The Ashes of Poetry

Further to yesterday’s post on the English poet in residence for the Ashes tour, the Sidelined mob have taken up the challenge and Rafe Champion has been appointed poet/blogger in residence for the Australians. He has committed to one poem for each day of each test, to match the expected output of English poet David [...]

Inspired women

The Guardian has a wonderful little piece that features five writers talking about the people, places and things that have inspired them. I am particularly fond of Michele Hanson’s story:
When I was 10 I was inspired by our vet, Miss Hilary. Here was the first woman I had ever seen wearing chap’s clothes. Fabulous. No [...]

“I speak of bats, balls and wickets”

Visit the sport section of any second-hand bookshop and you will no doubt notice that crickket seems to inspire print like no other sport. Aside from the endless biogs and autobiogs, there’s the sheer weight of statistics in cricket that has spawned it’s own mini-genre within that of cricket writing. It’s a game for trainspotters.
Now [...]

Oh f**k it

I may have temporarily left the world of web work but I have not forgotten the acute embarrassment that can ensue from particularly public cock-ups. And let’s face it, when you work on the web, most of what you do is public and people are never backward in coming forward to tell you what flavour [...]

Running the world

Jarvis Cocker has made his own way while Pulp is on indefinite hiatus. I was wondering if he would do this and I found, by happy accident, that he has an album out. True to form, there is a track called ‘Running the world’ which doesn’t appear in the iTunes listing for the album but [...]

Carnival of the InfoSciences #59

For any librarians (or other interested parties) who read Stack, the latest Carnival of the InfoSciences is up and running at The Shifted Librarian.

We recruit

Now the Right has realised it was right about the Left it can also be revealed that recruitment starts early.

Living books

I was sure I had blogged about the Swedish version of ‘living books’ but I can’t for the life of me find the post. Anyway, it’s a concept that began in Denmark in 2000 and involves people becoming ‘books’ for a library. You can borrow these ‘books’ for half an hour or so and have [...]

Brisvegas

I’ve spent that last couple of days in Brisbane. Apologies to my friends at LP but this was a visit where there was no time whatsoever to do anything but the defined purpose of the visit. Believe me, I only got to visit a book shop this morning on the way home and that was [...]

The Guantanamo Public Library

Although most of them haven’t been charged with anything, have no liberties and may or may not have been tortured, the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a library, even if they’re not allowed to set foot in it.