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A new musical about the proposed, controversial disposal of oil company Shell’s Brent Spar oil storage facility in 1995 has inspired Glasgow theatre company Sleeping Warrior’s latest musical. The demise of the giant, rusting, yellow monolith rising 135 meters above the North Sea sparked a global media storm, prompting both public and political protest that included the boycotting of Shell petrol stations, physical assaults, and an arson attack against Shell …

This is the 57th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Justin Duke and his blog, jmduke.com I'm particularly happy to have Justin as a guest on P&B because in addition to be a person with a blog—something I clearly appreciate—he's the founder of Buttondown, a service I used since 2019 and the one used …

a faint trail that leads into the woods in austin, texas. it runs down the middle of a clearing in a residential area. across the bottom of the picture sit a bunch of large rocks creating a border. hey! who put those rocks there? Social service organizations, like nonprofits and foundations, love resiliency! In their world, resiliency means a person’s ability to bounce back after a crisis. A person might …

Janet Johnson (1858 - 1955) pioneer welfare worker.Lived at 39 Redcross Way. She became the first woman Guardian of the Poor in Southwark in1888, devoting her life to the condition of poor workhouse internees, She became manager of the Central London School for Orphans and Destitute Children at Hanwell, initiating humanitarian reforms with new ideas on education, clothing and diet.Historic Southwark

PC After about a year in early access, Ravenswatch (not a game about choosing a new fabric with raven print, I’m sad to say) is properly out, and it’s a tremendous mix of Hades and Torchlight. Yes, we’re once again back in the parallel universe where a game that has everything people want isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Honestly, this feels like it could be a forgotten Supergiant game, …

Introduction # Welcome to the first post of our development diary for the Bonfire native app. In this series, we'll journey together through the entire process of designing and publishing Bonfire on the Apple App Store using LiveView Native (LVN), an experimental framework that enables developers to build native applications using Elixir. We're focusing on iOS first because the current LVN release targets the Apple ecosystem (iOS and macOS, but …

“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” For many young radicals in the 1960s, these words from Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana were instructions to be taken seriously. Richard Gott’s despatch from Bolivia, published in The Guardian on 19 August 1967 and reproduced in full below, exemplifies how this internationalist revolutionary commitment translated into political action that would shape a generation of left-wing thinkers. When Gott …

All of these stunning elevation maps of the world’s continents (except Australia and Antarctica) are the brain child of cstats1 who you can follow on X/Twitter here and Instagram here. And if you’d like to support them you buy something from their Amazon shop here. The first map above is an elevation map of Europe. Here are the highest and lowest points in Europe: Highest Point In Europe: Mount Elbrus, …

“Do the hard things” – Futurist Jim Carroll How many times do you say to yourself, “I’ll do the easy things first!” And then you just keep doing the easy things over and over again, always avoiding the hard stuff. And you never make any progress – because at some point or other, you have to do the hard things. What if you did the hard things first? What if …

Murder at the Monastery by Richard Coles Canon Daniel Clement, Vicar of Champton, is not having a good time in this fascinating novel. The Reverend Richard Coles continues his series of mysteries set in the English countryside in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where Daniel’s thoughtful approach means that justice can be done. This third novel, however, is set mainly in a monastery, and even with some specialist knowledge …

The last piece (for the minute) for Rhiw is a skip; one of those that sits by the lineside with a mix of gash inside and seemingly has no means of being retrieved.The root is one of a pair from the Peco Modelscene range which is stamped Leafdale Models 1988 underneath. A couple of coats of paint to dull the bright yellow plastic and then the full scrapbox treatment for …

Photo: Anna-Rose McChesney Drawing is the act of translating a thought to a mark on the page—where the hand is in conversation with the mind. This conversation is marked by an unbridgeable gap between the idea and the output—sometimes betraying and exposing the thought, and other times surprising you with an unintended vigour and clarity. Miles Davis once said that ‘what makes a wrong note right is the note you …

Kinn Hamilton McIntosh is a British mystery novelist, known as "Catherine Aird," who started her writing career in the sixties with The Religious Body (1966) and published her most recent novel, Constable Country (2023), when she was 93 – bringing the tally to twenty-nine published novels and short story collections. All except the non-series, standalone novel A Most Contagious Game (1967) featured her series-characters, Inspector C.D. Sloan and Detective Constable …

You know how “all the books say” not to cut Lavender back too hard, as it won't grow back.... well, a fortnight ago, I was doing the annual clip of a low Lavender hedge, and I spotted this: Uh-oh... is that a bare brown patch coming up?Hahaha! I'm teasing you, this was not a case of it having been cut back too hard, it's a case of two of the …