News Category
Eric Ravilious: ‘what it is to be English’ and making masterpieces of the ordinary
Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver.
He grew up in East Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs and other English landscapes.
Well known for his iconic work for Wedgwood, Ravilious is widely considered one of the key figures in mid-20th century British design but he was also one of the finest watercolourists of the century.
His astonishingly prolific career spanned peace and war. With the outbreak of World War II Ravilious was assigned to the Royal Navy as one of the first Official War Artists finding new ways to capture and preserve the fleeting record of passing time…
Although he died at the age of only 39, Ravilious was largely responsible for the revival of English watercolour painting. He started out under the tutelage of Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art and although hugely versatile it was painting that Ravilious saw as his true vocation.
A film of his life, Drawn to War, came out in 2022:
Washington police chief who put SS insignia on his office door gets $1.5m to resign
To save money, the city of Kent in Washington gave State Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell $1.5m to leave his job. A bargain – because the city says litigation to remove him would have cost taxpayers more.
Kammerzell, a 27-year department veteran, first was disciplined in July 2021 after a detective complained that an insignia used by high-ranking generals in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich appeared on Kammerzell’s office door above his nameplate in September 2020.
An internal investigation concluded that Kammerzell knew full well the meaning of the insignia, which belonged to an “Obergruppenfuhrer” — a high official in Hitler’s dreaded paramilitary Schutzstaffel or SS, which was responsible for the systematic murders of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II.
Kammerzell also had been overheard joking about the Holocaust, according to the internal investigation, saying that his grandfather had died in the Holocaust — when he got drunk and fell out of a Nazi guard tower.
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The mayor of Kyiv shows how to do a TV interview
In other news, Kyiv Mayor and former boxing champion, Vitale Klitschko, says his people must fight like the Israelis.
“We have to learn from Israel how to defend our country, with every citizen,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “If they love the country, they need to be ready to defend the country. We have a lot to learn from Israel because we need every citizen to defend his home and his future.”
His father’s mother is Jewish. “I am proud to have Jewish blood,” he said. Around 900,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the Shoah.
In 2009, the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko gave Roman Shukhevych, an SS officer responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews, the title of hero of Ukraine.
In 2017, a street named after General Nikolai Vatutin, who liberated Kyiv from the Nazis, was to be named after Shukhevych. The decision was passed by the city council with a majority of 69 out of 120.
In Ukraine, history is never far away…
Posted: 19th, March 2022 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Russian cosmonauts arrive at International Space Station dressed in yellow and blue of Ukraine
The three new arrivals on ISS were dressed in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag as they emerged from their Soyuz capsule after docking with the space station. Their yellow uniforms carried blue stripes, instead of the standard-issue blue.
If it was a bold statement against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine it was done far away from Vladimir Putin’s goons.
Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a six-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory yesterday, joining the crew of two Russians, four Americans and one German.
In a message to Earth, Artemyev said crews choose their own outfits. “It became our turn to pick a colour. But, in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it. So that’s why we had to wear yellow.”
Whether or not the message reached the Russian people trammelled by the country’s censored media is no clear. After all, they’ve lied before about what goes on in space…
Winnie the Pooh is now in the public domain
This Public Domain Day on January 1, 2022 meant works from 1926 lost their copyright and became yours to play around with and enjoy. Around 400,000 recordings published before 1923 entered the public domain thanks to the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA).
You can explore them at the National Jukebox, the Library of Congress’ archive of sound.
You can find music to go with your version of A. A. Milne’s first Winnie the Pooh book. Here are some more books now in the public domain:
- A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrations by E. H. Shepard
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
- Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope
- Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
- T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
- Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist
- Edna Ferber, Show Boat
- William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay
- Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy
- D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent
- H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy
- Vita Sackville-West’s The Land
- Franz Kafka’s The Castle
- Felix Salten’s Bambi, A Life in the Woods
Posted: 5th, January 2022 | In: Books, News, The Consumer | Comment
Lost pinhole camera takes world’s longest exposure photograph
The beer can pinhole camera spent eight years capturing a solargraph at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory. The final image records the sun’s movement in 2,953 light trails.
