Tomsk79

If I told you that one of the dramatic highlights of Red Plenty is an upgrade to a Siberian viscose works, you might jump to the conclusion that it has niche appeal. But thanks to the literary wizardry of Francis Spufford this event is genuinely an enthralling plot point, and only one of many he uses to bring to life how Russian society operated in the Khrushchev era. As if the subject wasn't risky enough, Spufford decided not to write the conventional history he was planning and instead made what he describes as a "Russian fairytale", a kind of heightened-reality novelisation of history. It may sound unappealingly quirky but it works brilliantly because it's a perfect fit for the story he's telling. It could easily have ended up like one of those TV history shows where actors prance about in period costume while a voiceover explains what's really going on, but it is much more immersive than that. There are real lives being lived here, albeit fairytale rea

It's not often that I still care about the FA Cup draw at this stage of the season so let me take this opportunity to rant about the decline of the draw itself. Once upon a time it was just two old duffers drawing balls from a bag - and that was the way we liked it, dammit. Now, as the ever insightful Football Cliches points out, it's dominated by Jim Rosenthal's attempt to fit as much numerology as possible between each draw. But far worse than that, and I think a new phenomenon, is the creeping in of one of the greatest blights on modern football. Yes, there's now banter between the presenter and drawers. Compare the FA Cup (With Budweiser) to the Wimbledon tennis championship. Wimbledon has kept all its ludicrously old-fashioned but much loved traditions, but underneath it all is a very slick operation. The FA, on the other hand, have dressed up their competition with tiresome razzmatazz but underneath it all their organisation is still stuck in the 19th centur

Spot the loading in Alex Salmond's proposed referendum question: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? Salmond described this question as "simple, straightforward and clear", somehow forgetting to also mention its not-so-subtle bias in favour of independence. Still, could be worse. Salmond's question is indeed a model of clarity compared to the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence. Presumably he realised he couldn't get away with this world-class level of obfuscation: Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995? There is something in common though. Do you agree that Salmond got his idea for loaded phrasing from the Quebec question?

SOUTH CAROLINA - Jesus Christ became the latest Republican candidate to pull out of the primaries Saturday in the wake of polls showing him trailing behind even Jon Huntsman. Mr Christ's gaffe-prone campaign finally collapsed after a YouTube video surfaced showing him healing sick people with no health insurance. It is thought that he has performed many such treatments across the country without accepting payment, a revelation that has enraged Republican donors from the insurance industry. The video has been played a number of times on Fox News where it was described as "an affront to American values" and "worse then Obamacare". The Son of God entered the race on a wave of popular enthusiasm last year, but like so many of the runners has found the media spotlight unforgiving. In the first Republican debate he was booed by the audience when he said that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdo

It's a longstanding principle of international law that nations have a right to choose their own political status, and therefore Scotland has a right to vote on independence from the UK. But does it also have a right to dictate the terms under which it remains inside the UK? Or to put it another way, if Alex Salmond's "devo max" proposal included a pony for every Scottish resident, should the UK government be obliged to breed them? Unlike full independence, devolution is a concern for the whole UK. For example, if Scotland was given full powers to tax, spend and borrow, but stayed within the pound, we could potentially end up with a "Poundzone" every bit as unstable as the Eurozone. Any change in the devolution settlement within the UK should surely be a result of negotiation between Westminster and the Scottish government, rather than a unilateral decision by a Scottish referendum.

As if the EU hasn't got enough problems to worry about at the moment, the Fidesz government in Hungary is busy removing checks on its rule . It can do this because it achieved a two-thirds majority in parliament in the last election , which allows it to modify the constitution. Hungary's electoral system is, to put it mildly, complex.There is a mixture of first-past-the-post seats and two types of PR, one of region list seats and another of "compensation seats" for runners-up in the first-past-the-post seats. Not to mention the two rounds of voting with three-candidate runoffs in the second round. But have you ever wondered how such a bonkers system came in to being? Of course you have! Who hasn't? Certainly not Kenneth Benoit and John W. Schiemann, who wrote a paper about it: Bargaining Over Hungary's 1989 Electoral Law (PDF). In summary, the major opposition parties sat round a table and hammered out a compromise between their favoured systems, whic

Estimated mass of the Higgs boson = 125 GeV/c^2 1 GeV/c^2 = 1.0735 u Therefore the mass of Higgs boson = 134 u, or roughly the same as a whole atom of caesium. It looks like science may finally be able to answer one of the Big Questions that have fascinated mankind for thousands of years, namely "who ate all the pies?"