Since drivers of 4×4s tend to be regarded as braying, selfish, middle class dummies - their penchant for oversized cars that are much too big for the school run barely disguising an inherent bullying streak - I can’t think of a better way for Land Rover to lay this image to rest than by creating [...]

Someone predicted on a forum on the Liverpool Echo website at 10.28am yesterday that Arsenal would draw Liverpool, Man Utd would get Roma and Chelsea would play Fenerbahce, leaving Barcelona v Schalke in the quarter finals of the Champions League. The idea of fixing a live cup draw seems initially ridiculous until you consider the [...]

As you will no doubt have noticed, this site looks a bit different today. I’ve got me a new super-minimalist theme called Stripped by Upstart Blogger. I’m a fan of minimal, functional design and, since the emphasis round these parts is on words, this theme is perfect because all the other distracting stuff is dumped [...]

While it’s probably advisable not to get sucked into the largely fatuous online “debate” Channel 4 is trying to stoke up, I found it a bit daft that Manchester was rated the 17th worst place to live in a “Best and Worst” list on Channel 4 last night.
As is usual with this annual feast of [...]

I’ve written some words in celebration of the motorway, on recently relaunched car website Motortorque, which is a fine site for petrol-heads everywhere. The piece is inspired by the recent BBC Four documentary The Secret Life of the Motorway, which sounds like the most boring three-part series ever but really wasn’t.
When the Preston bypass opened [...]

World Architecture News claims its servers have been attacked by the Chinese government after “ruffling some feathers” over its reports on Beijing.
The London-based news service this week ran a comment piece by editor Michael Hammond, which suggested the Chinese are “deliberately courting controversy” by hiring Frankfurt-based AS&P, to redesign part of Beijing. The practice was [...]

Since Friday, I seem to keep reading stuff about something called Parakey. I can’t quite figure out what it is other than some kind of operating system that “bridges the gap between information on the web and the desktop”. No mainstream news source I’ve so far come across (and admittedly I haven’t looked very hard) [...]