Categories
Responses

BPI board wants to be done for drugs?

 

The head of Britain’s music trade body, the BPI, has called for his own prosecution for creating a massive market for drugs and not doing anything about it.

Actually, Geoff Taylor didn’t say this, but by extrapolating from his poorly written essay defending SOPA for the BBC, he appears to do so.

His bitter tract – which starts and sets the tone with the negative emotional word “attacks” and ends with a snide “how that they value other people’s creativity as well as their own” – is against those who took part in the protests against a US anti-piracy bill known as SOPA.

Categories
News

What’s the story, Salmond?

Scotland could be independent, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why.

Perhaps it’s the London media bias that means I don’t know the narrative, for while the press is writing about the for and against of a referendum, the vote’s wording and timing, I want to know the bigger thing – what’s the story that the SNP and the first minister Alex Salmond are telling about why they want independence?

Understand me, I am a Londoner and would need the genealogical flexibility of a American to call myself Scottish, but I do count myself British more than English, partly is it’s a more welcoming identity to those of us who aren’t ‘pure bred’ English.

I like Scotland and its culture and visit often. And I also like that Britain is one of the bigger boys in the EU and UN.

Categories
Research

WD-40 lubricates ideas

What do oil and ideas have in common?

The world runs on both, and have gone to war over both, and both can be messy, but there’s more to it than that.

What unites them is that both end products are a reiteration and refinement of a crude original. And WD-40 is the ultimate example of this.

Categories
Professional Writing

Netflix, apologies and why blogs are for anyone but you

Words have power all right and there’s no better way to see this than when things go wrong.

Netflix is a US DVD and online video rental service. Or rather it was until a September 1st when it split itself into two sites, one for DVDs and one for video streaming.

There was uproar, not least because users were told to pay separately for each site whereas before they got both services for one price.