whalers on the moon: curious despatches from an old dream

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

scribesQuite apart from anything else, the past — even the very recent past, maybe especially the very recent present — is a mass of detail that’s hard to take in and process (not least because you have to push away the immediate present to do so). My conference produced a little over 12 hours of conversation in one large (often quite hot, by the end quite airless) room, and the discussion has continued elsewhere, in nearby pubs or bars after the two days of debates; also here at ilm, here at Freaky Trigger, and here and here on tumblr. Resonance 104.4FM broadcast it nearly in full on 25 May and have put the eight extracts up on their mixcloud site here (I don’t know how long for). Continue reading “whalers on the moon: curious despatches from an old dream”

“just” an “accident” mlud

The Ranter — who was there — makes the argument that the NHS demo’s encounter on Saturday with a carful of armed police was probably mischance, bad as it looked. Which may well be true, but, as this seriously terrifying comments thread reveals, the unintended can nevertheless easily become catastrophic.

(As the thread also reveals, weaving away from the thread-topic via the Olympics to the De Menezes shooting, the unplanned can sometimes be enormously valuable and clarifying. But this is not an excuse Sir Ian Blair can help himself to)