I’ve finally found something I actually really crave. It’s a book. The site it’s on also happens to be the best site I’ve seen for ages. Damm I love typographers. Check it out. Lineto.com
Author Archive for Jon
In the seasonal song Twelve Days of Christmas people usually sing “Four calling birds” but the correct words are actually “Four Colley birds” an old name for blackbirds. Also, according to my Encyclopaedia of Superstition, anyone who eats a mince pie on every day of the twelve days of Christmas (26 December - 6 January) will enjoy twelve months of good fortune in the following year.
Have a listen to this puzzling clip of Nelson Mandela that I heard on the World Service last night.
He says: Together we have the power to change the course of destiny. Big ambitious blondes are needed to deal with the pandemic. But what truly matters are the Small Eggs of Kindness and caring that come from a place of real love and commercial.I’m all for big ambitious blondes, we could all use their help, but what are the Small Eggs of Kindness? Kinder eggs? They do come from the place of real love, Italy, and the brand is owned by Ferrero, undoubtedly a commercially successful company. The ‘rainbow’ mix of dark and white chocolate that the eggs are made from is a lovely metaphor for today’s South Africa and maybe what Nelson means is that the answer to the problems caused by the HIV pandemic in Africa may already be inside the ‘egg’, if we can just figure out how to put it together properly.By the way, did you know that Kinder Eggs are illegal in the USA? Yeah, they are, really.
If you have children under ten then you’ve probably got some Playmobil in your house. It was my very favourite range of toys for a long time so I’m pretty used to their weird German ideas. This one really takes the biscuit though. One of the most extravagant items they sell is the Fairy Tale Palace. It costs about eighty pounds and it’s enormous; three stories high with loads of columns and staircases, chandeliers, mirrors and rose-tinted windows. Now they’ve made a toy toy castle so that the little Playmobil children who live in the castle can play with a model of their own castle, complete with tiny figures of themselves. You can see where this is going can’t you? I’ll stop now before we all disappear.
So, Dave Hartnett, the head of the Inland Revenue (or HMRC as they call themselves), has written a letter to seven million families offering a personal apology for his department’s losing of their personal details in the post. I bet the personal nature of the apology doesn’t extend to Mr Hartnett personally paying for seven million stamps.
According to the official Saudi Arabia information site:
To understand the history of the Kingdom and its political, economic and social development, it is necessary to realize that Islam, which permeates every aspect of a Muslim’s life, also permeates every aspect of the Saudi Arabian state.
and according to a story on the BBC News site today
An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.
If I were a Muslim I would consider Saudi Arabia a very poor advertisement for my religion. Have a look at the official information site and click on the section entitled Saudi Art and Culture. It contains a poetry section containing two short poems, and a discussion of the Arabic language which is put to shame by the entry on the same subject in Wikipedia. 
Did you know that Taurine, the most significant ingredient in Red Bull and the other energy drinks underpinning modern life, is basically bile and is also found in bull semen? Huh? Did you?
Masterfoods, who produce many of the shite sweets that make so many people in this country unhealthy, have started using animal rennet in their waxy, flavourless chocolate. I am mostly pleased about this because now I won’t have to even discuss the possibility of my daughters buying or eating this crap; there’s no way they will want anything to do with something that is extracted from the tummies of dead baby cows. The fact that the chocolate in Mars Bars, Twix, Maltesers and Milky Way was already offensive because it is made from cocoa that is the product of a ruthlessly exploitative and unethical trade that causes suffering and deprivation for many children in Africa obviously wasn’t enough for these scumbags. I suppose once evil becomes your main interest in life you just have to keep trying to push the envelope.
The BBC are reporting that the exclusive, members-only torrent tracker Oink’s Pink Palace has been closed down. It’s a shame but to be honest I am surprised it has taken this long. The site had really strict rules about members having to upload as much music as they downloaded which meant that the range of material available and the speed at which it could be obtained was far better than any other site, including the iTunes store. Oink was a brief vision of how successful the music business could have been if they weren’t so greedy and stupid, no wonder it’s gone.
Are you unsure about what the recent changes to inheritance tax mean? If you jointly own a house worth more than £600,000 and you’re not married the new rules mean that there is now a significant financial reason to get married, unfortunately. There’s a very nicely written guide to the new rules on the Inland Revenue site. It’s in Question and Answer form and the characters of the Questioner and the Answerer are drawn out very nicely by the narrative arc, with some very panicky worries in the middle about losing essential paperwork in fires and robberies.