Ace British social parody

9/5/2009 I haven't been able to watch the youtube version since late August, BBC enforcing its copyright by pulling the video has put another hole in the cultural subconsciousness

Even more compound nouns

German language adds 5,000 words

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock.

Turkey, the paragon of ethnic relations, finally opens to admissions of genocide... in another country.

As well.... Turkish TV shows coup d’etat in Honduras, including scenes of the Honduras military confronting Honduran protesters, as well as the Honduran president-in-exile’s airplane and its attempt to land in the capitol and pass them off completely as footage of race riots in China.

Tax Havens

Terribly funny

Then you have the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – KPMG, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte – whose expertise is indispensable for anyone hoping to diminish their tax exposure. Writing in an Irish magazine, a KPMG partner spelled out the mindset:

A worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way . . . Let’s be clear about this. Tax is a cost to business. As with any other cost, the board members owe their shareholders a duty to manage that cost by the legal means afforded to them.

KPMG gave us a sense of its attitude to legality when it paid a fine of $456m in the US for ‘designing, marketing and implementing illegal tax shelters’. The big four have now set up a body to regulate themselves called the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Not only do the accountancy firms appoint representatives to the IASB’s committees, they actually fund it themselves – through a foundation registered in a tax haven.

Trine

Anyone want to play co-op?

Silent Hill Origins: O.R.T.

Dwarf Fortress

Doing some reading on the DX

Got my Kindle DX. The form fact is perfect, but it feels a bit heavy.

PDF support is a bit botched. You can't zoom in on the PDFs, only rotate them to enlarge the text.

A very neat touch. When the device goes to sleep/turned off, a screensaver goes up with a picture and name of a great author.

Written out of Revenge

Written out of Revenge

Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death. Not that theirs was a tempestuous relationship in the usual sense. There were occasional scenes and some quarrels, but not, apparently, many. The struggle was between two complex and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.

Let's Talk about 6-4

The tide of cultural war must be turned and equilibrium must be re-established so that we can look at the present with a fresh set of eyes.

West miscasts Tiananmen protesters

To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist.

Such arguments may seem arcane two decades later. But, in my view, they are keenly relevant. The styling of Tiananmen as a pro-democracy movement helped to miscast the west’s narrative on China’s past and future.

Not Everything is About Democracy

The Banks

It's Finished

In September 2008, the Big Four bank Lloyds bought HBOS, after its boss, Victor Blank – this is the part you couldn’t make up – bumped into Gordon Brown at a drinks party and got him to give an assurance that a takeover would not be referred to the monopolies commission.

Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of I’ve-always-fancied-you-isn’t-it-time-we-did-something-about-it, but let’s take comfort in the following truth: none of us has ever done anything as embarrassing as buying HBOS.

Summer 78 (instrumental)

Sloppy journalism

I Think You Forgot to Mention Tiananmen…

"So why did The Austrialian insist on peppering their story with a hearty dose of Tiananmen when it wasn’t necessary (the China Digital Times was able to report the same story without resorting to such misleading comparisons)? Well, Tiananmen attracts readers because it’s something they know, or think they know. It’s exciting, violent, and lets most Westerners bask in a glow of superiority, shaking their heads as they read and wondering when the Chinese people will “wake up” and overthrown the brutal CCP."

Rearrangement

The past two years have been good. Friends were made and regrets shared. Memories deconstructed and the truth of the moment recovered...

Much of how we think of ourselves depends on the mood that we are in, and what we choose to write depends a lot on who reads and who we wish would read what we write.

Recently I thought about how the blog needs to change, one thing that I wanted for sure is that some sort of maintenance. That particular thought didn't change much regardless of what and how I felt in the span of the past couple of months.

And so it has been done! the tags rearranged, the more egregiously bad grammar corrected. Posts that had lived beyond their purpose have been archived.

High finance in the Islamic world

Two in a series.

The Money that Prays
Islam and the Armies of Mammon

The Legacy of Kain

I just got around to reading Jenny Turner's humorous self-conscious reflection on Twilight. What happened all of a sudden to vampire protagonists who are bitter and selfish anti-heroes? In other words those who have style, and nothing like their ersatz contemporary brethren?

The archetypal vampire I had in mind is Kain in the first Blood Omen.



"And so I left, cold of heart and soul. Forced to the road and the long, bitter night."

http://www.nosgoth.net/Blood_Omen/dialogue/page1.htm

"Mais c'est étrange. Le soleil et la mort, voyagent ensemble..."

EVE Online - It Ends Here

The endless horizons and cold beauty of space.

Eileen Chang's fractured legacy

Might as well catch up on some reading since there is no work today.

Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng

The question I had after reading the article is what are the agendas of contemporary non-mainland Chinese writers anyway? (Other than unconsciously going around parading fatalism as a 'universal insight')

Water in the car

There is water in my car... fantastic! I always wanted one of those flash floods...