James Elder

@jameselder.bsky.social

1250 Followers 728 Following

Business archivist by day; rowing club archivist by night. So, quite a lot of 19th and 20th century British history, and grumbling about digital and A/V preservation. Not the UNICEF spokesman. Be nice, I'm trying my best.

The cathedral in Alta, Norway.
THE AMERICANS AT HENLEY Marking 250 years of Independence The very first foreign entry at Henley was an American named E. Smith of Atalanta Rowing Club, New York, who entered The Diamond Challenge Sculls in 1872. Smith won two heats bur was beaten in the third round. His nation was just 96 years old. Today, as the U.S.A. marks 250 years of independence, there are 72 entries (including composites) in the 2026 Regatta across 22 events, made up of 42 open crews and 30 women's crews. The Early Years Smith's entry made the Regatta a pioneer in international sport: there were no precedents in rowing; among amateur sports in Britain only cricket had made an informal tour to Canada in 1859 and Australia in 1860. The frst sizeable foreign entry at Henley, all from the U.S.A., came in 1878 and there was immediate trouble in respect of the amateur and professional argument. By Henley standards it transpired that of the two American scullers, G.W. Lee of New Jersey and G. Lee of Boston one was certainly a professional and the other at best a very doubtful amateur. In the same year the Shoe-wae-cac-mette Boat Club of Monroe County, Michigan, entered The Stewards Challenge Cup. In front of a crowd of around thirty thousand pcople on the banks of the Thames, or in pleasure boats on the river, these French-Canadian lumbermen beat a crew from Columbia College, New York, but lost the Final against London Rowing Club. "The Shoes' were naturally disappointed to lose the race Back home the press suggested that "these men did not know how to tow The New York Times went onto criticise their clothing and the fact they drank whisky as well as beer! Cartoons at The Shoes' expense appeared in American publications. The same Columbia College crew was also entered in The Visitors Challenge Cup where they beat University College, Oxford, and Jesus College, Cambridge in a hear (this being the period of many races being three abreast), and went on to win the Final against Hertford College, Oxford.…
Rebecca Ferguson in Silo
It is not enough for an inventor to show that he or she was the first to have an idea. The inventor must apply for a American patent no more than a year after the idea is first described in public anywhere in the world. The American Optical legal department had interpreted the handwritten date in American style as December 6, 1953, which gave them plenty of time to file their application. They didn't remember that Europeans write dates differently, with the date before the month. When the lawyers filed the patent application November 19, 1954, they had missed the proper deadline by over five months. "We knew the game was up" when the copy of the cover arrived, recalls Siegmund. An angry Brian O'Brien felt cheated.
View of the River Thames from Henley Bridge on the first day of Henley Royal Regatta 2026
later in 1868 when Robert Lowe became Chancellor of the Exchequer. As his most recent biographer has written, ‘From the moment Lowe came to the Treasury, the department gained a reputation for tactlessness and discourtesy. ’26 Tilley, with over thirty years’ experience at St Martin’s le Grand, would have readily agreed. In 1872 he complained that until ‘the present Government came into power... there was a manifest desire on their [the Treasury’s] part to consider our propositions favourably and after requiring explanation where explanation was necessary to approve them if they possibly could’. 27 Tilley further observed that the old practice of informal discussions between Post Office and Treasury clerks, in which problems could be solved in an amicable fashion, had been replaced by a pattern of icy correspondence in which St Martin’s le Grand was thrown on the defensive. ‘I am not very thin skinned in official matters, ’ Tilley wrote, ‘but these rude scolding letters from the Treasury are a little too bad. We attempt to make improvements and we are told we are idiots and don’t know our business. ’28
A weather forecast showing Mon-Thu max temperatures of 31, 38, 38 and 35.
