Category — Random

It sounds a bit cavalier, I know, but I just turned down a free phone. RRP around £450. The timing was perfect: I’m about to buy a new handset, having got frustrated with my old Nexus One and thoroughly fed up with my iPhone.

There were strings, of course. But they didn’t insist I write a glowing review anywhere. They didn’t even oblige me to write a blog post or two. In fact, they didn’t ask me to generate any content at all, as far as I could tell from the T&Cs. However, they did insist that my name and face be available to them for future “publicity purposes”. Not with an endorsement appended, obviously, but still. I value my impartiality and independence, and a reputation for taking ethics seriously. Lending my name (even trivially) crosses a line. [Read more →]

Despite the nice SEO title, I’m not sure there’s anything especially honest in offering a cure for writer’s block. Being blocked is a natural part of the writing process; it’s ‘organic’, if you like that term. In my experience, it can even preface a flood of creativity.

Still, writer’s block is frustrating, and upgrades itself to unpleasant if it strikes at a time you really need it not to. (The anxiety about being blocked, not just ‘being blocked’, dishes out the real carnage.) So, here are some of the writing strategies I adopt to stop it starting… or if it’s already started, to chase it away.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

1.When I feel the fluidity start to fail, the first thing I do is grab a pen and paper and walk. [Read more →]

The notion that sport and politics should never mix is a curious, and also deeply political, one. Sport, after all, is just the waging of international politics by other means. Ask the East Germans.

Rarely has the mix been quite as fruity as this weekend’s end to the Italian football season [Read more →]

Consider this:

A kidney patient who travelled to the Philippines to search for a live donor has defended his decision to become a so-called “transplant tourist”.

Stories like this hit the bullseye of the inherent tension between ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ ways of looking at the world. [Read more →]

Two stories from the afternoon of 11th September, 2001 that you won’t hear anywhere else.

1. I’m standing in Throgmorton Street with my face pressed against the glass of a private banking building. The TV in the corner opposite the reception desk shows the collapse of a tall grey structure. It’s the WTC, North Tower. The channel is Sky News. At the bottom of the screen the LSE stock ticker is scrolling. The prices are changing.

2. I’m in the mail room of Tower 42, the basement of the building formerly known as the NatWest Tower. It’s forty minutes later. Rumours are going around that several airliners are missing over the Atlantic, perhaps heading for London. The workers in the 183m of building above have been told to evacuate. To go home. “Why are you all still here,” I ask the postroom workers. “We’ve been told we have to stay.”

First published at The Sharpener.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed the vogue for quiz shows designed to reproduce, repackage and reinforce existing class relations for primetime TV. The latest incarnation is Poker Face:

Each show will see six new contestants face five rounds of questions. Throughout the game they will know exactly how many they have right and how much money they are accumulating… However they have no idea how well their fellow contestants are actually faring… At the end of each round one person must leave the game. [Read more →]

Ed:

I think Materazzi probably deserved it…With any luck, Materazzi will be disciplined for racist abuse by FIFA.

Dave Hill:

If – and it’s a very big if – I had been him and Materazzi had said to me anything like any of the remarks attributed to him, I think I would have done the same and maybe more.

Matt Foot:

Materazzi called Zidane a “terrorist”, presumably in some disgusting reference to his Algerian descent…Materazzi would be guilty of an offence in this country: racially aggravated disorderly conduct, on the basis of abuse of someone because of their nationality

Piara Powar, national co-ordinator for the anti-racism group Kick It Out:

If there was a racial slur then Fifa needs to act.

I’m sure there are plenty more. You might put this down to footie partisanship. We love Zizou. He’s the peerless footballer of his generation, the greatest since Maradona. Materazzi was a` pantomime clown (and occasionally violent) during his time at Everton. But something more interesting is going on here. [Read more →]