Poptimism: an unexpected ally!! (If it is him – he doesn’t seem terribly optimistic here anyhow)[…]

For my wedding present Mike Daddino very very kindly gave me a massive folder of CD-Rs, full of MP3s. Among them were every MP3 he’d managed to track down (as of 2001 or so) from the Appendices of Simon Reynolds‘ Energy Flash. I’ve […]

The Brown Wedge helps with your comic education with Ivan Brunetti’s 22 Panels That Always Work, an instructive how to piece. Admittedly that one has a bit of a tongue it is cheek. This is possibly more useful, Wally Wood’s version of the[…]

I Love Horses, They’re My Friends. Advert breaks have been spiced up since Christmas by the wonderous publishing house known as Deagostini, the mafia front* magazine publishers who publish magazines in series of one squillion issues, each with […]

“The moss on a dead man’s skull“: isn’t this just most evocative phrase? On the whole the doortstep-weight Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in 16th- and 17th-Century England (Keith Thomas, 1971, Pe[…]

3-0 is the standard walkover result – when Scotland ‘beat’ Estonia when Estonia didn’t turn up. If UEFA upheld Wales’ complaint, UEFA would scratch that game and the record would say it never got played, Russia didn&#821[…]

So Mark Haddon wins the Whitbread Prize for The Curious Incidence Of The Dog In the Night. Deserved? I think so. In a year where publishing sensations seem to pop out of the woodwork every couple of months, this is the one whichI was actually moved t[…]

Hurrah! The Lady QCs took second place in the pub quiz and first place in the spiritual victory prize. Yes, last night there was a mob-handed takeover at the quiz, where our motley two groups of loons scooped first AND second prize. I felt a little g[…]

Pub Quiz Etiquette: A team with several publog regulars won a pub quiz last night. A team with several more publog regulars came second. Total swag – ’50 of drinks vouchers. But this morning it’s hard to feel too proud – the t[…]

Film titles which promise much but do not deliver. There is no point in Runaway Jury where the twelve just and true ones decide they have had enough of this tedious trial mularkey and scarper from the box. Nowhere dow we see them being persued by the[…]