Members of Darren Rewcastle's family lay flowers and grieve in Duke Street at the point where he was killed yesterday on June 3, 2010 in Whitehaven, England. 12 people were shot dead yesterday and a further 25 people injured after a 52 year old man named as Derrick Bird went on a rampage with a shotgun in west Cumbria before killing himself. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images.
"Do they have an al Qaeda ad, you know, come as you are? You know?" – Bill O'Reilly, on McDonald's gay-friendly ad campaign called "come as you are."
Liz Halloran counts the heads:
Fourteen Republican women are in the running for the U.S. Senate. In 2008, just three Republican women competed in the general election, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. And 94 are still vying for House seats, compared to 46 at about the same time in the primary cycle two years ago. Also telling? Sixty of the 106 women who are challenging incumbents for House seats are Republican.
Encouraging, no?
A reader writes:
You wrote, “Not to mention the possible evolutionary connection between breasts and posteriors.” Take it away, David Brent.
Another writes:
Jeff Murdock, from the great British sitcom “Coupling,” had an unforgettable quote about this:
Fact is, some women don’t have large breasts, and they’re people too. Maybe they’d like the freedom to show us their bottoms instead of their breasts. Maybe they’d enjoy a more flexible arse-friendly beach that says: ‘Hey, so long as you’ve got cleavage, who cares which way it’s facing.’
The Economist looks at the work of six architectural practices that "have been asked to produce projects with a vision for 2030.":
Pretty much all of the presentations assumed that cars would be self-piloting within 20 years, and that their interiors would, to some extent, be transformed into extensions of living spaces… Another more radical step would be to question the notion of personal mobility itself. At the moment, people need such mobility because there are things they want to bring home as well as places they need to get to. Electronic networks may change that. It is not completely far-fetched to imagine charming, vast and dense cities in which most human movement takes place on foot while most movement of goods is by robot delivery systems.
Oh please God. The fewer cars the better.
"Video for the Portland band AU, from their new release Versions."
Ida Walked Away from takcom™ on Vimeo.
My column last Sunday took on the 21st Century role of British immigrants in America:
The blunt Brit is now almost a stock figure. Last week saw the final American Idol featuring Simon Cowell as a judge. Cowell is better known in America than, say, the Supreme Court’s
chief justice or three-quarters of Barack Obama’s cabinet. At some point in a distant Wildean past, a British musical judge might be expected to be wittier than his peers. Cowell is witless, inexpert, inarticulate and touchy. He just possesses a series of ugly prejudices and crude hunches and the ability to tell someone to their face that they’re rubbish. In Britain, who really cares? In America he’s a legend.
Or contrast Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant reality show in America with the British version. In the US, he’s far ruder and the recipients of his bile much less socially prepared for it. And so the Brits have found a niche in fostering embarrassment among Americans by saying things Americans in general are far too polite to bring up.
Christopher Hitchens cannot be reduced to this. His first common identity in America was leftism, just as mine was conservatism. He seems to have read everything and met everyone, as his addictive new memoir, Hitch-22, proves. His prose is almost as enjoyable as his company. But he only reached his apotheosis in American culture by attacking the one thing Americans have historically shied from attacking: God. Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II and Princess Diana were not enough. He needed the Big One to become the Loved One.
More here.
(Photo: Simon Cowell attends the Collars and Cuffs Ball at the Royal Opera House on September 17, 2009 in London, England. By Chris Jackson/Getty Images).
A reader writes:
Check out this report (pdf) on tort liability by the Pacific Research Institute. Sarah Palin is now writing the forewords for "think tank" studies? Bruce Bartlett could not be more right about how intellectual void these organizations have become. At the very least, it just shows how relevant she is in the current Republican party. Please keep up the good fight!
Ramat Eshkol, Haifa, Israel, 8.53 am
The Dish 