General

I do, for one. There’s no greater validation, when one casts a frail little paper-boat of a blogpost onto the maelstrom of teh interwebs, than to have some stranger, or even friend, respond. Go to any reasonably popular website, however, and it rapidly becomes obvious that 90% of comments are crap. What to do?
Theodore Dalrymple’s [...]

Some things are too bizarre to make up, or to believe, and such is the story of the “ambient sausage rolls”. I saw it first at Yahoo News, which explained that the Plain English Campaign had informed the Co-Op, a supermarket, that the “ambient” label on its sausage rolls had “bemused” members of the public [...]

Conflicted, moi? One of the best TV dramas evah, being remade with one of the greatest plonkers evah in the starring role. Edge of Darkness redefined thrillers on BBC television, with astonishing performances from Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker and Eric Clapton’s soundtrack to die for. Now the same director is remaking it for [...]

Regrettheeror.com has published its annual round up of the corrections that have cast little pinpoints of light into the darkness that is mainstream reporting. They’ve identified Calling Bullshit (aka Fact Checking) as the trend of the year with some interesting analysis and several choice examples. this is my absolute favourite:

During the editing of this Review [...]

It was a cold, raw day, which may be par for the course in northern Europe but is decidedly unpleasant here in Rome. Earlier in the week we’d agreed to go down to the Farmers’ Market in the old slaughterhouse to see if I could score more than 1 kg of flour at a time. [...]

Snapped on a bus this morning. See the animal there on the left? Does it look like a sheep to you? Does cashmere come from sheep? Would you buy “cashmere” from a manufacturer that doesn’t know what animal produces cashmere? Not even at a 50% discount?
I’ve bleated about this before, in relation to the strawberries [...]

We’re enjoying a rather good late autumn here in Rome, and the hibiscus are still blooming. The strange thing, as The Squeeze’s trained eye noticed, is that they’ve changed colour. The top image is the gray variety photographed in late August. The middle one is a flower on the same bush photographed this morning. A [...]