Yes I know they’re Easter eggs – it’s a post modernist ironic statement* and protest at seeing chocolate easter eggs and cards for sale in a high street store before Christmas. Bah humbug.
* this may or may not be alcohol-induced mumbo jumbo. Hic.
p.s. You can create similar personalised greetings from the wonderful LetterJames
p.p.s. And this is one of the loveliest posts I’ve ever read.
One of the best things about being on holiday (and long car journeys) is the chance to listen to the radio properly instead of settling down to listen to a programme and realising after 30 minutes that you’ve become engrossed in a project and missed the damn thing.
There have been some cracking programmes on this week but I’ll just point you to three before I get off to bed:
The People’s D-Day, moving accounts of ordinary people caught up in the planning of D-Day.
Front Row on Thursday night:
George W Bush has provoked more artistic hostility than any previous first-term President. With guests including film director Jonathan Demme, dramatist David Hare and satirist Rory Bremner, Mark Lawson examines anti-Bush movies, documentaries, novels, plays and jokes and why most American voters ignored them.
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. A brilliant way to take your mind off what’s happening in the world.
Want to find some interesting programmes? It’s always worth going to the Radio 4 Listen Again page and taking pot luck.
“We realize that what we are accomplishing is a drop in the ocean. But if this drop were not in the ocean, it would be missed.”
– Mother Theresa
It’s wonderful to see so many people across the world giving what they can to help survivors in Southeast Asia and Benjamin Rosenbaum has put together some research* on the efficiency of various charities. It’s not something that’s discussed much but as we’ll all be digging deep over the coming months it’s a good idea to make sure that your money is going to a charity that disperses funds effectively and (if it bothers you) doesn’t do the God thing.
* Thanks to [NSFW] Flip for the link.
Picture courtesy BBC News
And so to 24. But this won’t be the last post, the survivors and their families in South East Asia will be needing our help over the coming months and we just cannot “forget” what has happened and move on.
Other donation news:
Neil has decided that “all profits received from the advertising on his site from Sunday until the end of this week will be donated to the British Red Cross”.
If you work for Sun and intend giving help, Alan Burlison’s blog [via Robert Scoble] reports that the Sun Foundation will be matching employee donations – with over 36,000 employees, that will be a sizeable help to the people needing our aid.
Via Dave Goodman comes Nellie McKay playing piano and singing The Dog Song.
From Kimberly comes the beautifully designed manybooks.net, a site containing a number of books for online reading or downloading in a variety of formats. And it’s not limited to English – French, Dutch, Japanese, Welsh and others are covered too.
I’ve just downloaded The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire by James Jennings and A Short History of Wales by Owen M. Edwards, (produced from the 1922 T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. edition):
Next to its unity, a characteristic of modern Wales is its democratic feeling. It is a country with a thoughtful and intelligent peasantry, and it is a country without a middle class. There is a very small upper class − the old Welsh land-owning families who once, before they turned their backs on Welsh literature, led the country. They have never been hated or despised, they are simply ignored. Their tendency now is to come into touch with the people, and they are always welcomed. But a middle class, in the English sense, does not exist. The wealthier industrial class is bound by the closest ties of sympathy to the farmer and labourer. The farmer’s holding is generally small – from 50 to 250 acres – and he always treats his servants and labourers as equals.
If anyone needs a Gmail account, I have half a dozen to give away in exchange for a donation to the charity of your choice.
Don’t need another email address? That’s what I said. But a spare 1 gigabyte chunk of storage is terribly useful for transferring files around!
Just a few days in and the Amazon Honor System collecting funds for the American Red Cross has collected $1,050,040.00 from 20,662 payments.
Having cleaned upstairs, I’m now having fun with an ironing board and a large pile of sheets. How about you?
“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” – I can barely keep my eyes open so I’m not going to make the 24 post target tonight, will carry on tomorrow instead. More opportunities to win one of those highly sought after* Daisy Compilation CDs!
Thank you to everyone who stopped by. I know that a lot of the charity websites are having difficulty coping with demand but do dig deep and keep trying.
* well, my mother wants one.
A huge Wikipedia entry for the disaster is already in place.
Making donations even easier – Amazon are taking donations for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief.
These links are updated frequently thoroughout the day. Should you miss any they're all stored on my Delicious pages.
