Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Recent Books
It feels like ages since I wrote about some of the recent books I’ve been reading. Let’s try to put that right with this handful of recently finished books. Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang I first discovered Rebecca F Kuang when I read her fantasy epic Babel a couple of years ago. Her lastest…
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Sky on Freeview – Ofcom Announces a Consultation
Today Ofcom has announced that it will conduct a public consultation into Sky’s proposal to replace it’s Freeview channels with three pay channels on DTT. As regular readers will recall, this proposal came as a counter measure to Setanta who will have Freeview, and also acted as a nice distraction for the launch of Virgin…
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Hyde Park Calling and the Buena Vista Social Club
And so to Hyde Park Calling – a festival that happens at the same time as Glastonbury, and so has an “old rocker” feel to it. Due to a bit of a cock-up on my part, one of the newer singers I wanted to see, Terra Naomi, who’d I heard on the cover CD of…
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Taking Liberties
Taking Liberties is that rarest of things – a low budget British documentary released in the cinema. It covers a subject that’s very close to my heart, the reduction of civil liberties we’ve seen under the premiership of Tony Blair over the last ten years. It tells its tale using a combination of archive clips,…
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190580203X
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Die Hard 4.0
I’m sure earlier in the year, or perhaps late last year, I saw trailers for Live Free or Die Hard. But in the meantime, somebody noticed that Web 2.0 was a bit of a buzzword, and since this film is all about using the power of computers to bring down the state, it was renamed…
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Pointless
No no no no no. Being interviewed in Second Life is utterly pointless. What next? Political interviews in the middle of Deal or No Deal?
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Alan Johnston – 100 Days
Alan Johnston has now been held in captivity for 100 days.
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The Progressive Patriot
The Progressive Patriot is one of those books that’s going to defy categorisation in bookshops and libraries. It’s part autobiography, part history and part social history. Bragg takes us on something of a personal journey to understand his roots. We travel this journey, partly by way of his East End/Essex born family, but dip in…
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Cloud Cuckoo Land
Exactly which part of Cloud Cuckoo Land does Home Office minister Liam Byrne live in? He’s reported today as saying that Blair’s pointless, over-priced, Big Brotheresque ID Card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century. How exactly? The building of the railways brought great positive…
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The Special Edition
So I’m popping in to HMV after work to look for an album, and can’t help but notice all the special editions of albums that are on sale. It’s pretty typical these days for albums to be packaged in at least two different manners. It might be that one set comes with an additional DVD,…
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Programme Scheduling
The undoubted hit TV show of the last week or so has been a strange talent show called “Britain’s Got Talent.” Now I haven’t watched a single episode, but seemingly 11m tuned in for the final yesterday evening to see an opera singer win (Great! More light operatic albums on the horizon. We sure do…
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Misc
BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian “I counted them all out, and I counted them all back” Hanrahan. I’m flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis. Incidentally, isn’t it ridiculous that…
Hadrian’s Wall
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