Life in the Resident Evil games is mediated through two screens. The obvious one is the inventory, which lets you pick between carryng around plot items (key cards etc), health stuff to keep you alive, and shiny weapons. The other, no less important,[…]

SUPERMAN IS DEAD
So said the cover of the Evening Standard yesterday. Ho hum, I said. Its not anything we haven’t seen before. He’ll be back in a couple of months.[…]

Guilty Pleasures (Theory And Practice)
I’ve just been sent a review copy of a new compilation of DFA stuff and very fine it is too. But how’s about this for a quote from the press release, attributed to James Murphy:
“We’d bot[…]

ROLF does REMBRANDT
I’ve always approved of how-it’s-done programmes (cookery, gardening, that funny little ten-minute “tips for” series), even for disciplines i’m not much interested in —> and there’s plain[…]

FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
19. Death
The first death I can remember was also perhaps the purest. A kid at school was running on the athletics track and collapsed. In the second or two it took a teacher to reach him he had died. A brain hae[…]

There are two types of salads in this world, as far as a I have noticed. There is the leafy, chunky, lotsabits but mainly lettuce types, and then there is the chopped to bits swilling in dressing kind. I can only make the first kind, mainly due to an[…]

SENSES OF SHAME – Smells Like Teen Spirit
In 1991 rock was at its lowest ever ebb. Forget the ironic reappraisal of hair metal: it stank. Little did I know things would soon get even worse. The title of “Smells like Teen Spirit” com[…]

Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief
Jonathan Miller is a very clever man, but I don’t know why this documentary is on TV. Does digital channel BBC 4 really have a wider audience than Radio 4? Maybe he knew that I at least was mor[…]

Five Things About Michael Chabon’s
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY
1: Clay doesn’t have any amazing adventures
Okay, he maybe has the amazing adventure that many of us have, living in a big city, doing work you like, doing wor[…]

Bernardo Belloto
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I read every couple of years. It is strange and horribly beautiful and I’m not sure I understand it all. More civilians died in Dresden than in both nuclear attacks on Japan combined. I don’t[…]