16:51 Sat 20 Jun ‹ Work Q Find a book.... City of Light The Story of Fiber Opt Jeff Hecht Jeff Hecht City of Light Simone Fari Victorian Telegraphy Be... ANO FELON ON CEINTY COUNSE Helen Glew Gender, Retoric and... BRITAIN'S SHIELD RADAR AND THE DEFEAT OF THE LUFTWAFFE PAD ZIMMERMAN David Zimmerm... Britain's Shield: Radar and the... where wizards stay up late THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET katie hafner marchew ivon Katie Hafner, Ma... Where Wizards Stay Up Late:... CAMPBELL-SMIT MASTERS OF THE POST THE ROYAL MAIL Duncan Campbe... Masters of the Post: The Aut... HELEN The ]Walls THave Ears onom Helen Fry The Walls Have Ears THE ZIMMERMAN Y TELEGRAM Thomas Boghardt The Zimmerman T... MENENSTT Maria kikihanskowd THE GLOBAL WIRELESS Maria Rikitianska... The Global Wireless NO TRADESMEN AND NO WOMEN Tăc Origins ef ibe Britist Civil Service MICHAEL COOLICAN Michael Coolican No Tradesmen and No Wome... MAGIC RAYS OF LIGHT A Brief Histor of the Future THE ORIGINS OF THE INTERNET John Naughton John Naughton A Brief History of the Future PEGULAN 9 CASE - of the ELECTRIC CONSTABLE PASSION, FOLSO & PERSUIT *CAROL BAXTER) Carol Baxter The Peculiar Case of the El... STAFF RELATIONS IN THE CIVIL SERVICE R Henry Parris Staff Relations in the Civil Ser... John Wyver Magic Rays of Light: The earl... CCODE LUAL STATER PETER HENNESSY Peter Hennessy The Secret State: Prepari... GPO STARE N 1916 Stephen Ferguso... GPO staff in 1916 JON AGAR CONSTANT TOUCH A Global History of Jon Agar Constant Touch SERVING A WIRED WORLD Katie Hindmarch... Serving a Wired World:... PROGRAMMED INEQUALITY Mar Hicks Programmed Inequality: Ho... FAXED The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine Jonathan Coopersmith Jonathan Coope... Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the... VPN 27% O ##: THE PROJECTIO V OF BRITAIN A HISTORY OF THE GPO FILM UNIT Etal ly Sutt Antey and Jamu G Manst Scott Anthony, J... The Projection of Britain: A Hi... toa INVISIBLE WEAPON International Politics (1851-1945 | DANIEL/R HEADRICK Daniel R. Headrick The Invisible Weapon RADIO WAR THE SECRET SPIONAGE WAR OF THE RADIO SECURITY SERVICE DAVID ABRUTAT Dr David Abrutat Radio War: The Secret Espion... DENISES AT WAR LULU HAU INE DAWIUR THE DIDITAL ADE David A. Price Geniuses at War: Bletchley...
alcarns LABOUR WAS CHISELLED OUT OF THE MINES HAMMERED OUT OF THE SHIPYARDS FORGED IN THE FACTORIES THAT IS THE TRADITION I SERVED
The 1989 Bradford Phone Book with cover art by David Hockney.
Corporate structures became fiendishly convoluted, as though designed to maximise shareholders' freedom of manoeuvre and minimise scrutiny by regulators, investors or journalists. Shell companies were routinely established, some in offshore tax havens. Until it promised to improve the simplicity and transparency of its structure, Thames had nine main group companies, two registered in the Cayman Islands and a number of other subsidiaries, including one in Guernsey. 1º In 2021, Thames told me that all the companies in the group were now registered in the UK; an 'abridged version' of its structure listed six holding companies between the ultimate shareholders and Thames Water Utilities Ltd, the company that actually delivers the water. Affinity Water, which now owns those three statutory water companies serving the Colne Valley, Rickmansworth and the Lea, has (at the time of writing) an even more labyrinthine structure and a similar history of being bought and sold. Today Affinity serves a wide arc round London, from the south-west to the north-east, along with parts of Essex and a stretch of the Kent coast from Deal to Dungeness. First, the original three companies merged as Three Valleys Water. Then, in 1987, Three Valleys was bought by the French multinational Veolia. In 2012 Veolia sold the company, which by then included several other water companies and had been renamed Affinity. The buyer was an infrastructure investment consortium led by two leading City institutions, who in turn sold it in 2017 to another consortium of three investors, one German, one Dutch and one British. An organogram on the company's website shows the three partners jointly control a vehicle called Daiwater Investment Ltd. From there on, the chart reads like an Old Testament genealogy, with 'owns' in place of the 'begats'. Daiwater owns Affinity Water Acquisitions (Investments) Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Acquisitions (HoldCo) Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Acquisitions (MidCo) Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Acquisitions Ltd, which owns Affinity Water Capital Funds Ltd, which begat six subsidiaries, one of which, Affinity Water Holdco Finance, owns Affinity Water Holdings Ltd, which in turn owns the Ofwat-regulated company that actually delivers the water, Affinity Water Ltd.20 You don't have to understand the purpose of this maze of companies to know it has nothing to do with the efficient delivery of potable water.
