Kester Brewin

Tag: Culture

  • First Pilotless Police CCTV Drone Launches

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    Following up on the recent post about CCTV, I just had to post this story. Am I alone in thinking this is seriously worrying? That we are sleepwalking into a Stasi-style surveillance society? Get your catapults and air guns loaded my friends, the battle starts here. Technorati: BBC | CCTV | Drone | Police |…

  • Divine Comedy vs Divine Tragedy

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    In a great piece of polemic, Julian Gough has written in Prospect this month about the tendency for Western literature to express itself in the tragic, rather than the comic: “Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely…

  • CCTV ¦ The All-Seeing (soc)i(ety) ¦ Faceless

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    KB

    The other day I was walking along our high street when I saw this ‘mobile CCTV’… tank parked up. They were snapping, so I thought it only polite to reciprocate. It seems we’ve totally resigned ourselves to being discreetly observed at all times. Speed cameras, CCTV, Congestion Charge cameras… I the novel I’ve been working…

  • Rain | Technology Anoraks

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    KB

    After about 6 weeks of solid sunshine, it’s finally started raining this week. We needed it. Ironically, the downpours seemed to have caught the water supplies off-guard, and we had 3 water mains burst around our street, closing schools and leaving us without any. The allotment certainly needed the water. I was down there the…

  • Twitter

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    Don’t get it. Don’t want to. Hope I never will. Ditto any other ‘microblogging’ nonsense. It’s ever-more candyfloss communication in an age of increasingly vacuous relationships. No content:No thanks. Technorati: Blogging | Blogs | microblogging | twitter

  • Interview in ‘Prospect’ with Rowan Williams | Russia, Suffering & Personalism

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    KB

    “For most of us it’s a question of what authority we are prepared to recognise, and I think authority often comes from something endured, either by ourselves or someone else. Think of Nelson Mandela. Think also of Gee Walker, the mother of the murdered Liverpool teenager Anthony, who forgave her son’s killers. Suffering confers a…