last summer, has taken a lot of flack of late. Analysts have (quite rightly) noted that the form of ‘social networking’ it represents is neither all that new, nor all that natural. For much of its existence, the internet has been a space which allowed social networking, whether that was through email listservs, usenet newsgroups, or more recently blogs and other websites. That’s nothing new. Similarly, the desire to make explicit the web of personal connections we each carry can be fun, but after a while such formalisation seems to remove something of the informality and spontaneity of friend-of-a-friend meetings. ...

A few comments on a variety of blogs over the past few days have reminded me of the confusion I felt when I was first exposed to conservative American views on trade unions. The snide side-swipes at trade union bosses’ salaries and the scant attention to the importance of trade unions to provide for collective bargaining and essential checks and balances seemed a strange balance to me. A little more exposure to history—particularly through John MacArthur’s ‘‘The Selling of Free Trade’—brought to my awareness the territorialism and related abuses which have stained the history of trade unionism, leaving the reasons a little more clear. Alongside that, headlines such as this one do show that there is some truth to the allegations about union bosses’ pay when some earn as much in a week as their average member does in a year. ...

One of my favourite stories to make its way round blogs yesterday was the news that: Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, lost a ballot initiative in Los Angeles County to build a retail complex after local officials said the development would decimate small businesses. (from Bloomberg.com’s coverage, picked up from Hugo’s blog) The news came a day after I had spent some time reading various articles about Wal-Mart as Kari and I put together a list of local amenities for those invited to our wedding, a list which also includes a couple of warnings. We decided that we’d link our recommendation that guests avoid Wal-Mart to Alternet’s article. ...

With the temporary laptop having arrived this morning, most of the day has been spent transferring files and installing software. As a result this entry’s ended up being a bit of a whistlestop tour. Last night, in an effort to share his love of Naomi Wolf, Steve Lawson pointed out this site about contemporary feminism. This article on Good Housekeeping magazine seems a good introduction. It’s rare that I actually get round to reading articles from Sojourners, but this article about Susan Pace Hamill, a campaigner for changes to the Alabama tax code rather struck me. Their interview with Bruce Cockburn is worth a glance (like most interviews with Bruce) ...