petrobins.bsky.social
Moves other people's commas. Originally Nottingham, now London SE26.
90 posts
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319 following
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Til Death Don't Us Part #SitComHorror
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Indeed — the move to tabloid was a big cost-cutting step on the print side, some details here: www.printweek.com/content/news...
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Sort of? "Keep spending loads on the web through the dot-com crash," the big call that his early-00s peers thought crazy, looks less crazy now. The Berliner presses, back then I think more envied than mocked, now seem an unhinged splurge. Jenkins IIRC was the star signing for the Berliner relaunch.
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Bidding war with The Times, no? Jenkins was The Times's biggest name, and it poached David Aaronovitch around the same time. It was 2005, online ad rates were never going to fall, and the Guardian was going to become the paper of the whole governing class because Labour would be in power forever.
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Some of us still have the LRB mouse mat (even after ceasing to own a mouse): share.google/1SW1XWnx7Dvr...
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That's meant to be "drink to" in the sense of "make a toast with," no? Although I agree you can't really shove a direct object between the "drink" and the "to" and expect people to follow the syntax.
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It made a sort of sense because his Pergamon Press was a big academic publisher at the time, but still. The list of things Maxwell tried to do and/or buy for establishment cred is long and weird.
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This is a hazy recollection from potentially unreliable histories of the Oxford student magazine Isis (which he also briefly owned), but he had a big flashy bookshop there that grew gradually emptier and emptier as his attitude to the payment of other publishers' invoices became clear.
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In Britain, turkey and stuffing equals Christmas. This article traces the tradition to Dickens: www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...
(I assume we borrowed the cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving, but we have that at Christmas too. None of it makes the February sandwich more explicable, tbf.)
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Now wondering what the catchment area of Coughlans represents — the true and secret borders of Croydon?
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Now imagining that he has a cybernetically enhanced left-hand side (that he presumably considers insufficiently sleek and/or skeuomorphic to photograph).
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Stumbling across this conversation has caused me to look up how to switch back on the beepy tunes I accidentally cancelled on my venerable Japanese rice cooker ("Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" when you set it going, "Amaryllis" when it's done).
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I'm a bit worried I've oversold this now — it's a sort of castle-y thing stuck attached to one end of the brick shed, with a transitional brick tower in between. This is from Street View:
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The Penge Wetherspoons is for some reason part of the same building as the Penge Sainsbury's, which itself has an ominous vibe distinguished even among those of southeast London supermarkets. I have not been in to the pub side.
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Could it be Anti-Treasury Brain, as it were? That is, losing trust in/enthusiasm for letting her officials streamline things after the Winter Fuel Payment experience?
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Her Tatler years must be useful for Diana stuff, at least?
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Hello from Lewisham West and East Dulwich
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I'm reading this thread and thinking of Francis Wheen, not because of any personal knowledge or antipathy, but because his introduction to his collection of Guardian columns defines his career as being essentially in the shame-maintenance industry (not in those words).
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Assigned blame for the consequences of a swerve or an emergency stop, maybe? (I have fallen off my bike doing an emergency stop for someone who suddenly stepped into the road, but both parties were unharmed, if startled.)
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Apologies if you lready know it, but the Borges story "Three Versions Of Judas" takes this idea and runs with it to even stranger places.
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Definitely planning to try that as a Tern excursion with our twins. But I suspect they won't enjoy it as much as the weird little Docklands ferry that requires you to enter through the lobby of a Hilton.
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American English treats them all as buses, AIUI, and doesn't have coach in this sense as a separate thing; maybe that's spread?
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Looking for Mister Goodwar
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Someone said "I wish the right would think harder about the implications of climate change" while close to a cursed monkey's paw?
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Enjoying this, thank you! You might want to tweak "stationery bandit" to "stationary bandit" in the web version (though government by paperclip thieves might not be the worst available option these days).
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Is that one real, though? Seen it reported as a fake.
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I enjoyed this, with a gathering and disturbingly familiar sense that we were headed for William Gibson's Jackpot.
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Jay's 1980 LRB piece is interesting in terms of where he was coming from then - including a paragraph about being heavily engaged in conversation with Milton Friedman at the time the scripts for YM were being written: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...
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He wrote the words, to the producer Clive Langer's melody, for Robert Wyatt; his own recording of it came slightly later.
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A consumer monthly can involve big production crunches, especially if the editor is indecisive, disorganised or prone to ripping things up. I have no personal knowledge here, but the character he plays in his columns might have had some very long press weeks.
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OED reckons it's an in- meaning not, fwiw, rather than some weird bank shot like inflammable, so your stretch looks right.
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You could just attribute the line to Marilyn Monroe?
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Agree - and there was a lot of rhetorical activity in places adjacent to where evidence should have been, which makes me suspicious.
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A paranoid sub writes: Zoos can sue! So can TV producers. And beach resort operators. I think we probably are safe from the Waterloo & City line, though.
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The lettering also looks more like Caslon Antique (the industry-standard option for "looks old timey", designed in the 1890s) than like actual 18th-century type: www.myfonts.com/collections/...
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It's cos Byron rhymes Juan with "true one" and "new one"
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This blogpost suggests that the debate among GPs is or was "Is online booking just *too* easy to use?" policyskeptic.blogspot.com/2021/04/shou...
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The screenshot is from a browser that hasn't rendered the Guardian's fonts correctly, which adds to the air of unreality.
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Early in the Berliner era, Wednesday's Guardian came with *two* Society sections, because there were so many job ads that a one-section Society Guardian have been too difficult to fold.
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One is a comedy of failure and despair, confronting a world of endless, hopeless repetition. The other is a Beckett play.
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IIRC, Charles Moore once claimed in a Spectator column that he continued talking in guineas, shillings and old pence in the 70s until his future wife threatened to dump him for it.
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That's amazing — was there anything about the history of the building? (I'm guessing it may have been a church or meeting house.)
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Was running through edge cases and am now stuck thinking about the lame piece of Victorian humour I was taught as an example of zeugma: "She left in tears and a sedan chair."
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It's the car that's the exception here, no? Think you would be on a train or a plane. Maybe something to do with assumed size of group? A package goes on a truck but in a van; you would probably go on a ship but in a canoe.
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His only named account would be a starchy official one as dean of St Patrick's. What you have to worry about are the 650 terrifyingly scabrous alts, intricately co-ordinated with a wider misinformation network run by Pope and Gay.
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I'm mainly delighted to have finally learned what a snow pea is. I'd been imagining some kind of white variety.
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They're all funhouse-mirror versions of the real world, so the real world is indeed where they all overlap, but not in any especially ominous way. (And making Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four noncontiguous is weird.)
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Belatedly: George Meredith, who is taken for granted as a standard author in early-c20 critical works that treat Dickens as somewhat distastefully pulpy. But he was never as full-spectrum popular as Scott.