A screenshot from the episode of The Simpson 'Bart Gets An Elephant'. The scene is the Democratic Convention where banners read 'We hate life and ourselves' and 'We can't govern!'
Radio, one of the first commercial broadcasting stations, set up in 1973.) Dearing did not disguise his personal disappointment; nor did he really succeed after 1982 in finding a successor to Walmsley who could offer the Post Office's marketeers the same calibre of leadership. Dearing always set great store by having people at the top with a vision of what they wanted to achieve, and this mattered to him. There was, however, another individual whose marketing achievements had been making a notable difference to the Post Office for a few years, as Dearing had acknowledged in making him Deputy Chairman in October 1981 - an appointment that also signalled very usefully the importance of the (relatively small business that he ran. Sam Wainwright was the Managing Director of the Giro and Remittance Services, which since 1977 he had rejuvenated as the 'National Girobank'. His leadership had more or less single-handedly transformed a lacklustre money remittance network with a doubtful future into a fully fledged banking business, with possibly profound implications for the role of the Post Office in local communities across the country. Wainwright had been hired by Ryland and had joined the Post Office several months before Barlow's arrival in 1977. A Whitehall committee had for some months been looking into the feasibility of merging the Giro operation into the Treasury-controlled National Savings Bank. Unaware of its existence until after he had accepted the position of Managing Director, Wainwright was confronted with a report from this committee recommending an amalgamation. He opposed this vehemently and made clear he was ready to quit immediately unless allowed to expand the Giro as a self-standing business.S A 52-year-old former financial journalist and successful City banker, he had accepted a halving of his City salary in order to pursue his own vision of a 'National Giro' as a popular 'bank for the unbanked'. This made him a forceful protagonist on its behalf, and the Treasury's report was shelved.* Dearing, who may have had a hand in his appointment in 1977, backed Wainwright's plans enthusiastically. The two men became close friends, and Dearing spent much of every Friday at Wainwright's head office in the City's Milk Street, a short walk from St Martin's. With the Chairman behind him, Wainwright proceeded to assemble - in the face of constant objections from the Treasury and a series of political rows triggered by vested interests in the financial services industry - all the moving parts required for a viable commercial bank. The organization was re-christened, and better agency terms were negotiated with the Post Office's Counters Department. Retail deposit accounts were inaugurated, followed by the issuance of certificates of deposit, corporate deposit-taking and a full range of funding activities in the money markets. Overdraft and personal-loan facilities were developed, along with personal- insurance products sold by National Girobank as the agent for third-party suppliers. When the Thatcher government imposed a windfall banking tax in 1981, to recoup some of the profits made on the back of abnormally high interest rates, Dearing joined with Wainwright to try to persuade the Government that National Girobank was subtly different from the clearers. Their point was taken, and ministers agreed to an injection of public funds to compensate for the windfall tax surrendered. Nonetheless, by the early 1980s National Girobank was a fully subscribed member of the clearing banks' club, with access to all the standard arrangements for cheque-clearing and inter-bank payments. It had computerized back offices to match any in the industry, and was one of the pioneers of free banking, for customers in credit, of credit cards and of ATM machines. (It collaborated with the Co-Op Bank and two building societies to establish an ATM network called 'Link'.) By 1984-5 what had been a loss-making operation in the 1970s was making almost £20m a year and a highly respectable return on net assets. Its profits were small in the context of the Post Office's finances as a whole, but that was not the point. National Girobank was ubiquitous and open
A book: THE STORY OF A COUNCIL WARD WEST HILL AND WIMBLEDON PARK SIDE BY MALCOLM GRIMSTON
In reality, he was a man fired with creativity and imagination, but was no executive. He had a dozen ideas before breakfast on an average day, and the resulting lists that descended on German and his team soon came to be dreaded. Some were substantial proposals. Benn was especially keen on the idea of using postmen and post offices for additional non-postal services: he wondered why post office counters had not been used, for example, as the basis of a money remittance system along the lines of the Giro banking networks familiar in many European countries. Always fascinated by new technology, he suggested post offices might run computer facilities which could be rented out by the hour to small businesses. And perhaps some post offices could be used to house mini art galleries. The Solicitor's Department initially baulked at the whole idea of straying beyond the traditional activities of the Post Office, but eventually retreated. Benn was confident of his ground by July 1965 and happy to tease the lawyers: 'I even said I thought that if we caught fish from our cable ships and sold them in post offices there could be no objections'.!' He stopped short of this, but regularly pushed the notion that postmen might work in harness with the social services: each postman might be equipped, he thought, 'with a guide to local social services which he would be able to use if asked for advice by the people whose homes he served and who might need help. Nothing came of it in the end. Allowing mail vans to provide local transport in remote areas of the country was another of his proposals, and fell on more fertile ground.