ninme

The Times - Anti-Viral Victory New Aids drugs are a triumph of human ingenuity

When Isentress (from Merck) and another new Aids drug (from Pfizer) were first announced in the US last year, they were hailed as potentially the most important developments in Aids therapy in a decade.

Hmm, a decade of R&D and human ingenuity, [...]

Categories: Science and Nature

The Times - The confessions of Clarkson’s secret bride Top Gear speaks to the little boy in all of of us, by Melanie Reid

Every mother with a son; or rather, every woman who shares a house with a male of any age who likes to watch Top Gear - and that’s most of us [...]

Categories: Entertainment

The Times (Saturday) - Prodi Agonistes Goodbye to a shreds and patches Italian Government, hello to uncertainty

Many Italians would retort that their extravagantly remunerated politicians treat parliament more like an automatic feeder, a machine for dispensing patronage and privilege that, cascading through regions and provinces, leeches the earnings of taxpayers who pay far too [...]

Categories: Politics

So we hiked downtown (and back!) yesterday afternoon to watch Juno, and: I really, really liked it. The main actress was great (and cute!), her not-quite-boyfriend was great (and still cute!), her best friend was hilarious, her dad was awesome, and her step-mom was just beautiful. But the first, maybe, twenty minutes or so are [...]

Categories: Entertainment

Macleans - Why we love that alien hordes stuff It’s all delicious fantasy for us. But in some places, they’re actually living the apocalypse, by Mark Steyn

The pop-cultural detonation of national landmarks is a mostly American phenomenon. In other places, it happens for real. Godzilla thomping his way down Fifth Avenue and hurling Buicks [...]

Categories: Entertainment

Wheat & Weeds - The Task Before Us

It is a bleak picture, and Camus was criticized for painting it, but as he wrote in reply, “there is no other life possible for a man deprived of God, and all men are [now] in that position.” But Camus was not [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Hmm.

Daily Mail - Brown banishes 300-year-old tradition by removing Britannia from our 50p coin

Gordon Brown’s campaign to promote British values was exposed as a sham last night after it was revealed he personally approved a decision to remove Britannia from the 50p coin. The patriotic symbol - based on a [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

I was reading the editorial on the subject before clicking over to the news item below, thinking, when I got to “children as young as seven being kept in abysmal conditions, worked for 19 hours a day and beaten continuously,” that, well, that’s the sort of thing that happens with slavery, isn’t it, which is [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Andrew Pierce in the Telegraph:

Yet again, we have had pure slapstick theatre from the Italian parliament after the fall of Romano Prodi’s government. One senator had to be physically restrained from spitting at a colleague who had had the temerity to announce he was voting for Prodi. He called his rival a “gay” [...]

Categories: Politics

This is from Friday (yes, I finally have a working server and access to the computer. it just takes massively inconvenient server switches and getting up at 8 on a Sunday to do it):

The Times - This tastes horrid (in my view) We food critics have been crippled by the ruling against a newspaper for criticising [...]

Categories: Food

The Telegraph - Hillary Clinton should muzzle Bill

Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency has been transformed by the emergence of her husband, Bill, as attack dog for her campaign. Having stayed in the background before the caucuses and primaries began, when his wife had established a large opinion poll lead over her rivals, [...]

Categories: Politics

Meanwhile, this is yet another test. Peter had the blog rebuilding all. night. long, because now it’s built… statically, whereas before it was… dynamically. So it should be faster. For you guys. For me trying to save an entry, it should be slow as hell. But since this bloody Movable Type 4 install, it’s been [...]

Categories: Wildcard

I almost titled this “James Joyce For Musicians” but decided to make myself focus on the positive.

Telegraph Blogs - After atonality, what next?

It could be argued that the first decade of the twentieth century was the richest in musical history: Mahler, Strauss and Debussy were at the height of their powers, while Ravel, [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

Wheat & Weeds - A Bishop Who Knows How To Bishop

Mentioned this in this week’s potpourri, but I wanted to call attention to the Colorado legislature’s latest blatant anti-Catholic move. (Have Coloradans nothing better to do than harrass Catholics?) This time they’re trying to make it impossible for faith-based institutions to prefer hiring [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

The Times - Just baptised? How convenient Those of us who stuck firmly to our churchgoing are sulking about church schools policy, by Melanie McDonagh

Ah, the ethos. It’s that curious element in the atmosphere at church schools - and let’s abandon the euphemism “faith” schools, shall we, as if anyone is going to lie [...]

Categories: People and Current Events