Adam Mars Jones, a well known author, writes the following in the course of eviscerating Martin Amis, another well-known author:

The same sense of lostness clings to social attitudes. When Des finds a girlfriend, Dawn, the only problem is her racist father, Horace. He’s not just a racist but a throwback of a racist: ‘Your brain’s smaller and a different shape. Whilst hers is normal, yours is closer to a primate’s.’ In the allotment of nasty social attitudes this contorted purple tuber must count as a heritage potato, miraculously re-established from a seed bank.

It is just such a bizarre metaphor; where did it come from, and what does Mr Mars Jones intend by it?

https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/213303559020748800

The new WordPress has this nifty ability to embed Tweets, and this seems a worthwhile kind of article to test it on.

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In a coincidence little short of astonishing, last night I came across the cover for an issue of New Scientist published 25 years ago to the week, while this morning on the train I read an article from last week's Economist. The link? Fish. And more specifically, how scientists generally do a bett...

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Romans in general don't seem to be big on charity shops, or second hand. Of course, the Church is the charity, and there are big yellow bins on the streets that harvest used clothing for redistribution.¹ For non-clothes, however, there's not much in the way of options to recycle. There is, howev...

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As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It's an RSS reader that claims to offer "Visual feed reading with intelligence" and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there's anything wrong with GReader, apart from the fact that it is from the Don't Be Evil boys themselves. I just like the idea of paying for service, which then gives me a full-on right to demand more of it. That's why I use Pinboard and Instapaper rather than alternatives.

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