My review of an excellent new book on international politics
January 17th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’m a bit of a news junkie and am fascinated by national and international politics. However, so much reporting of current affairs lacks context. One needs to know something of the history and geography of a nation or region to make real sense of what is happening today.
British journalist Tim Marshall has written an excellent overview of geo-politics. It has the main title “Prisoners Of Geography” and the sub-title “Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics”.
It is an easy read and immensely informative. I strongly recommend it and you can see my review here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (2)
How good is the quality of your water?
January 16th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This week, in my capacity as Chair of the South East Water Customer Panel, together with other Panel colleagues, I visited one of the company’s water treatment works at Bewl in Kent to learn more about how water is treated before it is of the right quality for customers.
Many customers think that running a water company is simply a matter of collecting rainfall and distributing it through pipes but, as we learned and saw, water in the UK goes through a whole series of stages before it becomes amongst the highest quality water in the world.
At Bewl, the stages are called aeration & flocculation, flotation, ozonisation, filtration, granular activated carbon, disinfection, de-chlorination, and distribution. You can learn a little more about each of these stages here and you can learn a little more about water quality in this short video.
You might think that good quality water in an industrialised country is no big deal. But then you may not have heard of the current situation in Flint, Michigan in the richest nation on earth. Here an entire city of 100,000 is barred from drinking its own water – even cooking with it – because of poisonously high levels of lead.
Posted in Consumer matters, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Is Wikipedia the best site on the web?
January 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This was the title of a column that I wrote eight years ago. At the time, Wikipedia had 8 million articles in more than 250 languages.
The amazing site is 15 years old this week and now has over 38 million articles, over 5 million articles in English alone. I use it all the time as a starting point for many inquiries and I contribute small sums to its funding.
You can read how Wikipedia changed the world here.
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
How to remember things
January 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
After a break for the Christmas/New Year period, I return to my Friday postings of advice from the Life Skills section of my web site.
Do you ever have trouble remembering things? If so, you might like to learn about some techniques for remembering different information.
You can check out the various techniques here.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
This year’s Academy Award nominations and the films that I have seen
January 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
America’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced this year’s nominations for what are popularly known as the Oscars. As usual, a small number of films has attracted a large number of nominations, so the top eight movies have garnered no less than 57 of the nominations.
I have seen five of these eight works (the other three have not yet opened in the UK), as you’ll see here:
- “The Revenant” – 12
- “Mad Max: Fury Road” – 10 : my review here
- “The Martian” – 7 : my review here
- “Spotlight” – 6
- “Bridge of Spies” – 6 : my review here
- “Carol” – 6: my review here
- “The Big Short” – 5
- “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” – 5 : my review here
You can see the full list of nominations here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
“Keep calm and carry on” – the true story of this wartime campaign
January 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
For years now that very British exhortation “Keep calm and carry on”, in its original wartime text or in multifarious variations, has been ubiquitous – on posters, mugs, tea towels and so on. But just how commonplace was the advice in the Second World War when it originated? A letter in today’s “Guardian” newspaper has the answer:
In Owen Hatherley’s article (Let them eat cupcakes, 9 January), it was stated that “the Keep Calm and Carry On poster was not mass produced until 2008”, and that only “a handful were printed on a test basis”. This is not true. As our research project on the communication history of the Ministry of Information has established, some 2.45m copies of the poster had been passed to local distribution centres by early autumn 1939.
However, a number of those involved in the campaign had already begun to express their doubts: “the population might well resent having this poster crammed down their throats at every turn”; it was “too commonplace to be inspiring”; and “it may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves”.
The entire campaign was scrapped after just four weeks. Stocks of “Keep Calm” were retained until April 1940, after which they were pulped as part of a government effort to recycle paper. Only a few copies survived, including the one discovered in Alnwick in 2000. Links to a version of the full story, written by Dr Henry Irving, can be found on the MOI project’s website.
Professor Simon Eliot
Institute of English Studies, University of London
Posted in History | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (16): is Ted Cruz eligible to be America’s president?