* Most notes for the attention of his officials, though, were more interrogatory. In his first twelve months, Benn sent the Director General more than a hundred minutes - many of them aimed at the 'continuing and probing review' of the Department's work that had been foreshadowed in Labour's election manifesto. Detailed questions and requests for information rained down on the staff at every level, while the PMG himself scurried from one initiative to another at a pace that his officials could only try to view with a wry detachment. (As one of them, Tilling's successor in the private office, would recall twenty-five years later: 'Sir Ronald German would come in after an ample lunch, sink into an armchair... and say, "What has that young man been up to today?" 13) Some of Benn's innovations
A diorama of a train compartment on a bookshelf.
Britain was the first country to pioneer an old age pension, funded by the state and targeting the poorest, who could claim it from the age of 70. But it was only after the second world war that a period of leisured old age become an ordinary expectation for most British workers.
A man in a suit and a woman in a fur coat.
ON FRIENDSHIP - ANDREW O’HAGAN LOUDER AND FUNNIER - PG WODEHOUSE AT HOME - BILL BRYSON THE BEATLES 101 - VIKKI REILLY STAYING ALIVE REAL POEMS FOR UNREAL TIMES - EDITED BY NEIL ASTLEY THE BLOODAXE BOOK OF 20TH CENTURY POETRY - EDITED BY EDNA LONGLEY WHY IS DOWNING STREET PANTED BLACK? - JONNIE FIELDING THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE - DOUGLAS ADAMS THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY - DOUGLAS ADAMS "THE COMMONERS" - NICK MANNING A MAN ON THE MOON The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts - ANDREW CHAIKIN SOUTH BANK ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN - DOMINIC BRADBURY The 1990s - HENRY CARROLL
Scott Anthony, James C. Mansell The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit Simone Fari Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization Duncan Campbell-Smith Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail Michael Coolican No Tradesmen and No Women Carol Baxter The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable Katie Hindmarch-Watson Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital
Scott Anthony, James C. Mansell The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit Simone Fari Victorian Telegraphy Before Nationalization Duncan Campbell-Smith Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail Michael Coolican No Tradesmen and No Women Carol Baxter The Peculiar Case of the Electric Constable Katie Hindmarch-Watson Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital
locations was practically impossible thereafter for large numbers of men deployed in about 120 mobile columns, tracking down Boer guerrilla forces across a vast area. This was not a style of warfare conducive to postal efficiency, but the verdict at the end of hostilities in far-off South Africa was nevertheless that the Army Post Office Corps had more than proved its mettle. Given a combat zone with clearer front lines and shorter lines of communication, the capacity of the Post Office and the War Office together to bring mails to the brink of the battlefield could hardly now be doubted. The partnership arrangement was restructured in the years that followed. A fundamental reorganization of the army in the years after 1906 ('the Haldane reforms') included the setting up of a Territorial 'Army Postal Service'. After some years of confusion, this emerged as REPS.* Responsibility for REPS was handed to a Territorial officer, tasked with organizing a mobilization plan: the postmen reserves, in Royal Engineer uniforms and subject to full military discipline, would need assigning to all divisions of the regular army in the event of war. (The 24th Middlesex was meanwhile transformed into the Post Office Rifles, which remained quite separate.) The man appointed as the first 'Director of Army Postal Services' was William Price, who was given a full establishment of 300 officers and men - enough, it was reckoned in 1913, for the six divisions of any Expeditionary Force likely to be sent overseas. Price himself would be attached to the Army's Inspector-General of Communications and would report to the Quartermaster General. Here at last was a structure that looked equal to the demands of the hybrid concept. By the time those first REPS men set off with the BEF in August 1914, confidence in its effectiveness was high.! Two nasty shocks followed, much as they had done in South Africa - and identical in nature. The scale of the action had been badly underestimated, quickly leaving Price with far