Posts by Russell Brown
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Then the article is wrong.
The MORI polls (online) show Conservative support at 34% in March, before the Falklands war (in fact, before anybody had even heard of the Falklands), and rising to 48% in June, when the war ended. That was not due to economic policy. During those three months, economic policy barely made the news. Sorry, but you really *did* have to be there. I've never experienced anything like it.
I read up a bit on the lead author, David Sanders. He's certainly not crazy, but his whole thing is predicting government popularity based on economic policy, so it's not so surprising that he'd argue in that direction.
I think this is one area where the conventional wisdom still holds sway.
Moreover, the ensuing election was a multi-party fight under the FPP system. It was not an endorsement of Thatcherism, as economic policy (as opposed to Maggie the Boadicea). But it was a total rejection of Labour.
Not surprising either, given the way Labour went. I arrived three years later, and spent years watching poor old Neil Kinnock try and push back Militant Tendency.
There's a superb BBC4 three-parter about the British radical left of the late 70s and early 80s, called Lefties. Lots of great what were they thinking? moments,
There's a marginally-seeded public torrent here, but UKNova users may be interested to know it was recently re-seeded there too. It's well worth your data cap.
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Oh, and the Domobar is finally back home. I'm still slightly annoyed they managed to make 1.5 hours labour take three weeks (and it was in pieces on a bench for the whole third week), but I'm grateful and impressed that they haven't just serviced it but upgraded several pieces.
Just made a coffee. I could see it was coming out beautifully straight away by the blobbing and tiger-striping. I'm now back to wondering why 90% of cafes can't make a cup as good as some munter like me can make at home ...
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What's "quickly"? I finally have stuff to post today ...
I've copied you in to an email to someone who might be able to help, on your Inspire address.
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Anyone had a cup of Civet coffee that goes for 50 pounds a cup in London?
No. I was totally up for the equivalent weasel coffee when I visited Vietnam last year, but no bugger had heard of it.
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Fuck me - I've been shut down as a "spam blog". It's a false positive, brought about by my pernicious habit of linking to content on news sites, but it means I can't post until some dumbarse in America actually looks at the blog and manually unlocks it. Which given US standards of "customer service", could never happen.
Giz a yell if it looks like it's not quickly resolving. I might know someone who knows someone.
But I'm seeing No Right Turn displaying right now. Is it that they've disabled your Blogger login?
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There was actually, I think the Havana boys opened Midnight Espresso in 1988 or 89, Wellie coffee culture took off very quickly from there.
In Auckland, DKD opened in 1985, I think. There were a few other places serving espresso (what was the health-food plae in Lorne St?), but it's generally agreed that you can trace the Auckland cafe culture from there.
But it is probably true to say that the cafe thing really took off from about 1991. Urbi et Orbi (the precursor to Brazil) opened that year in K Road, and it was all about the coffee.
I was friends with the Incubator Studio guys at the time, and it wasn't entirely untrue that they put as much effort into the coffee (made with Atomic stovetops bought at auctions) as they did their sound engineering.
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Singapore, OTOH, was dreadful; we had to resort to Starbucks ...
Me too. That was after trying Coffee Connoisseurs, where I was made to wait ages for a very expensive and completely hopeless long black.
Oddly, the Starbucks coffee around the corner was actually okay.
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I was going to leap to the fore and defend American food
Anthony Bourdain made great play of doing that in his first book, but when it came down to it, he was basically defending dull food.
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Before we had *$s in London, coffee was either instant or (worse IMHO) from a filter jug.
Part of my payday ritual in London in 1986 was going to Monmouth Coffee in Covent Garden and selecting beans and having them ground for me. I was just brewing coffee on the stovetop, but the mocha java beans seemed nice and exotic.
And there was espresso in the West End too -- notably from Bar Italia, which always seemed authentic and exotic. I dragged a bunch of people along there straight off the plane when I was back in 2000. Sadly, it became evident that if Bar Italia ever had made great espresso, it certainly didn't do so by 2000.
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Since always. And Friedman's remark that if Allende had been left in power a few years down the road the Chileans would have fared even worse than under Pinochet is despicable to say the least. The man wasn't deposed; he was murdered.
That reminds me of Owen McShane's infamous quote about how Allende et al never got credit for the way they paved the way for democracy in Chile. He didn't seem to grasp that the guy they killed had been elected.
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