January 13th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Oh, the irony of it: after all those stupid Republican birther claims that Barack Obama was not eligible to become President of the United States, there is now a discussion – mainly in Republican circles – about whether Ted Cruz, a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, is actually a US citizen and therefore eligible to serve in the White House.
Cruz’s was born in 1970 in Canada and his Cuban-born father was not a US citizen, but his mother was born in the US and his parents were married at the time of his birth. So that, should be that.
But Cruz did not give up his Canadian citizenship until 2014 which makes him politically suspect in some quarters and, much more seriously, there is some question that his mother became a Canadian citizen and may have ceased to be a US citizen.
At its most amusing and/or absurd, one commentator has speculated as follows:
“If it turns out that Cruz’s mother had ceased having US citizenship at the time he was born in Canada, then Cruz would not be a US citizen at all. That would make him an undocumented immigrant and a candidate for deportation, something that he and many other Republicans strongly favor for people in that situation.
Since he has renounced his Canadian citizenship, he would also be a stateless person. Perhaps he could apply to for refugee status though then he would have to undergo rigorous screening to ensure that he was not an ISIS agent.
It is not clear which country would be willing to take him in as a refugee, given that he is such an unpleasant person. The Canadian government of former prime minister Stephen Harper would have done so but I am not sure about the Justin Trudeau administration. They have been very welcoming to refugees but Cruz may be a bit too much to stomach.”
If you can bear to enter into the detail of this debate, check out this blog posting.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (1)
Another really enjoyable visit to Prague
January 12th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Vee and I have now returned to London after a long weekend (four nights) in Prague. We have both been there more than 20 times so this was not a trip to see sights but to catch up with very close friends. We managed to see a total of 20 which included a new boyfriend and a new baby.
There was snow when we first landed and the temperature hovered just below and just above zero all weekend. As always, we did lots of long walks. Prague is a fabulous city with magnificent architecture and lots of cobbled streets and hidden courtyards. This is probably the time of year when the city has the fewest tourists, so we were able to savour all the magic of the place.
Of course, since we have been to Prague so many times, we have seen all the sights and museums, but we always manage to fit in something new.
This time, we called into locations commemorating three famous men from Czech history: the astronomer Johannes Kepler whose discoveries are celebrated in a one-room museum off Karlova street, religious reformer Jan Hus who was the subject of a large exhibition at the Clam-Gallas Palace, and filmmaker Karel Zeman whose ground-breaking work in animation is illustrated in a museum near the west end of the Charles Bridge.
Also we made a repeat visit to the Museum of Communism which ironically is located above a McDonald’s and next to the Casino on Na Prikope. As we first visited the then Czechoslovakia before the ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989, we know that the situation described in the museum is no exaggeration.
You can find an overview of my visits to Prague here.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
A little story from Prague
January 8th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
At the start of a long weekend in Prague, Vee and I did what we always do which is walk and walk around this beautiful city. The snowfall of the last few days is melting and the Christmas tree in the Old Town Square was being taken down, but we are here for friends not the festivities.
Now, back at home, we have some delightful Christmas tree decorations which we bought in Prague years ago and we have some friends who said that they would love to have something similiar. Today we came across a shop selling such baubles and purchased a set.
In Britain these days, we have lots of workers from Central & Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Baltic States. But, here in Prague, such workers are generally from even poorer countries even further east.
So the shop manager was from Bosnia-Herzegovina and her colleague was from from Azerbaijan but spoke Turkish as well. I managed to say ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’ to the manager in Serbo-Croat and to other guy in Turkish as well as muttering a bit of Czech – so they gave us a discount!
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Another visit to beautiful Prague
January 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
In the late 1980s, Vee (whose father was a Czech pilot in the war) re-established contact with her family – the Kuttelwaschers – in what was then Czechoslovakia and, about the same time, we first met the Czech doctor Pavel whose wife and children – the Horvaths – became as close as family to us.
Since then, we have visited what is now the Czech Republic about once a year. We are travelling to Prague for a long weekend on what is my 26th trip and is Vee’s 24th. Vee might well be back in the Autumn because she is expecting some events to be held to mark the 100th anniversary of her father’s birth.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)