Russell Davies

Real life

"Chandler was everything I wanted in a boyfriend—smart, funny, emotionally unavailable—and Matthew Perry’s embodiment of him surely shaped the sexuality of a generation. Later, I realized that I didn’t want to date him as much as be him. The other Friends might have struggled to find work (see: Monica’s “mockolate” recipes, Joey’s porn cameo and Rachel’s waitressing) but Chandler had the ultimate 90s problem, in the form of a job that paid the bills but achieved absolutely nothing. Perry’s performance lifted a motif of the decade—the sterile life of the office drone, also found in Fight Club and The Matrix—into exquisite comedy. He bantered by the water cooler. He got sent to Tulsa. He knew that nothing he did mattered, and that his real life was waiting for him at Central Perk."

(Helen Lewis)

UX waste

Every day, multiple times a day I pay for something, cashlessly. And every day, multiple times a day Mastercard insist on showing me their animated logo before they tell me whether the transaction’s gone through. What a senseless waste of human life.

Switching bank account to reduce company carbon emissions

This is brilliant work from Rod. We have to start with the hard work of guesstimating, best approximations, orders of magnitude and hand-waving or we'll never get anywhere.

This for everything please.

Plastic bag

"After years yearning for government, Stewart found it frustrating and dismaying. “If you try to act like a chief executive, the whole system reacts in very strange and unstable ways.” Appointed junior environment minister he demanded a flip chart, then listed his responsibilities — floods, national parks etc — and wrote, “Action?” next to each, to his civil servants’ bemusement. His greatest achievement is introducing the 5p plastic bag tax"

(The Times)(findings)

Haaland

"He plays with the effectiveness of a sovereign wealth fund."

(New Yorker)(findings)

The first step on the ladder to self-knowledge

""We're terrible gossips, but 'gossip' in the sense that Phyllis Rose described it, the first step on the ladder to self-knowledge," Thompson said, adding, "Gossip is discussion about life's detail. And in life's details are all the little bits of stitching that you need to hold it to-fucking-gether." Thompson embodies the poet May Sarton's observation that "one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." Part of female heroism, Thompson says, is decency and taking care of others: "Women will look around and often be aware of what others need. They have to be like that because no one else will fucking do it. Women look after everyone endlessly-and without them there'd be nothing.'"

(New Yorker)(findings)

State Trust of the Fat and Bone Processing Industry

"French parfumiers were active in late imperial Russia, and among their creations was a scent called Le Bouquet Favori de l'Impératrice. After the October Revolut-ion, the parfumier Ernest Beaux relocated to France, met Coco Chanel and offered her an array of choices based on Le Bouquet Favori, from which she selected No. 5. Another parfumier, Auguste Michel, stayed in Russia, working for the TeZhe trust (an acronym for the unromantic State Trust of the Fat and Bone Processing Industry). TeZhe produced Red Moscow, another reworking of the empress's alleged favourite."

(LRB)(findings)

Idea aroma

"Temp music can also leave traces in finished scores. "TIl go to the theatre and think, Hmm, I'll bet they temped this movie with the score to 'Gladiator,' because that's what it sounds like," Bur-well said. "I've also seen films in which I could tell that the temp music had been a piece of mine." For previews of "Banshees," Mc-Donagh used early versions of Burwell's own melodies. The temp track included passages that didn't make it into the final score, but Burwell said that the discarded elements had probably influenced the film- in a good way. "It's like a classic story of how creation works," he said. "You begin with an idea, then you throw the idea away, but the aroma of it is still in the room.""

(New Yorker)(findings)

Pathetic

"The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.)"

(LRB)(findings)

But they knew that it was modern

"Eliot had set out his own ideas about 'the new (the really new) work of art' in his essay 'Trad-ition and the Individual Talent', and the use of the word 'modern' rather than 'new' in the title of The Faber Book of Modern Verse made it sound just a little different and also avoided the word 'modernist', which Eliot disliked in the context of poetry, yet still suggested a distinctive up-to-dateness

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

And danced all the modern dances;

And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,

But they knew that it was modern."

(LRB)(findings)