[T]oday’s highbrow signifier is tomorrow’s Beanie Baby.

And vice versa, of course.

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:

For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.

Not that anyone who needs to is listening.

I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.

George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep. 

Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.

Scrabblers of the world, unite!

Peter Molnar's excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That's the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.

> As is often the case, Dave is focused on RSS rather than the web per se.