Web Monitor
16:34 UK time, Thursday, 1 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: who the Bombay Welsh are, why the big smoke can be greener and the case against the r-word. Share your favourite bits of the web by sending a link via the letters box to the right of this page.
• Impressionist Alistair McGowan told Alastair Campbell on Radio 4's Chain Reaction his impersonation skills may have come from his dad, who was Anglo-Indian. Although he didn't have his son's talent for faking accents, people often thought he was Welsh which he went along with:
"He was Anglo-Indian and as I found through doing the programme [Who Do You Think You Are] a lot of people from Anglo-Indian stock suffered a lot of racism [in the UK]. So they hid their origins and said they were Welsh. They were known as the Bombay Welsh [between themselves] because the accent is quite similar. When you try to do an Indian accent you will very quickly go into Welsh."
• The image of a green living out is often located in the fields living off your own food. This is being smashed to pieces by a set of urban environmentalists. Web Monitor has already mentioned Stewart Brand's ode in Wired to the shanty town's green credentials in comparison with subsistence farming.
Now is making the green case for tower blocks:
"Putting solar panels on the roofs doesn't change the essential fact that by any sensible measure, spread-out, low-rise buildings, with more foundations, walls, and roofs, have a larger carbon footprint than a high-rise office tower - even when the high-rise has no green features at all."
• Articles such as and Jimmy Carter's accusations of Republicans being racist against Obama have made weary. He's analysed the r-word and concludes it's used, abused and misunderstood:
"Politicians and pundits on both the left and right abuse the term racism to tar their political enemies. But decent people with good intentions also overuse the term as they struggle to draw attention to racial injustices that do not involve overt bigotry. With the r-word used to describe so many different things, it no longer has a clear and agreed-upon meaning."
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