I see England are doing well in the cricket as well.

Kevin Pietersen — best batsman in the world at the moment — a true Englishman as well. A longbowman if ever there was one.

A Longbow:

Eeeee’s off the telly and that innee like. Me and me arhled china will vote for the cheeky chappie and that…obviously … gaahhs withaaahht sayin like daaannitt it like…*

The thick fucking tossers.

*admission: my impression of a cockney accent is shite … any improvements welcome in the comments. Cockernees talk all funny and that — difficult to emulate in written form and that.

The “Bureau of Public Secrets” website is 10 years old.

Inaugurated 22 August 1998, apparently.

For the 10th anniversary, Ken Knabb has posted a brief account of the development of the site, along with a few remarks on the radical potentials and limits of the Internet. And that.

Makes a good point about copyright fascism by publishers…

Thousands of classic works are now online and this in no way causes people to stop buying printed copies. No one says, “I was just about to buy a copy of Shakespeare’s works, but I guess I won’t since they’re now all online.” The Web is useful primarily as a reference resource, where you can check some particular point or search for some particular passage. It’s not very conducive to lengthy reading. Scarcely anybody ever actually reads a whole book online (unless it’s out of print and there’s no alternative). But the more of an author’s writings are online, the more likely it is that new readers will discover him or her.

And the limits of the Internetsweb …

[It] is very useful for brief texts and communications, especially when timeliness is important (news, notices, networking, ongoing projects), or for creating reference archives of important documents. It’s not a good place for serious study. It’s ridiculous to imagine that you will get anything out of Homer or Lao Tzu or Gibbon or Montaigne or Murasaki, or anything else with any depth and subtlety, by clicking to a webpage and glancing at a few “graphically enhanced” excerpts. If you want to find out about Marxism or anarchism or the situationists, you should get books by Marx, Kropotkin, Debord, etc., read them carefully, discuss them, criticize them, try putting their valid aspects into practice, then go back and reread them in the light of those experiments. Only when you have become somewhat familiar with them does it make sense to check the Web for additional texts by or about them, or to seek others who share your interest.The Internet obviously shares some of the alienating features of other media, insofar as it habituates people to passive spectatorship of texts, images, news, ads, propaganda, sensationalistic soundbites, emotionally manipulative melodramas, etc. But it differs enormously from one-way media like radio, television and film in that it also facilitates interaction and participation. The mediocrity of millions of blogs and websites should not blind us to the fact that their very existence is an expression of horizontal popular communication that would have been inconceivable in the top-down, television-dominated world of two or three decades ago.

…

*Warning note — contains some idealism.

Brooker on Make Me a Christian:

[T]he biggest hurdle each of them has had to overcome throughout the series is George himself: his robotic intolerance; his haughty judgments; his stomach-churning opinions stated as fact. Choosing him as its “star” has created a bizarre tension at the heart of the programme: the volunteers have been repeatedly told that Christianity is all about love and acceptance by a man who insists the world must adhere to his dementedly fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. And by giving George a mainstream televisual platform without once pointing out what a marginal and extremist figure he is, the show is hugely unfair on yer average non-lunatic churchgoer, the majority of whom are far more likely to offer you a pot of homemade elderberry jam than hysterically denounce you as a fornicating sinner.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m an atheist defending moderate Christians. Wanna make something of it?