Last post...for a while...

Will be back later in the year...
Thanks for reading.

Italian Culture Article

In the 'Independent' each Sunday, there is a digest of news from the New York Times.
This week's edition had an article by Michael Kimmelman which led me to a range of articles that he has written.
An interesting one on the impact of the recent Euro 2008 football tournament on the cultural life of Vienna.
A more recent one on the impact of immigration in Italy has some pertinent stories on the impact of immigration on culture in its wider sense.
Well worth reading...

Iconic Britain

If it's Saturday then there must be another website being launched to identify the 100 iconic images that best represent Britain. This time it's called ICONIC BRITAIN.
You can vote in a number of categories including:
Art and Culture
Views and Vistas
Wildlife
Great British Holidays

Placespotting

Placespotting

Just had an e-mail from Martin Fussen to tell me about PLACESPOTTING: a site that allows you to create your own map based quizzes...

Go to the website and click CREATE.
Move and zoom the map until it shows an interesting place. Provide some hints for the person / friend who will try to solve the puzzle (a number of hints can be provided) and a message that they will see if the riddle is solved. After saving the quiz you can send it by mail to a friend or embed it in your homepage as a picture. The task is to find the place shown in your picture on a second google map.
The website has 6638 different quizzes stored. 108274 quizzes were solved and
927275 opened.

Looks worth checking out and creating a few quizzes.

London Icon: the Routemaster

Image from HERE.

London was famous for the Routemaster Bus.
It's the classic bus with the platform at the back with a spiral staircase to the upper deck, and the pole to hang onto as you jumped on and off, patrolled by a conductor who would spiral out a ticket with his (or her) machine. I remember on many occasions getting the night bus from Trafalgar Square back to Brixton and other boroughs...

Image by Flickr user metropilot, and made available under Creative Commons License

And then the Routemaster was removed from the routes - why ??
Apparently there were some issues with the design of the old bus... Do some RESEARCH on this.


Image by Flickr user Annie Mole, and made available under Creative Commons License

Now Boris Johnson, the new Mayor of London is keen to bring back the bus. He wants to phase out the 'bendy bus', and is keen to

This GUARDIAN article outlines the details.

The mayor said the Routemaster had been "fabulous" and its successor should seat at least 72 people and be "green" in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and red in colour.
More details in this BBC item too.

So head over to the COMPETITION WEBSITE, which is nicely designed: A NEW BUS FOR LONDON.
All the details and entry forms are available...

Film Title Pages

A new find is SHILLPAGES. This contains the Title screens of hundreds of films as images. I'm sure you can think of some uses for these...
Here are a few...

You should get out more...