Die Toaster! Die!

The notebook is full ... of rubbish. The first entry is the fact that tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the exact date when Winston Smith started his diary and therefore began his defiance of Big Brother. Mark the date well.

Then comes the fact that an error message I saw on a web page regarding development howlers was jokingly compared to Klingon - to be exact the following phrase - Hab SoSlI' Quch! - an insult so vile that it must not be said to friends. I also have a mention of The Marcos Twins but that is to do with shoes.

The reason for the self-portrait of Stanley Spencer being up there is from this article regarding art from reputed History Man Laurie Taylor. I always think that the picture that is mentioned is by Stanley Spencer rather than Lucien Freud. Not sure of the full drift of the last bit of Taylor's piece - was it Lucien Freud he met or just someone who looked like him and the fact was mentioned all the time? Laurie Taylor is always a bit airy-fairy on Thinking Allowed.

Final bit is an image that has been bugging me for ages. One of the guys in the office often wears a headset to speak on the phone. He is across the office with his back to me and the image of him there has triggered memories for years. Today I worked it out. It is this poster.

I was intrigued by a mocking comment regarding the protests against the G20 regarding the fact that the "great unwashed" were taking pictures of the Police using cheap Chinese-or-Korean-made cameras and the uploading them via a network infrastructure all courtesy of venture capitalists. Now I'm not taking sides other than to say that violence is rilly, rilly bad but I suspect that any group in a conflict would feel rather smug had they managed to turn the enemy's weapons on themselves. Not that plastering a few pictures of riot police on the web is going to change anything is it? It is not ironic that the barbarians who caused the break-up of the Roman Empire then went on to make their disgusting hovels out of the bricks torn from the Roman Villas.