Ms. Schmidt, who once served as the creative director of Moomah, the children’s cafe in Tribeca that caters to parents in denial about some of the distasteful aesthetics of child-rearing, made the cards in her favored style of heavy stock, neutral paper and quaint typefaces.
The second half of Robert Peston’s episodic factual money programme appeared on Sunday. There was too much footage of Peston sitting on trains, glaring at screens and papers and stuff, but like any good sausage it also had some meat in it.
This bit struck me on the shoulder:
(From The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust, BBC Two. If the video refuses to play, try downloading it.)
John Lanchester’s point, again:
Intuitively, you must think that since we’re having a crisis about debt, [and meanwhile] we’re forcing students to take on debt, a lot of them will then seek ways to immediately pay back the debt by going off and doing the kind of lucrative but not socially useful thing. That must be a quite likely risk.
Vince Cable said the “tax” word. And nothing broke. Amazing.
The man playing Michael Palin really does look like Michael Palin.
(Here’s an incidental thing: I just spent at least half an hour trying to pass parameters to the Vimeo oEmbed embed machine. I suppose I wanted to make the player more, uh, minimal. Well, it turns out that Vimeo Plus members can prevent people from customising some aspects of their embeds, and evidently Merlin has chosen to do that. Which is fine, but is there a parable in there?)
I have recreated the sound of the beginning of The Weakest Link:
You see, the man whose disembodied male voice appears in the teatime quiz programme is the same man on whose voice is based the electronic voice of my iPod. That’s what I was getting at there.
I am furious that he emphasises the wrong parts of “Bowie” all wrong, but such limitations also serve as a comforting reminder that the machines aren’t ready to take over just yet. When that changes, I think we should start to worry.
One of the themes – maybe the main theme – of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was the question: does humanity deserve to survive? Twitter’s trending topics makes me think that the answer is no.
From Brent Simmons, who has been on fire of late.