PRESENTERATOR
a new semi-regular thing rating the television presenters of current-day Britain
#1: MIKE “Weapons That Made Britain” LOADES
Mike Loades, according to a brief and slightly half-arsed Googling wot I just done, is a fight chor[…]

AN OBLIQUE AND I HOPE NON-RANCOROUS RESPONSE TO BLISSBLOG’s LONG NON-RANCOROUS RESPONSE to etc (zzz)
While tidying up at Stone Lanes, I reread Teach Mark S a Lesson: Louis Prima. As it’s set long ago, it doesn’t strictly speaking a[…]

WHAT ALIENS MIGHT BE LIKE pt something-or-other [isn’t this a PBS series?]
On the whole science fiction novelists are no more convincing (though maybe more inventive) than science fact dreamers. Frank Herbert is the exception.[…]

POP FACTOR: 839 CONTROVERSY RATING:
“Was I ever in love? I called it love.
I mean, it felt like love.
There were moments when –
well –
There were moments when.”
8 (Tom)
The Streets finally have indie cred here. Painfully hip […]

“I’ll wager xwaxboz quatloos on the newcomer“: [v.long post alert]
Aliens in SF movies are mostly humans in rubber suits for a good practical reason. But since humans read books to find out about themselves, aliens in SF novels are[…]

Beware the floating eye — this book about the symbolism found in the various elements of the US dollar bill is sorta good, sorta not. There’s a lot of basic history about the design of the bill which is very interesting, along with detai[…]

NEW ORDER — Technique
I actually posted this all over on ILM but I couldn’t decide whether here or there was the best place to put it. So I split the difference.[…]

POP THE VOTE activists deplore ROCKIST PRESENTATIONAL ADVICE:
“Kerry obviously will never be a natural orator of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama caliber,” argues PolBlogger Billmon, “but there are some things he could do that would he[…]

Appliance Anniversary OK the list of wedding anniversaries is well known to be a bit lame – paper/cotton/fruit etc etc. – but Wedding Guide UK’s updated SPEND-MORE-MONEY-PLEASE list of ‘modern anniversaries’ is simply me[…]

Fans of Canadian publicly-funded TV might recognise Cosmic Odyssey, the Bill Shatner-narrated science series on the BC Open University’s Knowledge Network. The most recent installment was “Extreme Astronomy”, about “high-energ[…]