Sunday, October 31, 2004

Holden Caulfield

Salinger's creation is aging gracelessly.
washingtonpost.com

Thursday, October 21, 2004

DHL in Baghdad

The courier company sets up in Iraq. A fascinating story from the Telegraph.

A Day Off?

...Sheeit
The Onion

Overland through Asia

Project Gutenberg eBook: Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar Life, by Thomas Wallace Knox

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Media Center Extender For Xbox

www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/devices/xboxextenderkit.mspx

Midwest Awash in Giant Grottos

Halo2

Halo 2 smashes records already.
BBC

Strategic Central Asia

The secretary general of Nato is touring Central Asia in a sign of the region's growing importance since US troops went into Afghanistan in 2001.

BBC

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Patrick French in Kerala

Interview from early 2003 with the Younghusband author who is currently living in Kerala working on a biography of V S Naipaul.

Nice work if you can get it.

The Week

Notorious Indian bandit shot dead

Killed first elephant aged 14
Accused of smuggling ivory worth $2.6m and sandalwood worth $22m
Escaped from behind the bars in 1986 by killing four policemen and an unarmed forest official in their sleep
Operated mainly in the forests bordering states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu


BBC

Dreams of Empire

A round up review of books addressing the idea of an American empire from The New York Review of Books .


Google 'saved' Australian hostage

An Australian journalist kidnapped in Iraq was freed after his captors checked the popular internet search engine Google to confirm his identity.
BBC
LRB | John Lanchester : Mao meets Oakeshott

Edinbugh and the Enlightenment

On January 8, 1697, at some time between two and four in the afternoon, an eighteen-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh. Aikenhead had been found guilty of a serious charge: the previous year he had several times told other young men that the doctrines of Christian theology were 'a rapsodie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense.'
The New Yorker
gladwell dot com / The Ketchup Conundrum
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Robbie album sold on memory card
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Robbie album sold on memory card

Friday, October 15, 2004

BBC NEWS | World | Muslim world celebrates Ramadan: "And in Pakistan it was hoped that the holy month would end recent violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims in which more than 70 people have died."
The Spectator.co.uk: "The state can?t set you free
Roger Scruton on how the Human Rights Act threatens the ancient liberties of the British people "
Harry Shearer

Monday, October 04, 2004

The usual suspects by David Pryce-Jones: "The Soviet Union is no more, and to a whole new generation it already seems unreal, preposterous, some sort of practical joke that the Russians played on themselves and the rest of the world."
Johann Hari - Archive: "Our victory is assured - so we can afford to be very scrupulous in our methods.'" Interview with Christopher Hitchens.

Friday, October 01, 2004

The Spectator.co.uk: "FISH, FLESH AND GOOD RED HERRING: A GALLIMAUFRY"
The Spectator.co.uk: "In Professor Furedi?s view, the relentless drive to ?inclusiveness? in institutions such as universities and museums arises from the loss of the traditional cultural elite?s belief in its philosophical right or duty to remain an elite, coupled with a desire nevertheless to do so. Populism is the means of squaring this particular circle: while the elite maintains its hold on the levers of power, it pretends that it is in the process of delivering power to the people, by means of flattery of the banal, the ordinary, the stupid, the easily grasped. In the process, of course, culture itself suffers. It becomes trivial, undemanding and, above all, unimportant. "
The Spectator.co.uk: "Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he?d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers.

On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he?d bought The Dummy?s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ?We have some suggestions for you!? box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration. "

Mark Steyn
The Cult of Che - Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. By Paul Berman

Top Net Hub

Britain is now home to the internet's biggest data hub.
In total more than 55 gigabits per second of data are regularly passing through the London Internet Exchange

BBC