Regina Valkenborgh set up the camera in 2012. And then forgot about it. It was found in September principal technical officer David Campbell tied to one of the observatory’s telescopes. He told Valkenborgh, who says:
It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years. I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up. I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived. It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.
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Posted: 14th, December 2021 | In: Key Posts, News, Technology | Comment
The apostrophe is dead – again
The apostrophe is to become extinct, says the Telegraph, as language becomes less formal.
The Apostrophiser should find more work. The language fan been correcting the misuse of apostrophes in Bristol. He reacted to such horrors as ‘Open Monday’s to Friday’s’, ‘Amys Nail’s’ and ‘Cambridge Motor’s’.
We’ve been here before many times. The Telegraph has pressed f9 on the keyboard and couched up a regular filler:
Have we murdered the apostrophe? – BBC Culture – 2020
“Why the Apostrophe Protection Society has closed in disgust” – Guardian, 2019
“Do apostrophes still matter?” – BBC News, 2019
“Lets get rid of the apostrophe” [sic] – ABC News, 2018
“The apostrophe isn’t dead yet” – The Atlantic, 2014
“What is happening with the apostrophe is that it’s just dying out” – Globe And Mail, 2005
The apostrophe will die out when editors can find something to replace the news of its dying out. And when Waterstone’s bookshop – founder: Tim Waterstone – become Waterstones, the clock is ticking.
‘Boris Johnson look-a-like’ jailed for theft in Yorkshire
Boris Johnson ‘look-a-like’ Jason Watson has been jailed. Unless Jason is running the country and the Prime Minister is now giving her Majesty no end of pleasure for the next ten months…? No.
Watson, 43, a serial burglar, was found with 1,280 in cash stashed down the front of his trousers. He’d burgled the House of Panini in Hull, East Yorkshire, grabbing a handbag containing £1,280.
Watson and his accomplice Adrian Awty, 45, also stole keys, bank cards and a pair of Vivienne Westwood earrings on September 28.
Watson then made his escape by concealing the money down the front of his trousers. However, he and an accomplice were later identified and arrested by police.
Posted: 4th, November 2021 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
Zac Goldsmith – look out, another elite posho wants to save the planet
Zac Goldsmith is the UK environment minister. He’s chuffed to bits about the “unprecedented” conservation deal by more than 100 world leaders to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030. Sounds good.
“The market has been blind to the value of the environment,” he tells the Guardian. “The [current economic] incentives to deforest are 40 times bigger than the incentives to keep healthy forests, so changing that is difficult.”
It’s about the money, right? People need to eat and live. So trees get felled for farming and mining. Which brings us to Zac and how he got to be Lord Goldsmith and minted.
He’s the son of billionaire businessman and financier James Goldsmith. In 1998, his uncle Edward Goldsmith made him editor of The Ecologist magazine, a position he retained until 2007.
And he’s just the latest extremely wealthy posho to tell us how to live. Why are all these elites so keen to be friends with the Earth? Well, it is where you source diamonds and gold, right.
Prince Charles told the Cop26 climate summit that Earth is in “the last chance saloon” and that “the future of humanity and nature herself are at stake”. We should be on a “war-like footing”, says Charles who employed a man to squeeze his toothpaste. Harry and Meghan take time out from their occasional use of aviation fuel to tell us about the urgent need to be carbon neutral and why having more than two children is wrong. The Queen wants us to cut down and protect the children – no, not from her son’s now-dead former friend Jeffrey Epstein – but from excess. We’re being lectured by the extremely wealthy to behave better by accepting less. If you could harness the power of eye rolling, we’d be carbon neutral by Friday.
Posted: 3rd, November 2021 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Royal Family | Comment
The Hill regrets the error in probably the best correction ever
Website The Hill notes that anti-Semitic crime in Germany is at the highest level ever recorded. Not that it was a crime when the Germans were keeping count of the 6 million Jews the country had the key role in murdering, but you get the point…
In times of increased power costs, British trains turn to diesel
Diesel is bad. Electric is good – well, so long as you don’t want to do anything it is:
Freightliner has confirmed that it will be withdrawing its entire fleet of electric locomotives in response to soaring electricity prices.
