• Richard Herring.com: Warming up – Herring responds to out-of-context quotes in Guardian piece. “To have those contentious lines quoted out of context, with absolutely no explanation of what else takes place can have no other effect than to make the casual (and even the quite careful) reader assume that I am a racist.” He has a point.
• Dan Wilson’s Blog: How 31 Year Olds Consume Media
• Evening Standard: Andrew Gilligan on council ‘propaganda’ newspapers – “In London more writers are currently employed by local authority titles than by the local independent press (which has around 350 editorial staff).”
• Good: Picture Show: Waiting for the End of the World – Photos of bomb shelters from around the globe.
• Guardian: Government releases 20-page guide to using Twitter – Tempting to take the piss but actually sounds quite thoughtful and well done.

The exhibition is held in the Crypt underneath the Metropolitan Cathedral. I’ve only been in here once before and that was for a university exam, when the place was full of little wooden desks. The space itself is spectacular (it’s the only part of Sir Edward Lutyens’ original concept for the cathedral to have been completed) but the approach by foot is torturous. We followed signs for the Crypt and soon enough found ourselves stumbling through a building site. After squeezing between a gap in a fence we then found our path blocked and had to about turn before finally finding the entrance after gambolling over a footbridge in near total darkness (it was about 4.30pm). This wasn’t ideal.

Then, quite a strange thing happened as we were driving back along Catharine Street at just before 6pm. I was listening to Radio Five Live and started to notice the faint sound of ghostly choral voices in the background. I turned the radio off and the choir was silent but when I switched the radio back on, I could hear it again. I figured it was interference from another station and didn’t think too much about it. But the laser beam emanating from the Anglican cathedral at the time aroused my curiosity and, as it turns out, it appears that at the music was reaching my car via an invisible beam. And no, I’m not going insane.

The explanation is a project by sound artist Peter Appleton that aims to connect the Anglican and Metropolitan cathedrals by way of musical resonance. It was happening between 5pm and 6pm yesterday, just as I was driving past.

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 founded by Albert Speer – son of Hitler’s favourite architect of the same name.

Hammond makes a series of rather bold connections between the Nazis’ 1930s Welthauptstadt Germania plan to create a three-mile “central axis” through Berlin and the Chinese government’s current plan for the “new Beijing”, which includes a huge new central thoroughfare. For example:

The Geneva based Centre on Housing rights and evictions has estimated that about 1.5 million Beijing residents will be displaced by the creation of the “New Beijing”. In Berlin, thousands of Jewish tenants were forcibly evicted to make way for the scheme but the outbreak of the Second World War stopped the construction.

Both Speer and the Chinese may find such a forthright comparison rather difficult to stomach. Hammond acknowledges that there has been a long, wide thoroughfare going through Beijing since the the 17th century. But he remains concerned about the selection of AS&P.

Did the Chinese authorities really expect that the media would not pick up on this or must we draw the conclusion that this could have been their intention? Assuming this was the case, they clearly wanted to send a message. That’s scary.

The piece concludes with a note revealing that WAN’s servers have suffered “four massive hacker attacks”, which “were traced back to an IP address in Guangdong controlled by the Chinese Government”.

It contains “an attacking octopus couch, a secret lounge hidden behind a bookcase, captain’s quarters and a steampunk bike rack”. I work from home and, needless to say, my back bedroom contains all these things, and more.

Via Wired. Photos courtesy of Because We Can.