This caught my eye at Forbidden Planet the other day, and I’m glad I filed it for further inspection. Basically, a British journalist (Dan Hancox) and a British cartoonist (Tom Humberstone, aka The Vented Spleen) are heading off to the US to cover the forthcoming election.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the US election process fundamentally arcane and baffling*. In fact, I know I’m not alone - I’ve had American friends cheerily admit it makes little logical sense to them either.

Everything I know about US politics I learned from Hunter S. Thompson**, and so I’m fascinated by the idea of two British guys aiming to do a Thompson & Steadman style campaign trail trek aimed at reporting back to Blighty on the process.

Not just because this is a pretty important election on a global scale, but because (however unwisely) I actually trust two independent counter-cultural blogger types to give me a better understanding of the process than the mainstream media. If nothing else, I’ll be listening to people I can relate to. Or think I can relate to, at least.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in following, they’ve got their “My Fellow Americans” blog up and running already, posting little preliminary details before the primary race kicks off in the new year.

Hell knows we’re going to be bombarded with information about it whether we like it or not - I figure I might as well stick with a supplier that provides a palatable flavour.

[* I'm not claiming the UK version to be any more logical, by the way. It is, however, vaguely more familiar.]

[** Yes, I know, that's hardly fair and balanced. Sue me.]

I used to hear it all the time as a public library employee: “People just don’t read as many books these days.”

It’s almost a common-knowledge truism - certainly something that anyone with a love of literature is certain to have heard if not repeated. But a recent study by the University of Manchester suggests that British people actually read more than they did in 1975. [Hat-tip to Ariel]

The research seems to be pretty wide reaching (10-15,000 people surveyed in each country), but as with all statistics we can’t be sure exactly how this all pans out, and what factors are at work.

For example, the statement “in 2000, Brits read on average for five more minutes each day than they did in 1975″ comes with a freight of ambiguity; it’s an average. It may be the case that demographics who were heavy readers in 1975 now have more time on their hands (and cheaper access to books), and have increased their reading as a result. But what of the demographics that traditionally read less in 1975? Are they reading more, or less, or the same amount? Has the flux in their reading time been absorbed by the increase of the time- and money-affluent?

And what about age spreads? The Print is Dead blog reports on a survey which suggests that, in the US, kids are actually reading far less than they used to - despite the alleged success of [multi-part YA book franchise I'm already sick of hearing about] as a ‘honey trap’ for the previously book-shy.

The same may well be the case here in the UK; I’m not even sure how one could go about getting figures that will actuially tell the whole story. The explosion of the ‘YA’ fiction bracket (a marketing term that I personally find cynical and degrading to authors and readers alike) suggests that there is plenty of reading going on at the younger end of the age scale. But sales figures aren’t the whole story - they don’t tell us who is buying these books, or who is reading them.

The fact that, overall, more books seem to be sold each year would suggest that reading as a pastime is far from dead. But who are those readers? Can we even find out? And what could we do with that knowledge - as a genre, as authors, as reviewers and critics and bloggers, as an industry - if we found it?

I can’t imagine any futurists, space-nuts or general geeks in the US could have wished for a better present on Independence Day. Continue reading “Congratulations, Discovery”

Okay, here’s a post for my fellow bookworms; a list of the thousand books most commonly found in United States libraries. The Bible is at number one, unsurprisingly. But the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy is in there at eight, being way more common than almost all of Shakespeare’s works! I must try to find something similar for UK libraries - a comparison would be interesting.

Link perused at BoingBoing.

The infrastructure of Iraq is (understandably) a mess. This is largely due to insurgents breaking things or blowing them up, often along with the engineers working on them. Continue reading “Iraq reconstruction costing more than European reconstruction post-WW2″

They want nukes, y’know. That’s what we keep being told, despite protestations from a nation in no position to lie, thanks to the might of the West breathing down their necks. Continue reading “Smoke and Mirrors…the real reason the US are setting Iran up for a fall”

The BBC reports on a Pentagon document detailing the US military’s approach to ‘information warfare’ (PDF format). A little quote:

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

Continue reading “Don’t believe everything that you read/watch/hear…”

Surely not…but a post at PhysOrg.net would appear to support this ‘crazy’ idea. Continue reading “US Middle East Policy based on outdated fears?”