Commentariat

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Lib Dem Voice had an interesting conversation under the title What should political bloggers be trying to achieve?, where Brian Coleman was used as an example of a search term that had been targeted by the Lib Dems in Google. This was the relevant bit of the conversation about Brian Coleman AM, the London Assembly Member for Barnet (the Lib Dems think he is a bit thin up top) and Camden.

The story is that Brian Coleman was the one who had a go at Lynne Featherstone for calling the Fire Brigade when her boiler made a funny noise, and the Lib Dems don’t like him as a result.

I thought I’d have a test on Google to see how we get on competing for a term such as “Brian Coleman” with the Liberal Democrat blogs on their top rated story for Brian Coleman: “Brian Coleman AM and his taxi bills”

(Click on the title to read the whole article)

It was my friend Gill, who has a son in the same school as Louis, who pointed out that, according to this year’s Parent Handbook, I am the new Media Studies teacher. “You dark horse,” she said, and I asked what on earth she was talking about. “Look under the list of teachers,” she said. And there I was. Or there I seemed to be, albeit with the addition of an extra L to my name: “Rebecca Tyrrell,” it said, “Media Studies”.

Guy Ritchie hasn’t been shy of late. Understandable, what with a new film out and his wife’s world tour to promote. Still, there was one subject he was reluctant to discuss when chatting with Pandora: his erstwhile religion, Kabbalah.

Italy has an unnerving ability to switch in a flash from being a kind and obliging country to a nasty place capable of ruthless violence. The latest to find this out was a group of activists protesting about the plan to build a of a new American military base in the city of Vicenza.

For all George Bush’s talk of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, he has retreated on matters of principle before the advancing powers of India and China

The most succinct word association for the Commentariat I have come across:

back-channel media.

A Freudian slip with more than a grain of truth.

Richard Chartres says the Church of England is grateful to The Sunday Telegraph for its renewed focus on the great need to help local communities open up their churches for broader public use, without losing their sacred character.

Many farmers have become so alarmed by the apparent unreliability of a highly controversial new blood test for their livestock, that they are lining up to have it ruled on by the High Court, writes Christopher Booker.

A couple of weeks ago, on a station platform in the north of England, I counted at least four morbidly obese adults. One of them was a mother with a toddler, who was already showing the same tendency. So I wasn’t surprised to discover last week that British children are near the top of a new table showing the extent of childhood obesity in 27 European countries. Scottish boys and girls are at number two, with a third weighing more than they should, while their English counterparts are not far behind; almost 30 per cent of English girls are overweight, putting them at number four in the table, while English boys are in sixth place.

Do you digg? Or twitter? Are you busy poking your friends on Facebook? Or feeding your aggregators? Most readers of the ‘IoS’ are pretty techno-savvy, and I expect you’ll know what I’m on about. Even Gordon Brown is twittering these days (and I don’t mean just at the dispatch box). But the rise of the digitally literate reader is causing a shudder of anxiety among the ombudsmen of the world’s newspapers, who are getting together for their annual conference in Sweden at the end of this month. (What do you call a gathering of readers’ editors? A “niggle”, perhaps?)

Another week, another Government target missed - that’s the downside of setting optimistic objectives in the hope of seducing voters. So far this year the number of new houses being built in England is running at the lowest level since Labour came to power - just over 32,000 homes are under construction. The pledge to build 240,000 new homes a year by 2016 stands about as much chance of being achieved as that other New Labour dream - the eradication of child poverty.

The Tony award nominations for the best work in New York were announced on Wednesday, and it was a good moment for London theatre. Eight Brits were nominated for major acting prizes, and the Chocolate Factory’s show, Sunday in the Park with George, picked up nine nominations of its own. To think that it started in our small theatre in Southwark makes me very proud.

Jeremy Seabrook: Thatcher broke the back of Labour; New Labour, built on its own sense of powerlessness, broke its heart

Soumaya Ghannoushi: A Bush legacy? All the US president can have found during this week’s visit is the smoking ruins of his much-vaunted ‘New Middle East’ policy

I live like every other inhabitant of a twenty-first century village, in a bubble of virtual experience, writes Vicki Woods.

McCain needs to pick his partner very carefully. A heartbeat away from the Presidency matters more when the heart in question will be 72 at the time of the inauguration. Here are some of the suggestions: 1) Tim Pawlenty The…

The aim of the commentariat.org.uk site is to see how far the highly expensive paid for services for monitoring and analysing “comment” can be put together without charging any significant money.

So I’m starting an experiment with sending out a Daily Summary email of the Comment and Opinion from different publications.

Born on Hogmanay 1935, Jeff Torrington grew up in Glasgow’s iconic area of
old-time tenement deprivation, the Gorbals, and worked in the Linwood car
manufacturing plant, the home of a symbol of the new era coming into being,
the 1960s Hillman Imp. Torrington contracted tuberculosis at the age of 13
and while recuperating in a Govan sanatorium became a voracious reader
(teaching himself French to read Camus and Sartre), and also became a
humanist.

As a 22-year-old trainee policeman Kenneth Steele, the first Chief Constable
of Avon and Somerset, had no idea what was to confront him when he heard
news of a fire in a tenement on his beat in Clerkenwell, London, in 1936.

By Andrew Grice A rare bit of good news for Gordon Brown. Speculation that Tony Blair is going to follow his wife Cherie by bringing forward his memoirs is wide of the mark, I’m told. Last Friday night, Team Brown…

The new mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma (pop. 400,000) will certainly bring a fresh perspective to the job. A freshman perspective, that is. John Tyler Hammons is a political science student at the University of Oklahoma. At just 19, he stormed…

You might enjoy: Joan Acocella in Smithsonian: You got a problem with that? Christopher Hitchens in New Statesman: Just give peace a chance? Michael Marshall in New Scientist: Global biodiversity slumps 27% in 35 years Jaimie Seaton and Criselda Yabes…

Nirpal Dhaliwal: A new book uncovers the gay side of rap - but for anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s been obvious for years

Flexible working is a good thing. It enables people to balance work and life - especially when they have children - and allows firms to keep talent and experience in the workplace.
But this new “right” over flexible working is nothing of the sort:

The right to request flexible working is to be extended to about 4.5 [...]

Isabel Ortiz and Anita Kelles-Viitanen: The Asian Development Bank is meant to alleviate poverty - but its new strategy has little to say on the need for social protection