The company – which is the largest UK freight operator of electric locomotives – says it has been forced to replace its 23 Class 90s with diesel traction following a steep rise in wholesale electricity prices of more than 200% between September and October.
A Freightliner spokesman said: “As a result of an unprecedented increase in electricity prices, FL has taken the difficult decision to temporarily replace its electric freight services with diesel-hauled services in order to maintain a cost-effective solution for transporting essential goods and supplies around the UK.
Brave new world.
Lars Vilks, Mohammed cartoons and Batley is missing a teacher
Swedish artist Lars Vilks has died in a car crash. Vilks achieved an unenviable sort of fame – having sketched the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body in 2007, he was subjected to death threats. Al-Qaeda in Iraq offered a $100,000 (£73,692) reward for his murder. The BBC responds to his death by asking: “Why does depicting the Prophet Muhammad cause offence?” It’s an interesting reads, and includes a few words about the British teacher who as far we know remains in hiding and in fear of his life for showing a class in Batley, West Yorkshire, an image depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad:
In Kirklees borough, where Batley Grammar School is located, the syllabus says children should be “give[n] reasons why visual representation of God and the prophets is forbidden (haram) in Islam,” by the end of Key Stage 2.
Pupils should also understand “key religious values including democracy, human rights, rule of law, secularism, freedom of expression and tolerance” – this is taught in Key Stage 3.
If they teach that, why then was the teacher suspended?
Is it everyone’s duty in a country that values free speech to cause offence – not to be rude for the sake of it, but to try to expand the human experience and challenge convention through a free and fair exchange of views?
Image: Pallbearers carry the casket of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, decorated by friends and colleagues of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, at the city hall of Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
Eco-labels, organic and green but only one thing matters: the price tag
The Guardian is interested in seeing which labels on supermarket and processed foods gets diners to change their ways and opt for the more eco-friendly product. It spots “a different type that calculates the environmental cost”, and “how it had a surprising effect on consumers”. The test was not carried out on shoppers at Aldi or Lidl, rather at the Birmingham headquarters of the UK division of the food services business Compass Group. You might have seen their lorries dropping off bland school dinners.
It’s lunchtime at a workplace cafeteria in Birmingham, and employees returning to work after months away during the coronavirus pandemic are noticing something has changed. Next to the sandwiches and hot and cold dishes is a small globe symbol, coloured green, orange or red with a letter in the centre from A to E. “Meet our new eco-labels”, a sign reads.
Researchers at Oxford University have analysed the ingredients in every food item on the menu and given the dishes an environmental impact score, vegetable soup (an A) to the lemon, spring onion, cheese and tuna bagel (an E).
But organic and fair trade and all the other foods that have extra labels advertising their niceness cost more than those that do not. You don’t need a new label when you already have the price tag. The other solution, of course, is to tax things that don’t advertise their wellness factors and make everything more expensive, forcing us to go greener and ethical – and be more middle-class. And if you can’t afford it, well, that’s because you’re just a bad person.
Posted: 23rd, September 2021 | In: News, The Consumer | Comment
Stephen Pinker on the closing down of rationality and open minds
In the Times, Professor Stephen Pinker, an experimental cognitive scientist, is talking about the rationality and its death on college campuses. He’s a new book out. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters?. He tells the paper:
The good news is that we need not rely on our individual brains. We can outsource the work to institutions and professions we trust to be collectively rational. The bad news is that such trust is low and, Pinker believes, our institutions are uninterested in earning it back.
“Science is completely oblivious to that,” he says. “I found my fellow scientists, our scientific societies, for example, pretty much parrot the politically correct boiler plate on race, on inequality, on crime. You get no sense from the National Academy of Sciences or Science magazine that these are impartial arbiters of social issues. Their positions are indistinguishable from The New York Times and The Guardian, and this is a failing because it’s branding the institution of science as part of the elite, left-leaning establishment. It’s inviting people on the right to reject them.”
