> Mick Hartley links to some fascinating pictures, including a short piece of film, of Northern working-class life in the early twentieth century.
> From a profile of Germaine Greer: 'Once she gave a lecture at Oxford, arguing that the female orgasm was not only a facet of gender tyranny but was also vastly overrated. A male student raised his hand. "About that overrated orgasm," he drawled. "Won't you give a Southern boy another chance?" The speaker was a young Rhodes scholar called Bill Clinton.'
> Mike Atherton writes about Jacques Kallis: 'Kallis has given England's profligate batsmen... an object lesson in the art of shot selection. His twin hundreds have had all the ingredients of classic Test match batting: fierce concentration, solid defence, an understanding of his limitations, a complete mastery of technique, a thirst for runs and just a hint of selfishness. On top of it all, he has done it in a struggling team whose batsmen are short of form, confidence and experience.'
> I watched Jerry Springer the Opera on the Beeb last night. Not sure what all the fuss is about. I found it amusing, but as in mildly; and I was underwhelmed by the music. The Stoa was more enthusiastic. See Eric on why the BBC should be applauded for broadcasting it - as they should be.
> On his Street Corner, Gareth discusses a recent article by Kenan Malik and sets out what he sees as 'the weakness of the ungrounded multicultural argument, one that privilege[s] essentialised religious or cultural difference as the determining factor of discrimination and hatred'.
> 'At least 100,000 children have been separated from their parents by the Asian tsunami disaster, raising fears that tens of thousands had been orphaned in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.'
> Richard Curtis on global poverty:
The waves took 150,000 lives or more. The silent disaster of poverty claims a similar number of children every five days - 30,000 every single day. They die from lack of food and clean water. They die in their thousands from curable diseases such as pneumonia, measles and malaria - and from a simple malady like diarrhoea that is just a joke to me and the kids. They die from Aids, often contracted from their mother's milk. They die the day they are born for lack of basic natal care. In the UK, one in 143 children dies before their fifth birthday. In some countries in Africa that figure is one in four.Every day of the year we watch the news, and they forget to add that item. "Chelsea won again - oh, and 30,000 people died who didn't have to." "The Incredibles went back to number one at the box office - oh, and 30,000 real people died totally avoidably."