too few men. This problem, though, was soon redressed: several hundred more were recruited in haste from the ranks of the POR battalion (a return, ironically, to the model left behind with the 24th Middlesex), so trebling the size of the REPS force in France. The second early crisis sprang from the speed of the enemy's advance in the opening weeks of the war. The Germans' push for Paris engulfed several of the first postal facilities, established in and around Amiens; no sooner had others been set up than they had to be hurriedly abandoned, and thousands of bags of mail were hastily shuttled back from the front lines by train, lorry and rented boats ever further to the west, ending in near chaos at the port of Nantes on France's west coast.13 Once the Germans' Schlieffen Plan had failed to win an abrupt victory, a very different prospect opened up. The static warfare of the trenches - whatever its horrors in every other respect - posed the kind of logistical challenges that were meat and drink to the men from the Post Office. The BEF's layout, while embracing ever more army divisions, could in effect be treated as stationary from the Channel to the front line. Of course, individual units were still shuttled regularly between different locations, but most of those locations themselves remained as fixed as London suburbs. After some initial months of trial and error, REPS built a delivery system to match. By the onset of the winter in 1914, it had raised its force from 900 to 1,500 to cope with a huge increase in the mails for Christmas. The result, amid the grimness of the Western Front, often verged on the bizarre. Letters were usually reaching addressees in the trenches on the second day after being posted, and London newspapers (also sent over in great numbers) were being widely distributed within a day or two of their publication. As one officer confided to his diary on 30 December 1914: 'I got three letters posted in Ireland on the 26th and in England on the 28th, this afternoon, so letters are reaching us as quickly as if there were no war. It's really rather wonderful. "4
There was an almost complete lack of awareness of how the world works now and how improvements might positively impact on the problems MacAskill worries about. For example, he worries about future technological stagnation. Surely, one way to tackle this would be to try to achieve greater levels of social and economic equality, increased access to education, better equality in the workplace etc so that more people get the opportunity to realise their potential? Overall there was a marked naiveté, coupled with tunnel vision, about the realities of life for people outside his own circle of philosophers (and perhaps also tech billionaires). The section towards the end of the book about how to choose one's career to maximise its longtermist impact for good seemed particularly unmoored. How many people, in the current economy have the luxury of being able to choose their career according to these lofty ideals, to frequently return to education, and to periodically change direction? It might be possible for some - but for those with dependants and no financial safety net it's a pipe dream.
PROTECT AND SURVIVE This booklet tells you how to make your home and your family as safe a possible under nuclear attack
That won't do at all .. we've got to have this .. I don't mind for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs .. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it. Remarks at Cabinet Committee GEN75 (25 October 1946), about the development of the British atomic bomb, quoted in Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb (2007), p. 48
A railway station sign which reads: Welcome to Cambridge Home of Anglia Ruskin University
The Cambridge University Library.
Sign for the Stirling Building Refurbishment
Children were a special category too – at least until they left school. Babies, children and adolescents received virtually the same rations as adults, though with no tea for the under-fives and half the meat ration for children under six, and they were also entitled to extra foods like milk and eggs that were necessary for healthy growth. Babies between six and eighteen months were allocated three eggs a week, when older children and adults were lucky to get one. Children under five were entitled to 7 pints of subsidised or free milk a week, and from 1942 such children were entitled to subsidised or free orange juice and cod liver oil. With the exigencies of evacuation and rationing, school meals lost the stigma of poverty that they had had before the war, and every child received a third of a pint of milk a day at school at a subsidised cost or free, plus an extra 3½ pints at home. During the war working-class children from industrial towns and cities were drinking as much milk as children from higher-income groups had in the 1930s. After the war, the Labour Party was able to point to the contrast between the 1940s and the 1930s and claimed ‘in spite of shortages, the children are rosy cheeked, well clothed . . . They are taller, heavier and healthier than before the war’ and, though again this was part of a longerterm trend, infant mortality rates for England and Wales fell from 51 per thousand in 1939 to 46 in 1945 – but environmental factors for the poorest continued to militate against the gains of ‘fair share’ rations.