Views are so polarised now that debate is akin to trench warfare. No longer do we debate in pursuit of truth and then go out for a drink together. He hunker down and find like minds to point at them and sneer.
Posted: 23rd, September 2021 | In: Broadsheets, News | Comment
Harry Dunn: Parents reach resolution in case against Anne Sacoolas
News is that the family of Harry Dunn, 19, are nearing the end to their legal fight. Dunn died when his motorbike was hit by a car reportedly driven by US citizen Anne Sacoolas near RAF Croughton, Northamptonshire, in 2019. Her car was allegedly on the wrong side of the road. She jetted out of the UK, claiming diplomatic immunity. Harry Dunn’s parents buried their son. The US ignored them, protecting Sacoolas. The US refused appeals for her to be sent back to the UK.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) authorised Northamptonshire Police to charge Mrs Sacoolas with causing death by dangerous driving.
She has never returned to answer the charge. It’s been hideous. This is what happens when people are deemed not to matter – and others to matter more.
Dunn family spokesman Radd Seiger says the outcome in the civil case against Sacoolas is “a real milestone”. But we do not know the facts.
He said: “The family’s courage and determination to see this through has been incredible.”
Taliban Talc: Heroin rockets in price – but only in the Guardian and BBC
News in the Guardian is that heroin made in Afghanistan (it was packaged as talc) has rocketed in price:
Nearly three tonnes of heroin with a street value of $2.7bn (£2bn) from Afghanistan have been seized from a western Indian port in a major bust, officials said.
That’s 3000000g of smack at £667 a gram. In 2016, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said the average price of heroin in the US was $152 per gram – £111.
The story is from an agency, posted on the Guardian, apparently without the need to check the numbers. So off iy goes around the web:
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231116022408im_/https://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-2021-09-21-at-09.50.41.png)
But the BBC has it as its own report:
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231116022408im_/https://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-2021-09-21-at-09.49.38.png)
Such are the facts…
Covid-19: Robert Peston’s Double Fist
ITV’s Robert Peston tweeted that despite being twice jabbed he’d still caught Covid-19. He investigated why? And having concluded his study, tweeted his findings:
According to new data from the government’s Vaccine Surveillance Report, in the age group 40 to 79, the overwhelming majority of those infected have been double-vaxxed
Wow, indeed. Peston, of course, failed to realise the bleedin’ obvious that this was because most of the adult population has had two doses of the vaccine. of the vaccine.
Posted: 15th, September 2021 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
After Afghanistan and the War on Terror: US State Department works hard for US State Department
Fox News says the US State Department is blocking private rescue flights from leaving Afghanistan. Well, the government would, no? After all, it makes them look looks as though they’re in control and reinforces the need for bureaucrats. Why would the wonks let private companies do what they cannot?
As for the bigger picture, the War on Terror has been far from successful. If terror is the ability to foment mayhem, then the war achieved it better than the enemy ever could. What 9/11 did was to give the US a job – a mission. In 2002, then US vice president Dick Cheney said the War on Terror was a “single, immediate, global threat that any roomful of experts could agree upon.” His boss, George Bush, would “rid the world of evil”. So off went the US on its mission to Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. Bush said it “begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. [The War on Terror] will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
And then America tired of occupation and proxy wars and went home.
Posted: 7th, September 2021 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
When and why Charlie Watts punched Mick Jagger, by Keith Richards
Charlie Watts has died. The coolest and best looking Rolling Stone by far. In Keith’s autobiography, we get a bit of Charlie we can admire:
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231116022408im_/https://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/a.jpeg)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231116022408im_/https://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/11.jpeg)
Spotter: Andrew Beasley
Posted: 24th, August 2021 | In: Books, Celebrities, Key Posts, Music, News | Comment
20 years of nailing it Afghanistan – watch four culpable US presidents bullshit the world
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan has been led by the US-led retreat from the country ruled by the Taliban, just as it was when the US went in. It’s been 20 years of waste, thousands of lost lives, many more damaged ones, hope destroyed and the dawning realisation that America is good at one thing: picking a president on the strength of their abilities in marketing. George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden – you’d not want any of them in your corner in a fight. Now – get your war on!
