Happy Birthday, Speccie! Your 175th, actually. There's a special issue out - only five free articles on the web, of which the Graham Greene competition is probably the funniest - but The Spectator itself (my favourite comic in the whole wide world, I have to say) is still in fine fettle. Among the more interesting articles in today's issue, Paul Robinson's delirious defense of West Point and its highly questionable Code of Honour (whereby you're compelled to rat on your fellow cadets if they lie, cheat or steal, or be expelled if you're found out covering up for them) and Melanie Phillip's firm opinion that the evidence of the Hutton Inquiry shows that Blair - Shock! Horror! - spoke the truth about Iraq are probably the most provocative. Damien McCrystal's tirade against fat nannies is the most predictably outrageous and typical. But the whole issue (I am particularly fond of Jeremy Clarke's column) is a cracker. No other weekly (or even monthly) conservative magazine is anywhere near as good. Congratulations, old fruit!
posted by MiguelCardoso on Sep 25, 2003 - 12 comments

At Last A Luxurious Arts And Belles Lettres Magazine You Can Afford: If you have zilch, it's yours: The SCREAMonline, full of goodies for your pleasure. There's Kenn Brown's 8.5 foot DNA illustration [Flash req.]; sober reflections on the fattening of America; the strangely beautiful and boring Mt.Wilson Tower cam; Michael Corrigan's Confessions of a Shanty Irishman; some classic quotations from Woody Allen and the likes; a selection of bizarre record covers - and much more that is lovely to look at and entertaining to read. It's not exactly FMR, but then, how could it be? A propósito, does anybody know of other rich coffee-table weblogs or online magazines that are worth reading and yet look good enough to leave lying around on one's monitor? ;) And isn't still amazing that there are still so many free luxury items on the Web? [Via woods lot, itself a superb left-of-field example of the genre, much as it might pain it to be so described.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Apr 4, 2003 - 10 comments

Philip Glass, Late Twentieth-Century Music And Your PC, Sort Of... Andante's Carte Blanche is a new multimedia magazine dedicated to contemporary music. Its first guest-editor is Philip Glass and he's assembled an interestingly unscholarly, offbeat and pleasantly accessible issue. At least for those of us who generally pay contemporary music (too) little attention. I wonder why this is, as it's invariably challenging or enlightening when we do. Who knows? Perhaps Carte Blanche may convince some of us pop-obsessed philistines to change our ways... [ Composer John Adams, writer Susan Sontag, choreographer Mark Morris and British director Jonathan Miller will follow in what promises to be an unmissable online proposition.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Aug 1, 2002 - 12 comments