A group of men sitting in a television studio.
A new branch of M&S Food on the site of an old branch that closed 10 years or so ago.
A manuscript document.
TfL advert with a model who bears something of a resemblance to Daisy Cooper.
A mug with the text ‘Gladstone’s Library - My Happy Place’
A view of Central London at night from tje BT Tower.
A lot of Lime bikes on Rotherwood Road, Putney.
An oak wreath, mounted in a display case, hangs above a door.
A small room with many shelves filled with boxes, and a desk. A mobile shelving unit is in the foreground.
things like our books are really popular among children who don't read I think I know what they mean, I just wish they'd put it a different way. I notice that you seem to get a lot of mail from women. About half of it. I suppose the easy explanation is that it's because of the witch books, but I don't really know. I never thought anything much about this and then someone said that most readers of fantasy are males under twenty-five. I've got the impression, though, that the Josh Kirby covers put older people off. I've had letters like that. So have the publishers. On the other hand, I get a lot from people who like the covers. I like the covers. The good ones are superb and the - ones I don't like so much are still pretty OK. And I know some of the horrendous experiences that authors can have with covers. Corgi tried an experimental reprint of The Colour of Magic with a non-Kirby cover a few years ago, just to see what happened. I don't think it made a lot of difference one way or the other, to be frank. Do you see yourself still writing Discworld books in ten years' time? No. Not even in five years' time. Certainly not on a regular basis, anyway.
A shirt. The label reads Charles Tyrwhitt, Jermyn Street, Non-Iron
A gif of the game The Secret of Monkey Island showing the used ship salesman Stan wearing a loud checked jacket.
LET ME BE REAL WITH YOU INSPIRING LESSONS ON LIVING A LIFE OF SERVICE AUTHOR OF A MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ARSHAY COOPER SAVE THE DATE BOOK RELEASE EVENT DEC 9 2025 LONDON In Conversation with Annamarie Phelps Latymer Upper School King St, London W6 9LR 6:30PM
A phone screenshot showing Apple Music’s Replay function. My top album of 2025 is Instant Holograms On Metal Film by Stereolab.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) says on its website that “in reality there is no such thing as a ‘down valuation’. What is being described is the difference between worth (to the individual buyer/seller) and market value”. It adds: “It is important to recognise that the ‘client’ in most circumstances is, say, a bank or building society [the lender], not the person taking the mortgage.”
A still from a 1980s training film, shot on 1" videotape - a man sits at a computer. The stripes on his shirt are strobing, due to the limitations of the camera and the video playback.
An Edwardian library reading room, with shelving, wooden desks, armchairs and a wooden gallery above.
Tony Hancock in the “Twelve Angry Men” episode of “Hancock’s Half Hour”.
View of a wooden desk with bronze lamp, laptop, water bottle etc. Beyond it can be seen a library reading room with large windows.
The Gladstone Library - an Edwardian building of reddish stone with a large lawn and trees in front of it - with a very blue sky.
I man holds a metal piece of apparatus, a bit like a squared off megaphone, against a bank of equiment.
Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of "disruptive" and "transformative" inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress "is barely keeping pace with the past". Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.
Billie Whitelaw firing a machine gun.
A scene from Andor. Supervisor Lagret (an imperial intelligence officer in a white uniform) says "Shut it down" through gritted teeth.
A 20 song album track list of mid 1990s indie and britpop with a few other oddities.
40 TRACK CD THE BEST BLUR OASIS SUPERGRASS PULP STONES ROSES ELASTICA SUEDE PRIMAL SCREAM CRANBERRIES NEW ORDER THE SMITHS BOO RADLEYS CHEMICAL BROTHERS RADIOHEAD MORRISSEY MANIC STREET PREACHERS THERAPY? EDWYN COLLINS INSPIRAL CARPETS ASH THA SHAMEN DEPECHE MODE SMASHING PUMPKINS THE CHARLATANS LEVELLERS FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON THE PRODIGY McALMONT BUTLER …IN THE WORLD…EVER!
