Play With Words

Hadley Freeman 的周一时尚答问专栏。

Copycats
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Hadley Freeman
Monday October 13 2008

On a recent documentary Kate Moss seemed to design her collection for Topshop by just getting things out of her wardrobe or finding vintage pieces and telling Topshop to copy them. Is this how designers work these days?

Sarah Morris, London

Oh, you picky, picky public people! What do you want from the poor, hard-working, straining-by-the-grit-o’-their-teeth fashion designers? Donatella, Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada – honestly, most of the time, they look as if they work down mines. Especially Karl, when he wears that little Chanel hard hat (quilted, obviously) – faaaaabulous.

Continue Reading »

Eamonn McCabe 对《W》杂志封面照片的评述，在调侃中带出观点。

Brad Pitt has made Angelina Jolie look like she’s on the cover of Woman’s Realm
As private photos Brad Pitt’s snaps of his wife might be quite nice. But in the public realm they seem creepy, phoney and hypocritical

Eamonn McCabe

In many ways this is a beautiful picture of a mother and child, taken by a besotted father. In other ways it’s highly disturbing.

Continue Reading »

Guardian’s Simon Hoggart recreated the scene of the communication between British Chancellor of Exchequer Alistair Darling and his Iceland counterpart:

(Later, Alistair Darling told us that he was at sea. “Getting information out of Iceland is quite difficult,” he said. Imaging their attempts. “The British Treasury here. Can you tell us what is going on?”

“You call is important to us. Please hold.” Then half an hour of Vivaldi.)

A happy day. For Labour at least.

Andrew Brown 的文章说什么样的数码相机才是最好的相机－－并不是像素越多越好。

At last, technology is making photography better, not worse
Andrew Brown
The Guardian,
Thursday October 9 2008

The phone I bought last month has a camera supposedly better than the camera I bought four years ago. That’s to say it has a 5MP camera instead of a 4MP one. I could have bought a Samsung phone with 8MP, the same as my second digital camera. And the phone does take perfectly usable pictures and recognisable videos. That it functions as well as a mapping device and a recorder is astonishing, but irrelevant to this argument. My cameras will do none of those other things. When I want to take a close-up with the most recent, and expensive, DSLR, I have to go to the trouble of changing the lens first. The phone – and the previous camera – do it all in software.

Continue Reading »

这两天谈论最多的，就是 recapitalisation 了，要不就是 preferred shares、preference shares，因为 recapitalisation (注资)是布朗政府救市方案的中心，说大白话，就是虽然银行号称身缠万贯，但是。。。没钱了，要向政府要钱。

FT: US shift as UK sets out on path to recapitalise

Forbes: EU’s Almunia says bank recapitalisation needed

动作片《死亡赛车》(Death Race)正在英国公映，电影中的男主角，一位汽车拉力赛车手不得不参加一场”死亡赛车”游戏。2007年英国汽车拉力赛冠军 Guy Wilks 从职业角度评述这部电影的可信性。

Another view
Rally driver Guy Wilks on Death Race

Interview by Paul Arendt
Wednesday October 8 2008

Funnily enough, I’m not really into car movies. When I come home after a week’s rallying, I don’t even want to talk about driving – it’s my day job, and sometimes you’ve got to chill. So I found Death Race a bit lacklustre. It starts out well, with a mysterious murder, but as soon as the racing begins the film turns into a sadistic, live-action version of Mario Kart.

Continue Reading »

How to be a student 是 Harriet Swain 在《卫报》教育版为大学新生撰写的一个系列，今天说的是如何在作业中如何避免无意中剽窃他人劳动。

The art of avoiding plagiarism
How to be student
Harriet Swain
Tuesday October 7 2008

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to avoid reading anything written by somebody else. Unfortunately, this is not really what higher education is supposed to be about. While university teachers prize originality, they are not so keen on students relying entirely on imagination. By original thought, they tend to mean thinking something new about the thoughts of lots of other people, rather than just making it up.

Continue Reading »

Hadley Freeman 是《卫报》时尚编辑，Vogue 杂志撰稿编辑。Ask Hadley 是她每周一的栏目，名为回答时尚问题，其实是调侃现代生活男女关系等等。文笔风趣幽默，所以即使象我这样对时尚所知甚少的人也爱看。

今天专栏第二个问题中提到的 Lynx Touch 广告：
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmro1AchBVo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp37zN3inY

Ask Hadley
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Monday October 6 2008

Whenever I put on my golfing outfit (striped shirt, smart trousers) my girlfriend laughs at me. How can I make her stop?
Bruce Lane, Cornwall

Whether it’s an indictment on this page or the nature of fashion in general, it is remarkable how many of the questions that arrive by winged courier to this hallowed desk of academia contain their own answer within. To whit, last week L Grant wanted to know why it was so hard to find smart long-sleeved dresses for the over-30s (because you’re over 30. Duh! Designers don’t care about you. Go float yourself out on an iceberg or something!)

《时代》(Time)欧洲版 9月29日那一期上，有一篇 Stephen Roach 撰写的有关中国南方制造业的文章。其中的一段：

For one thing, China’s interior provinces have experienced their own economic boomlets.

Reshuffle 多是用来指政府或者机构高层的人员重组。比如英国内阁会不定期的重组 reshuffle。这一两天媒体都在说 reshuffle 是因为原来被认为是比较势弱、在重组上牵制重重的布朗，竟然出了一着险棋，把布莱尔的老臣曼德尔森(Peter Mandelson)从欧盟贸易专员的位置拉进内阁。

The Times: Mandelson returns in Brown’s big gamble. The most daring resuffle in modern times.

The Guardian: Gordon Brown’s resuffle – LIVE.