Tired of the media’s obsession with the economy and who’s to blame for the state it’s in, and looking for something to cheer me up, I started rereading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I remembered it as a cheery story of some lovable Californian bums. And it is. But it’s full of strikingly topical notes. [...]

I’m considering having one-to-one lessons to practise Spanish conversation, so over the past few days I’ve been looking closely at the websites of companies offering tuition in London. I’ve been shocked at how poor the English is on some of them, given that they are the shopfronts of the business.
Talk Talk Spanish, for example, says [...]

Iceland’s second biggest bank, Landsbanki, has gone into receivership. The Icelandic government has had to borrow £3.1 billion from Russia to prevent the whole country going the same way. Terrible news. Or so you might think if you weren’t working for the British PR agency Rooster, on behalf of a no-frills airline.
  Ping! In [...]

Think about this next time you’re on a plane coming into land in the US: there is such a shortage of air traffic controllers that the authorities are ”accelerating” the training of new ones, according to The New York Times. The good news: they start on a simulator — what one instructor describes as “a big Xbox”. And [...]