The Hundred Marksian Tuesdays

I see the Fitz made it into Time Out's 50 best West End pubs ( http://www.timeout.com/london/features/2511/5.html ) - best one in Fitzrovia, they reckon. Bit of pub history provided, but strangely no mention of the birth of Fitzrovian Tuesdays, attended by John, Tom, Seumas, Me and an enormous computer monitor.

Sidebar content

Has anyone got any side projects that they'd like to link into from the Fitzrovian Tuesdays sidebar? The new version of blogger allows RSS content to be loaded in very easily, as well as normal text and links.

Hawksmoor: "the Devil's Architect"

Like most popular culture, I've come to this pretty late on, but I read Peter Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor" last week - his gothic thriller based around the six churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It's intriguing rather than hugely enjoyable and ultimately collapses under the weight of its own symbolic structure, but it is worth googling the largely bogus mythologizing, psychogeographic ramblings and high-brow Da Vinci Code-type conspiracies that form part of the Hawksmoor story, which Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair have also made use of in their work. This Guardian article has a more sober take on the churches.

Gonzo

Hunter S. Thompson photography exhibition at the Michael Hoppen gallery 3rd February – 10th March 2007. Looks pretty good, though don't think I'm that likely to be in London over these dates. It's hell in the provinces...

Adsense back

And we're above the magic $100 mark, so can try and get hold of some of the moolah at some stage...

Doomsday Clock

5 minutes to midnight. There's a great line in the Metafilter thread about this link:

As an Iron Maiden fan, I'm looking forward to when it's two minutes to midnight.

New Blogger

We can switch this blog over to the new version of blogger now btw - however you need google (rather than blogger) accounts to post to it. Does everyone have google accounts?

Carbonfund.org

Had a bit of a search and tracked down carbonfund.org - the carbon offset people that RealClimate.org approves of (in its measured, reasonable kind of way).

Going to have a serious look at contributing toward this scheme, or a similar one. Not sure what the most credible UK based scheme would be?

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

I visited the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle this afternoon. Overall the place is really strong on the more intellectual and literary aspects of science-fiction - I'd snobbishly thought it might be just a load of movie props. Lots of early edition books and magazines on display with intelligent accompanying notes. They have the orginal draft of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - he wrote it in longhand and it's a stack of foolscap about 4 foot high. Best of all, London Transport's "Safe Beneath..." poster has made it into the "Brave New Worlds" section!

A bank for wind power

Here's one for the wind power naysayers - various methods of storing off-peak wind-generated energy to use during peak times. Including 'flow batteries', whereby once the battery is fully charged they move the chemicals to a storage tank, fill the battery up again, and charge that - resulting in huge tank of stored energy. And hydro-schemes which pump water up to the reservoir using wind power, then open the sluices for hydro power when needed. Which goes to show that you can't write wind power off - the more we invest in it, the more we'll learn about how to make it more productive and practical. (Log-in required I'm afraid.)

Scottish Taleban

Well Scottish Highlands may lead the way on renewables, but they're clearly not entirely up-to-speed with 21st century

Aaaargh they got the no. 29

Help, I've become a running dog of the reactionary right

Help.

Pee-cycling

Pee-cycling! Is there nothing we can do that isn't harmful? Will we have to start using bed pans again? Note the new NS environment section - pretty good.

Happy new year, by the way. Back at work today - bah!