Ale with Marrowbone
On Edinburgh’s Royal Mile last week.
How to solve iOS battery drain.
Smartphone batteries that charge in 30 seconds.
How Biz Stone faked his way into Google. I remember his “genius” schtick. Now I feel old.
Daily Mail headlines replaced with user comments.
Climate change refugees are evacuating their island homes.
Rising CO2 is causing the nutritional content of crops to fall.
The chance that climate change is not manmade is 0.01 percent.
The spectacular fall in the cost of solar power.
Mitigation is a bargain, but for a limited time only.
The death of Sue Townsend hits hard. I was fourteen in 1982 and had started my own diary that year, so was an eager audience for the first Adrian Mole book. I’ve been reading them ever since, as each new one appeared: a kind of fictional 7 Up series, but featuring my peers, albeit as seen by an elder. It helped that they contained some of the best comic writing around: funny, cutting, warm, wise.
Popular galloped through 1997 in just over two months, which is some sort of track record. I wasn’t expecting to like as many of the year’s UK number ones as I did—over half of them, in the end. Here are my more substantial comments on the year’s closing hits.
Some of my weightier musical thoughts from meaty Popular threads, as its canter through 1997 continued.