Posted: 24th, August 2021 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Only Fans bans porn – goodbye OnlyFans
OnlyFans is where you can pay to connect with physical fitness experts, chefs, musicians and “other creators who post regularly online”. You can also use it for on-the-clock, internet-enabled sex with a sex worker. From October 1, the site will block sexually explicit photos and videos.
“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” OnlyFans said in a statement. But the site is synonymous with pornography. There will be no more hardcore porn and live sex shows on the site, just nudity – you know, the kind of stuff you can see all over the web. So what’s the point of OnlyFans?
“These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” says OnlyFans.
On Twitter, @PostCultureReview posts an interesting take on the move: “A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong, and the reality of it is a lot more damaging and concerning to both the livelihood of sex workers and online freedom in general.”
Are the prudes and censors winning? Whose body is it? The twitter account alleges the move is part of a broader purge on porn pushed by evangelical Christians in the US.
Tezza Williams, 22, from Birmingham, tells the BBC: “If you’re not allowed to post really explicit content it’s going to be a massive kick in the teeth. There’s this massive stigma on sex workers that just should not be a thing. We’re doing it from the comfort of our own bedrooms, it’s given us a living – it could be getting people off drugs, off the streets. [Making porn] is helping people and they still want to put bans on it, and [that’s] disgusting.”
Does banning stuff that makes OnlyFans and porn sites popular help people and society? And who gets to ban things? Who makes the decision, and why are they making it?
Bury cannabis farm points to profitable city centre trade
Police have destroyed the cannabis plants they found in a property near Bury town centre. The BBC says the crop of around 1,000 plants had a “street value” of £1m.
Chief Inspector Jamie Collins, of Greater Manchester Police, says: “The removal of this quantity of cannabis from the supply chain is another positive step forward in helping to disrupt the activity of organised criminals who seek to profit from the sale of drugs”.
So legalise it, then, like they do is so many part of the advanced Western world.
How to die from cancer
Does it sound trite to say that ‘cancer’ is a word and not a sentence? A Samaritan friend uses it. It works. It helps. Jack Thomas, a journalist at the Boston Globe since 1958 responds to his cancer diagnosis:
As the saying goes, fate has dealt me one from the bottom of the deck, and I am now condemned to confront the question that has plagued me for years: How does a person spend what he knows are his final months of life?
Atop the list of things I’ll miss are the smiles and hugs every morning from my beautiful wife, Geraldine, the greatest blessing of my life. I hate the notion of an eternity without hearing laughter from my three children. And what about my 40 rose bushes? Who will nurture them? I cannot imagine an afterlife without the red of my America roses or the aroma of my yellow Julia Childs.
We told each of the three children individually. John Patrick put his face in his hands, racked with sobs. After hanging up the telephone, Jennifer doubled over and wept until her dog, Rosie, approached to lick away the tears but not the melancholy. Faith explained over the telephone that, if I could see her, she was weeping and wondering how she could get along without her dad. Now, she is on the Internet every day, snorkeling for new research, new strategies, new medications. My wife cries every morning, then rolls up her sleeves and handles all doctor appointments and medication. Without her… I cannot imagine.
Spotter: nextdraft
You legally grow, smoke and carry 28g of marijuana in Mexico
As lockdowns end, Mexico’s top court has decriminalised the recreational use of cannabis. You can get stoned in Mexico without fear of fine and worse, just as you can in many US states over the border. In an 8-3 decision, the court decreed that adults will be able to apply for permits to cultivate and consume their own cannabis. But smoking weed in public and in front of children is banned.
With a permit, you can hold up to 28g of marijuana and grow as many as eight plants at home for personal use. At present, it is illegal to carry more than five grams.
Looks like we’re edging towards declaring a winner in the war on drugs.
Posted: 29th, June 2021 | In: News, The Consumer | Comment