Interactive maps

If you live in Spain and you want data-rich maps that you and others can update easily on your server (eg for generating humming-bird hawk moth distribution maps or locators for a news site), you either spend a lot of time writing an app that will automatically layer your data onto freeware maps out there…

Attempt to kill Franco

There’s a brief reference this morning in the Guardian to how, back in 1964, Stuart Christie tried to blow up Franco. Christie, after three years in prison here, went on to become mates with the terrorists who attempted to do the same to the Heath government, the BBC and various other symbols of fascist oppression…

God’s fish

When the inspector calls, the chief weapon of fundamentalist fishermen–particularly those with long white beards–is Genesis 1:26-28: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all…

Belgian pie

I reckon Gayle Tomlinson has let herself be suckered for the purposes of this story in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, passed along the counter by that notorious pie-lady, Margaret Marks: Belgians are turning their backs on the traditional buns and taking the Geordie stottie to their hearts. Greggs [a] has launched its fourth shop in…

Money for old rope

When the Maoists take Kathmandu, what do you think they will say to the entrepreneurs who sell Che Guevara t-shirts to Westerners looking for an alternative? “Hey, no sweat, Che was one of ours.” “Who? See that wall?” Elsewhere on the Nepali Times site there’s a review by Kunda Dixit of an interesting new book…

Spreading the good news

They speak (or someone speaks) Catalan in the Edinburgh branch of Harvey Nichols, according to The Scotsman. The assistant from Georgia, we are told, is called Nestan Rasmussen, which sounds pretty unlikely, and the manager claims that English is also spoken, which inclines me to disbelieve the whole story. (South Korea, on the other hand,…

I-2-I

Burglar and ex-Libertines singer Pete Doherty was caught in June carrying a flick knife. “If the law was to send me to prison it wouldn’t be able to look itself in the eye,” he commented after yesterday’s hearing, in what critics are taking as a clear rejection of the post-Surrealist aesthetic currently sweeping East London…

Hear ye not the hummus?

I’m intrigued by this excerpt from a discussion of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, a new play by Robin Soans (who apparently also once wrote for The Two Ronnies): A professional hommos maker who lives close to the border of the West Bank reveals that he is losing customers from villages in the West Bank because they…

Echorelocation

“You call it a bat, but I call it a fluttermouse.”