I was much taken this morning by this headline in the online Guardian:
Running reaches crossroads as Nike-led footwear arms race infects mainstream
I think it's surely a contender for most mixed metaphors, ever.

What rotten times we live in.  The natural world is still beautiful, but the political/social world seems to be unravelling everywhere ( Read more... )

It's Vietnam Women's Day today (International Women's Day is also celebrated, but in March, as everywhere else.)  So to mark the day, here’s something about one of the many notable women in Vietnam's history.

Nguyễn Thị Duệ was born in the late sixteenth century, under the Mạc dynasty.  I don't know her parentage, but her name suggests that ( Read more... )

My life is at sixes and sevens again, but to at least be posting something here are three idle thoughts, and a question.

1. Trollope is hideously unfair to the Marchioness of Hartletop. ( Read more... )

I'm posting a lot, I know, right now, in the attempt to find some counterweights to the world's worth of bad news.  I hope I'm not wearing you all out!

Here's the not-internet world still ticking over - fanzines live!

I was really happy to see what might be the beginning of widespread fair wages for fast-food workers in the US.

I very much like ( Read more... )

Life is getting busier and busier in the streets around me - everyone's gearing up for Tet, with frantic cleaning and gift-buying and planning to get back home (wherever home is).  Last weekend, though, ( Read more... )

asakiyume has posted on LJ to say that Irom Sharmila Chanu has arrived in Delhi for trial on the charge of attempting suicide - but what she is actually doing is hunger-striking to protest the appalling ( Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 )

Language affects thought.  I think... the article looked pretty convincing to me.  And I know from experience that it's really hard to see a difference when you don't have the language to identify the difference - or to see it as a real difference anyway, a significant difference, and not just hair-splitting.

So how is my thinking tilted by the ( Read more... )

So, as I was saying, I saw the film The Sapphires.  It's not a great movie, but it is a likeable, good movie.  Especially I liked... well, the thing I liked first was recognising things in it -- the shower-block with corrugated iron walls and the big shower rose felt really familiar, and I guess the light, and the layout of the country town.  It ( Read more... )

So... I finally got around to obtaining the four 2009 Dr Who specials which weren't in my boxed set of Seasons 1-6, and so I have caught up on what happened to the Tenth Doctor before he turned into the Eleventh Doctor... and I hated the end.
That epilogue round of pay-offs to selected old companions I thought stank! The idea that you set someone ( Read more... )