Book Review: Myself When Young (1938)


My sex must have been a disappointment to my parents, as they already had three daughters and only one son, but their disappointment was probably not so great as my own, for I longed to be a boy, and, while staying with my uncle, Sir Walter Farquhar, at Polesdem Lacey, my delight was to wear my cousin's clothes, to climb trees, chase pigs, ride barebacked ponies and play cricket with the stablebovs.

I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the autobiographies of prominent women in society. Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was the wife of…

Continue reading →

Book Review: Fallen Idols - Alex von Tunzelmann


Book cover showing the disembodied head of Lenin's statue lying on its side.

"History is not erased when statues are pulled down. It is made." Some people celebrated when Saddam's statue was toppled in Iraq. Yet those same voices condemn the felling of Coulson, Rhodes, and a dozen other statues. Why? Alex von Tunzelmann has a knack for getting to the heart of history in an accessible manner. There isn't a hefty amount of ponderous academic theory to wade through - just well researched stories mixed with contemporary accounts. Statues don't have human rights. But our…

Continue reading →

Using date-based CSS to make old web pages *look* old


Screenshot of an early BBC news website from the 1990s. The page looks old fashioned.

How do you know you're looking at an old website? You may have found a page which has lots of interesting information, but how can you tell it's a modern and relevant result? Some websites don't contain dates in their URls. There may not be a © date or publication date shown on the page. And the <meta> tags might not contain anything useful. If you're lucky, the site will look old fashioned: Unlike the BBC, most sites have adopted the "Eternal CSS" pattern. When fashions change, the entire …

Continue reading →

Who said "Brits think 100 miles is a long distance - Americans think 100 years is a long time"?


Unfortunately or fortunately, this situation will prevail for some time to come, because the United States, as a nation, is going through a delayed adolescence, and we are questioning everything. We are a very new country, even if we are an old democracy, and we don't have it all down yet. As my friend Simon, an Englishman, says, "The British think a hundred miles is a long way; Americans think a hundred years is a long time."

It's one of those pithy little quotes which reveals so much about our two cultures. The average Briton considers anything more than a 45 minute trip a bit of a schelp, whereas Americans will seemingly drive half a day just to get some ribs from that one place they like. Conversely, I went to school opposite a church which pre-dated Columbus's invasion of North America - and I doubt that was the oldest church in the town! But who said it first? Oh, there are a variety of sites online which…

Continue reading →

Bryan Adams lied to you


A white plastic desktop phone with QWERTY keyboard and a video screen.

I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this: It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that…

Continue reading →

Book Review: "The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems" by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow


Book cover showing a photo of a row of Roman toilets.

I wish I could remember who recommended this book to me. It's not something that I'd usually choose to read, but it was surprisingly interesting. How did Romans take a shit? That's at the heart of this book. Not just the how - but the why, the when, and the where. How did foreign toilet habits influence the state? Was hygiene properly understood? What are the limits of Roman engineering. The book is interesting without being particularly entertaining. This isn't a Mary Roach style wander…

Continue reading →

Anti-Suffragette Postcards


Three postcards. The first shows a toddler girl writing on a blackboard - childishly writing things like "give us our rights" and a hangman showing a man being hanged. The second is of a fat and unattractive woman with the name "Aught To Be Spanked First" - she is saying "We only want what the men have got". The last is entitled Man's Reward and shows a woman using an umbrella to beat a policeman.

Due to a strange mix-up with an eBay order, I've come into possession of these rather quaint anti-suffragette postcards. I hope it is obvious that I am pro universal suffrage. What amuses me about these cards is how emotional they are! These aren't dispassionate arguments designed to calmly influence the rational man. It is all pure emotion! Looking through the archives of anti-suffragette postcards it's clear that men can't be expected to follow a logical argument; they have to be…

Continue reading →

Touring TNMOC with a living legend


Photo of Bruce Perens and me waving at the camera. In the background is a banner for OpenUK and lots of old computer science books.

This is a retropost. It was written in 2022, but published later. Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode. Errr... OMG, yes! So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the GDS office, gushing about how much open source stuff we did - then got to watch him record a…

Continue reading →

Shakespeare's Missing Smile


Scan of a yellowing page. The ext has no brackets.

Exactly a decade ago, I wrote about how Shakespeare invented the emoticon. Nestled deep in "Winter's Tale" is the first recorded use of the typographic smilie :) As I discussed, Sir Smile's smile appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th folios. One hundred years after the 4th folio was printed, the smile vanished. The 1786 edition simply omits it. At the time, I didn't have access to any other versions between 1685 and 1786 - but I'm delighted to tell you that I've now found one! The Hathi…

Continue reading →

Book Review: Empireland - How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera


Book cover. A British bulldog sits atop a statue's column.

After reading Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire I was keen to read more about my country's history. It's weird that studying history in the UK consists of the Tudors, Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution, and the World Wars. Nothing about how modern Britain came to exist, our empire, its global and local consequences, or the path it put us on. I guess we have to learn that from random statues before they experience marisepultura… Sanghera is very clear this isn't a purely academic history b…

Continue reading →

Early forms of Interactive TV


A tiny black and white image of a boy on a telephone.

Way back in the mists of time, I did my secondary-school work experience at the BBC. Specifically, Children's BBC. Every day for a couple of weeks, I'd commute into White City, wander those hallowed halls, sit at a desk, and... You know... I can't remember! I know I got to visit the "Broom Cupboard", and I'm pretty sure I did a lot of data entry, oh - and I sat in a meeting for "Two-Way TV". These were the early days of the consumer Internet. The WWW was still brand new and it wasn't certain…

Continue reading →

Book Review: No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front 1970-73 by Lisa Power


Book cover featuring a GLF protest.

The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before ‘queer’ was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we had a word for it. Their direct action and street theatre were the envy of the rest of the r…

Continue reading →