Attention corporate polluters

Use Green Force laundry powder for those tough green washing problems.

Office with a view

The view from my desk. Looking at this sure beats staring at the screen.

An ignoble pursuit

I can no longer bring myself to read about the current financial crisis and the various attempts to bail out banks and prop up capitalism yet again, but amongst the saturation media coverage (only seven pages in the main news section of today's paper) I came across this in today's Guardian...

"The boss of a successful US hedge fund has quit the industry with an extraordinary farewell letter dismissing his rivals as over-privileged "idiots" and thanking "stupid" traders for making him rich."
read on

Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions

Here's a link to a speech by the writer David Foster Wallace, who died recently, reflecting on the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head'. Up till now I have never read anything by Wallace, but having read this I plan to.

Sadly, Wallace did suicide.

But beautiful

I’ve just finished reading Geoff Dyer’s ‘But beautiful’ and kept thinking about this amazing pic as I read.

Guy Rundle: View from the underside

Every year, there are two stories that make an appearance in the wacky news columns of the papers. The first is of the proverbial British family, emigrating to Australia, imagining it to be some suburban-bush mix of Skippy and Neighbours. Arriving in the boiling canyons of Sydney, driving through Chinatown and decaying inner city warehouses, they take one look at the reality of their colonial vanilla dream and get on the first plane home. The other story is slightly different. It’s of the Australian couple who arrive on an early morning flight at Heathrow, engage a taxi for the day, do the Tower, Tussaud’s, Harrods, and make it back for the evening flight home. They actively didn’t want to see anything that would disturb the fantasy of ye olde Englande.

For Australians, until fairly recently, Britain could still be summed up by tea towel images. While Britons were fed both a soapy, white-bread fantasy of Oz and the no less distorting vision of professional antipodeans such as Clive James and Germaine Greer (metropolitan London intellectuals who thought that occasional visits back home could top up their 1950s and 60s memories of the place), so the Australian imagination of a crumbling old imperial city couldn’t encompass the real intensity of the furious, global, modernising capital that London has become.

Read the rest of the article.

The sites of London: no. 23

Most evenings it's now customary to see the floor of a bus paved with one or other of London's afternoon free-sheets. I picked up over a dozen copies of thelondonpaper on the 214 last night. I doubt TfL or its contractors are bothering (able?) to recycle all the newsprint that is discarded on London's tubes, buses and streets every night.

Even the people who read them think these papers are worthless trash.