Archive for August, 2010
How many films have you seen?
August 24th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
The holder of the world record has just gone to that great screen in the sky, having seen a stunning 28,000 films with each one noted. I confess that I have a card index system recording all the films that I’ve seen and the total is now close to 2,000. Many hundreds of them are […]
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Birth and death in Cornwall
August 24th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I was interested in the news that, while on holiday in Cornwall, the Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron has unexpectedly given birth to a baby girl, their fourth child, who arrived at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. My wife’s father – the Czech wartime night fighter ace Karel Kuttelwascher – was taken to this […]
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How big should a parliamentary constituency be?
August 24th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Here, in the UK, currently we elect 650 Members of Parliament to the House of Commons on the basis of one MP per geographical constituency using the electoral system called first-past-the-post (FPTP). But the Coalition Government has plans that could change this. It intends to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. Currently […]
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How has the Internet changed you?
August 23rd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
There’s been a series of articles recently speculating about whether use of the Internet is changing the way our brains are wired and how we think. There was this article in the “Observer” and another one in the “Guardian”. The timing is partly the fact that summer is such a quiet period for hard news […]
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This week’s national election (2)
August 22nd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I’ve already done a posting about one national election this week. This was in Rwanda where the result could not have been clearer. The other national election this week was in Australia where the result is so close that we still do not know the final outcome and might not for some days or even […]
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What Americans believe
August 21st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
In the United States, a new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say President Barack Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do […]
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This week’s national election (1)
August 21st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Earlier this week, a country went to the polls to elect a president. The turnout was a staggering 97.5% and the man who won secured an amazing 93% of the vote. You probably hear nothing about it and yet this was a country that recently suffered one of the worst genocides in recent history. The […]
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The Government’s “Spending Challenge”
August 20th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
You might laugh; you might cry; you might become angry. I refer to the 44,000 ideas that the great British public has put forward for cutting expenditure on which the Government is now kindly inviting us to vote on its “Spending Challenge” website. Is this any way to run a country?
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The digital state of the nation
August 19th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Each August, Ofcom publishes its “Communications Market Report”- a comprehensive and accessible examination of the UK’s TV, radio, broadband, telecoms and mobile industries – and receives considerable publicity for it. This is partly because it is genuinely fascinating, partly because the media loves to comment on the media, and partly because the media has less […]
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The world of short stories
August 19th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
In the last year or so, I’ve read and written a lot of short stories – a fiction form that I think is underrated. I’ve just finished a book of eight short stories by the Canadian author Alice Munro which I’ve reviewed here. My own short story writing now encompasses 23 tales which you can […]
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