The Oblong Office
The 16th Inspector Rebus novel: The Naming of the Dead. Takes place during the G8 summit in Edinburgh, as the alcoholic detective struggles to investigate two murders despite the vast distraction and the inevitable suspension. GOOD GRIEF WHY HAVEN'T YOU PENCIL-PUSHERS WORKED OUT THAT EVERY TIME YOU SUSPEND HIM HE JUST KEEPS ON INVESTIGATING? PUT HIM ON TRAFFIC DUTY! SEND OUT A MEMO SAYING 'DON'T LET REBUS IN THE POLICE STATION HE'S BEEN SUSPENDED'!.
Pretty cleverly worked out. Like the way that Rebus is struggling more and more against the hierarchy with the Farmer gone.
One more to go and that's the series over.
Museums
Dropped in at the
Mark Rothko
exhibition at Tate Modern. Unites the large blurry rectangles of
their Rothko Room with large blurry rectangles from private collections.
Seemed a bit crap really. They're all pretty much the same, so you don't really get any sense of evolution or changes in his work. I suppose that thinking in terms of Wolfflin's oppositions you could see it as taking each opposition to the logical extreme: the blurriness makes them Painterly not Linear, their all in a Plane with no Recession, the Clarity is all Recessive and since they're rectangles they display Unity not Multiplicity. However, that doesn't mean it's not crap. The paintings don't even seem to have interesting textures or anything.
However, if you like large blurry rectangles, this is definitely the show for you.
Guardian, Times, Times reviews.
Web
Video.
Tilt-shift beach
(MeFi).
Homer Simpson votes.
Crawling Neutrophil Chasing a Bacterium
(MeFi).
Wagstaff: Whatever it is, I'm against it.
Random. The Angry Police Captain. Movie typefaces.
Articles. The Great Depression in the UK
Secret forests coexist with farmers.
...in 1950, the average house size was 983 square feet, whereas by 2007 it was just a hair under 2,500 square feet, even as the size of the average family shrunk.Simon Jenkins on Ian Blair:
He established respect but never full command over a notoriously recalcitrant force used to getting its own way on a loose rein from the Home Office. He never fully combated such covert and costly corruption as the overmanning of big-overtime events and the aversion to street patrols. The one international rating on which London’s police outscore all others is on VIP protection, which is no surprise to observers of the modern capital. The West End and housing estates are almost unpoliced or left to community wardens and private security firms while Whitehall and parliament crawl with chatting officers.
| < on the so-called weekend | Monday the 6th of October 2008 > |
