Category: journalism

  • Kitten Block – Now for Chrome

    Kitten Block for Firefox now has over 1,000 users and has been verified by Mozilla, but I’ve also had dozens of requests for a version that works with the Chrome browser. So, er, I made one. You can get it here. As with the Firefox version, it’s very simple: no options, just simple kitten-based blocking.…

  • Hither Green in the news, 1893-1984

    The Borough of Lewisham WW2 Memorial, Hither Green Cemetery, erected 1951 One great, unknown benefit of living in Lewisham is membership of the Lewisham Library service. It’s free, and besides allowing you to borrow books the card also gets you access to a load of online resources: being a professional wordmonkey I particularly like having…

  • Kittens vs the Daily Mail

    This is what the Daily Mail website now looks like on my computer. Let me explain. It’s hard to avoid the Daily Mail. Even if you’d never choose to buy a copy, links to its website are everywhere (except this post, obviously). Some are easy to spot and avoid, but when one is obfuscated by…

  • The end of the News Shopper “Star Letter” debacle

    It’s now two weeks since the News Shopper published a nasty homophobic rant and awarded the sender with a prize – a nice new pen from a local store. Last week there was no mention of the whole sorry mess in the paper – strange, given that the paper claimed it was published to “fuel…

  • Star Letter – the clue’s in the name

    Here’s the Star Letter in our local paper, the News Shopper, this week: Thanks to Clay Harris for scanning this and posting it online. And here’s the response from the News Shopper this morning (read from the bottom up): I’m not going to go into detail as this has all been covered more comprehensively elsewhere,…

  • On Marriage..

    This article about marriage is pretty depressing. Not because the number of marriages is falling, you understand. That doesn’t really bother me. But let’s take a look. For the first time ever fewer than 2 in 100 women, over the age of 16, got married in a single year. In 2008 the marriage rate for women…

  • Hitting the road

    Travel certainly rates as one of the most pleasant surprises of my job: before joining Dennis as a Staff Writer I had no idea that magazine work would ever require a passport. As it is, I’ve done plenty of mundane travel around the UK – exploring the glamour of Sutton Coldfield, for example – but…