Flynn from the Disney animation “Tangled” stands nonchalantly with his arms crossed, while surrounded by swords pointed at him.
22:56 Fri 22 Aug VPN / • 25% 0 oed.com Revised 2002 (entry history) moot - ADJECTIVE - More entries for moot := Browse entry < Share 66 Cite • Contribute Factsheet Etymology Meaning & use Pronunciation Compounds & derived words Nearby entries Single page Forms Frequency Tabbed 1. Originally in Law, of a case, issue, etc.: proposed for discussion at a moot (moot n. 4). Later also gen.: open to argument, debatable; uncertain, doubtful; unable to be firmly resolved. Frequently in moot case, moot point. 1563- 1563 1577 a1650 1658-9 1732-3 1779 1797 1808 1876 1899 That they be not forced to sue the lawe, wrapped with so infinite crickes and moot poyntes. L. Humphrey, Nobles or of Nobilitye sig. Vvi The like question [sc. whether 'fish' or 'flesh'] may be mooued of the sell [= seal], and if it were well canuassed, it would be found at the least wyse a moote case. R. Stanyhurst, Treatise contayning Description of Irelande ii. f. 9/2, in R. Holinshed, Chronicles vol. | I was scarce come into commons, but..l was set at work, arguing a moot-point or law-case on Thursday night after supper. S. D'Ewes, Autobiography & Correspondence (1845) (modernized text) vol. I. 240 ••• Jersey is part of France; so it is a moot point whether a habeas corpus lies. in T. Burton, Diary (1828) vol. III. 46 'My lords and gentlemen', says he, 'it is a very moot point to which of those causes we may ascribe the universal dulness of the Irish. Sir C. Wogan in J. Swift, Works (1824) vol. XVII. 460 ... The policy of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point, unless the enemy set the example. G. Washington, Letter 20 March in Writings (1840) vol. VI. ii. 204 Particular times are appointed for the arguing moot-cases. Encyclopœdia Britannica vol. XII. 271/2 ••• If a statute of the United States were to adopt a common law phrase, in the creation of an offence, no common law consequences would follow, because we have no common law. But this is a moot point. Rep. Trials Col. A. Burr vol. II. 78 It remains a moot problem to be guessed at. A. D. Murray, Charnwood 110 Those who are already well informed in essentials and quite prepared to discuss
Rabbit The rabbit in this interglacial is a western Mediterranean animal; Roman authors thought of it as characteristic of Spain and the Balearic Islands. John Sheail (1971) has written a book on its history in Britain. The rabbit appears in England at the beginning of the twelfth century. The circumstances strongly indicate deliberate introduction. It is delicious, and by the next century had become an important commercial animal; but it is not mentioned nor implied in Anglo-Saxon documents or Domesday Book. The earliest secure archaeological finds - discounting rabbits that may have burrowed into earlier strata - are of c. 1100 at Ipswich and at Hadleigh (Essex).84 The first written record is for the Scilly Islands in 1176 (Sheail 1971). The earliest representation that I have seen is of a dog and rabbit on a corbel of Kilpeck church (Herefordshire), ascribed to the 1150s or 1160s. The word 'warren', originally referring to hunting rights in general, soon came to imply rabbits much as 'Forest' (Chapter 6) implied deer. Early warrens were set up on small islands: Scilly, Lundy, Skokholm (Pembrokeshire), the Fame Islands, Isle of May (Fife), etc.* This solved the problem of fencing, for rabbits hate to swim. By the thirteenth century warrens were being established inland and in Scotland®S and Wales. The bigger ones, often owned by monks, were on heathland; others were in parks and later in Forests. Sheail gives a map of hundreds of Warren place-names all over England except for mountains, fenland, and the most intensive agriculture. Coney, the old name for rabbit, gives rise to place-names such as Conygre, Conyfare, and Conifer Wood. The medieval rabbit was not like ours. It was delicate and needed cherishing in this climate. At first it could not dig its own burrow; Sheail records among the tools used in Henry VIll's warren a great auger 'to make and bore cony holes'. Earthworks were made to encourage burrowing. These are clusters of rectangular flat-topped mounds,…