Dirac Angestun Gesept

Phonographic Performance Ltd, which is apparently the British equivalent of ASCAP or BMI, has released a list of the top 10 most played artists on the last 20 years of British radio.

Number one? George Michael.

Britishness is ‘defined by diet’ says the BBC. A survey last month found that both roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and fish & chips were considered more British than the Queen, the Houses of Parliament, the Beatles, or drinking tea.

The Boston Globe’s got an article on how hard it is to find your way around Boston. Not exactly news, I’d say.

They cite the usual complaints (missing or incorrect signage, one-way streets, multiple streets with the same name) and point out how badly on-line maps deal with the area (the woman who wound up at Downtown Crossing instead of Codman Square because she didn’t give the site a neighborhood name).

My usual problem is making the shift from pedestrian to driver; one-way streets aren’t an issue on foot!

Ron Crews of the Massachusetts Family Institute is quoted in today’s Boston Globe as saying “States should be able to set definitions around marriage, and then one state should respect another state’s definition.”

Why do I get the feeling that the only “respect” he wants is for Massachusetts to deny marriage to same-sex couples from other states, and not for other states to recognize legal Massachusetts same-sex marriages? Since, when he lived in Georgia, he spearheaded their ban on same-sex marriage, I think the answer is pretty clear.

For Ron Crews, “respect” really means “do it my way.”

So, let’s compare and contrast:

9/11 victim’s flag-draped coffin in campaign ad: “entirely approprate” according to Bush spokesman Marc Racicot.

Serviceman’s flag-draped coffin on newspaper front page: fire the person who took the photo, and her husband too.

UPDATE 2004-04-23 17:40: Another Bush spokesman, Trent Duffy, is quoted in the Guardian as saying “the sensitivity and privacy of families of the fallen must be the first priority.” Too bad he wasn’t in Racicot’s position when relatives of 9/11 victims complained about the ad back in March….

When you have a planned outage (presumably to fix the problem that had caused us to lose power 3 times this week), and you claim to have notified us by phone, it would be easier to believe it if: (a) the caller ID boxes (any of them) had any indication of the attempt, (b) the answering machine had any indication of the attempt, and/or (c) the guy we talked to this morning when we called to find out why the power was out and when it might be back hadn’t said “yeah, other people have called and said they didn’t get any notification either”.