Halvard Halvorsen’s tumblelog

A New Citizenship: Professor Michael Sandel delivers four lectures about the prospects of a new politics of the common good
BBC 4 - The Reith Lectures 2009

Jarvis Cocker to appear on Question Time | Music | guardian.co.uk

Indeed. Rarely am I on the same wavelength as the Daily Mail, but in this case I am. Why can’t the Beeb produce intelligent, cheap and exciting telly about modern music (think Tony Wilson) insteading of sending the posse to Glasto?.

BBC’s Glasto army: Why does it take 415 people and cost £1.5m to cover a pop festival? | Mail Online

Good imagery in unexpected places, Don Taylor head of a Vegas union on the recession hitting Vegas,
There’s a lot of steel sticking out of the ground in this valley that’s just sitting there.

Boom days are over in Las Vegas | Business | guardian.co.uk

The article speaks about credibility, but none of the dinosaur acts listed in the article had anything left in their credibility accounts (their bank accounts a different matter). As expected The Rolling Stones is on the top of the list doing a Deutsche Bank bash just before the credit crunch (were they ever credible? I dislike the Stones and Dylan almost as much as U2).

Rock stars for hire (Stones, Dylan, McCartney) - Times Online

The Saturday Walkers Club (SWC) is a London based walking group.

Southeast England is criss-crossed by public footpaths, it includes the chalk cliffs of the South Coast, the gentle hills of the North, South and Wessex Downs, the blubell woodlands of Kent and Surrey, the Chiltern beechwoods, the Thames, the secluded valleys of the Weald, ancient forests, remote heathlands, fields full of wildflowers, and Purbeck’s dramatic coast.

Time Out Book of Country Walks & Saturday Walkers Club

How an Indie Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter | Music Business and Trend-Mongering

World Taximeter is an international taxi fare calculator. The website can currently work out the estimated cost of a taxi fare in a large number of American and European cities.

To work out the fare for a taxi journey you enter your starting point, destination and the time of day of your journey. World Taximeter then returns an estimated fare and a Google Map showing the likely route of your journey.

Just punched in some London data, looks fine to me.

Google Maps Mania: Taxi Fares on Google Maps

THIS BOOK BY AMERICAN AUTHOR John Geiger represents a truly incredible literary achievement. Somehow, against all the odds, he has managed to take several dozen of the most dramatic tales of human survival ever recorded – stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things while stranded on deadly mountainsides or cast adrift on the world’s great oceans – and then, by condensing them into easily digestible gobbets and recounting them in a monotonous back-to-back format, rendered them all spirit-crushingly dull.

Oh dear, the book’s subject seems superb, though. The presence of a ghost helping you along.

Book review: The Third Man Factor, by John Geiger - Scotsman.com Living

For centuries, the jewellery business has been home to trickery and deceit. It is, after all, a business based on illusion: what value is there really to a diamond, except in a drill bit? Why buy a Rolex when any £2 Hong Kong quartz keeps better time? The rubies in the crown jewels of England are now believed to be garnets: the jeweller himself may or may not have known he was passing off a cheap and common stone for among the most precious and prized (although, it should be added, one doesn’t often hear of rubies accidentally being sold at the price of garnets). Used Rolexes are cleaned up and sold as new, with Chinese counterfeit boxes, hanging tags and papers. Used Rolexes are sold as authentic with counterfeit bands — the best of these are made in Italy, and the 18-carat gold is real, so that many jewellers can’t tell a great Italian band from the Swiss product — with little else on the watch that came from a factory in Geneva. Often, the only authentically Rolex part of a used Rolex is the head of the watch — even the movement has been replaced — because the head has a serial number stamped on it that is difficult to duplicate with the precision of Rolex.

Clancy Martin on how he turned life into art - Times Online

A 72-year old man wearing make-up, telling dirty jokes, crooning and serving beefburgers. The Italian prime minister’s alleged seduction regime (plus throw in some cash and jewelry).

One night in Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘harem’ - Times Online