links for 2008-08-30
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PLANS to bestow sainthood on one of the most influential Catholics in English history, Cardinal John Newman, have triggered an unholy row over claims that he was gay. (The Australian, 30 Aug)
Beached As
Kiwis do talk funny. The top story on the NZ version of Sky News the other day was “Our most sook-cess-fuul olumpucks in sucksteen years, bro”. OK, I added the “bro” but the rest is true!
Thanks Bill
Orwell was a blogger
George Orwell’s diaries are being published in blog form, exactly 70 years after he wrote them.
The New York Times has a story about the project:
“I think he would have been a blogger,” said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize and thought up the idea of the blog.
[…]
“The diary isn’t Orwell at his most polemic; it is Orwell at his most steady, most observant,” Professor Seaton said.
Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.”
Sydney
Sydney smells of cheap perfume and stale urine. Presumably the perfume is meant to mask the small of the piss.
At one end of Brisbane St there’s a man counting a huge wad of $100 notes. At the other end of Brisbane St there’s a man in a business suit sitting in the gutter, taking off his socks.
The footpaths in Sydney are made of used chewing-gum.
Hotel room v. nice, weather fine. Wish you were here.
Foggy morning
This is where I live. And this is why I live here.
(Click to enlarge)
Update: some more photos from this morning in the gallery.
Kookaburra
Merry merry king of the bush is he!
Giles Coren and the subs
This correspondence between UK write Giles Coren and the subeditors at the Sunday Times is quite possibly the funniest thing you will read today.
