Pork To The Hand 22 Jul 2010 Here at FT Towers we don't often rehash press releases, but it's a different matter when they originate from LovePork.co.uk, the pig-related branch of the UK's very own Agriculture and…
Kissing the pink goodbye… 22 Sep 2009 FreakyTrigger in 'easy on the eyes' scandal?! There's a new stylesheet named 'nu' which you can select at the foot of the sidebar if, like me, you're a bit sick…
Sad coincidence: Philip Madoc RIP 5 Mar 2012 Quite unrelatedly, I was listening to Stan Tracey's version of "Under Milk Wood" only this morning, thanks to punctum's Pink Floyd essay: of course the narrator is Merthyr Tydfil-born Madoc,…
Greene King Desperate (for) Housewives 30 Apr 2009 Worried about the recruitment slowdown in the credit crunch? Concerned about equality and the glass ceiling in many careers. Like a beer? Why not be a publican. OR as Greene…
Old Fountain, Old Street 25 Jan 2012 One of the pubs unfortunately missed from our 'tween christmas and new year pub crawl, for to because it was shut, partly due I suspect to lack of passing trade…
sugar-spiced salmon, prawn-and-potato cakes, VERY QUICK TO MAKE 2 May 2009 (full menu: prawn-and-potato cakes, sugar-spiced salmon with "chinese" hot mustard, roast courgettes, sauteed leaks in balsamic vinegar) (raspberries and chocolate cake and cream to follow) The ask here was an…
power shandy: the next generation 9 Jul 2009 Facebook asked me to be a fan of women who like beer! I do wonder why. Of course I clicked through, a little concerned it might be a more, ur,…
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
21 May 2012
Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising.
3 Oct 2004
In search of Squirrel – Part two (warning, contains graphic images) Some of you may remember this article I wrote some time ago about my “failure” as a vegetarian and my quest for the different. Well, I’ve done it. Squirrel had become a bit of an obsession, I’d chased up all sorts of alleys (Julian […]
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
9 Jan 2013
GET UR FROAK ON While most of my online acquaintances were geeking out today at the thought of a new David Bowie album, our house was far more excited by the announcement of new Pokémon games – Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, the first on Nintendo’s 3DS console(1). The announcement was made by the President […]
1 Jan 2002
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972 “Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I’ll take a walk in the park, Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …” Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972 British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 – as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent – is a pure insight into a […]
4 Sep 2009
#543, 15th December 1984, video “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significant. Gargantuan “supergroups” like this fell out of favour but charity records […]
9 Jul 2002
Andrew WK: I Get Wet: Pitchfork Review: Remarkable write-up of the Andrew WK album from Ryan Schrieber, Pitchforkmedia’s editor-in-chief. Remarkable because it gets Andrew WK’s music so descriptively right – “Nothing could penetrate a sound that dense. I was overcome. I tried to remember the last time anyone dared to push rock so poppily over […]