corollary

Entry #165

Listening to:

A CD my office-mate just lent me, consisting of excerpted tracks from an album called Hommage à Nasrat Fateh Ali Khan. Seems pretty good so far.

There is to be an election in Britain soon. On my way into work this morning, I cycled past a billboard for the Conservative Party. It was a picture of a slightly anxious looking middle-aged woman standing by some sort of canal. In big red letters, at the top of the poster: You paid the tax; slightly lower down, Where are the police? About as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead then. More interesting was the URL in a smaller font: www.conservatives.com. I thought it interesting that they didn't want a URL with a .uk suffix. Of course, the way the Conservatives go about their fund-raising, the .com suffix is probably quite appropriate. Or maybe they just wanted people to be able to type "conservatives" into their browser and be taken to the right place. (My brower is now smart enough not to take me to www.whitehouse.com if I type in "whitehouse" though.)

I read a very interesting piece about British agriculture in the London Review of Books the other day. It's extracted on their web-site here (I don't know why it's only an extract; the LRB should really get its act together and put more stuff online). It's hard not to feel that your guiding principle should be: "Don't buy from British farmers; it only encourages them."