Five Magic Tricks From The Holyrood Spellbook

Blog

Fuelled by the summer sun, trot along to our Facebook and Twitter pages and give us what-for about our links. Add your own too if you fancy it. We’d love to hear from you.

 

OH HOLY TWEET! (Laura)

The Pope has become the latest member of the over 65 age group to pick up an iPad and start tweeting. Pope Benedict XVI made his first tweet earlier this week as part of a publicity drive to bring together the Vatican’s digital offering and drive the faithful towards their new news portal – which will bring their print, online, radio and TV channels together. Not sure if I will be rushing up to follow but I think it would be safe to say that if any one can knock Lady Gaga off her twitter throne I’d say the Pope has a very good chance with millions of supporters all over the world!

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/06/29/22939-twitter-blessed-as-pope-issues-first-tweet/

 

GOING UNDERGROUND – A MAKEOVER FOR LONDON’S ICONIC TUBE MAP (Adrian)

The London Underground is a staggering feat of human engineering and its colour-coded map is a well-recognised landmark for visitors to the English Capital. The map has been reproduced, parodied and highlighted so many times that anyone but the most insular residents of the British Isles could tell at a glance what is was. Even Dumbledore’s got a birthmark shaped like it.

But the iconic map designed by Harry Beck in 1931 has come in for some criticism in recent years, as many believe that it doesn’t accurately represent the distances between tube stations. The criticism has now prompted British designer Mark Noad  to unveil an “updated” map, which is believed to more accurately reflect the Underground network.

The map has nothing to do with Transport for London, who operate the tube, but Noad is hoping that the revamped version will prove a big hit with mobile phone users when he releases it as an app in the near future.  

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/london-tube-map-gets-makeover-by-designer.html

 

STRANGE WAYS TO GO (Andrea)

Wikipedia is a good source of knowledge – anything you want to know about a person, event or even a movie, you’ll find it on there. Although a lot of the “facts” can be doubted and shouldn’t be taken as the gospel truth. This page is an interesting read, but in the majority of cases they are probably made up. It would be funny to think all of them were true but it makes you think about how people come up with this stuff if it is indeed false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths

 

BEARDED WOMEN! SACRE BLEU! (Eleanor)

These days, in the 21st century, we’d like to think that protesting for equal rights between men and women would not be a political issue. In France, however, the gloves have come off!

Women have taken to a variety of stages and have been poetically making the point that France has a bit of work to do on their rallying for feminism. This commentary column from The Guardian tells an interesting tale of French double entendre, poetry quoting, male dominant boardrooms and grammatically confused policemen. Allez-y! Venez voir!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/29/la-barbe-feminism-france

 

THE MAGIC OF THE NEWS (Laura)

This spell binding podcast from Scott Douglas and Peter Laing of Quiet News Day fame has it all this week. The wizard duo discuss how JK Rowling’s controversial decision to release her Harry Potter e-books via the Pottermore.com website rather than via iTunes, could change the future of digital publishing, as well as discussing the latest developments in the Daily Record job cuts scandal. And if that’s not enough for you there’s also a debate on how prevalent your contact information should be on your website – is the humble contact us page about to be made redundant? So get your ears primed and ready for the magic…..

http://quietnewsday.co.uk/2011/06/29/quiet-news-day-86/