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,…
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…
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,…
The Friday Last FM Quiz – THE RESULTS! 13 Aug 2010 A couple of Fridays ago I set a simple quiz for FT readers - name the most-played Last.FM tracks of these 20 acts. 13 people replied, and here are the…
1 Jul 2013
This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good. I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked […]
20 Aug 2004
How Old Is Superman? One of the seemingly undefined aspect of the Superman mythos is that of his ageing. Those who fall on the side of his omnipotence in everything (the superhearing, superbreath, superhair bunch) probably think as a preternatural godhead he will live forever. Look, he has been banging around in the comics for […]
13 May 2008
#394, 4th September 1976 In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s […]
4 May 2010
#601, 19th December 1987, video In the comics series Phonogram, there’s a scene in which the – kind of horrible – pop DJ Seth Bingo and his indie collaborator Silent Girl are struggling to work a recalcitrant dancefloor into life. Their solution? “Play the Blondie!” – a copy of “Atomic” which literally glows as it’s […]
21 Nov 2013
So here we are. The 32 qualifiers for the football World Cup have been decided, which means it’s time, once again, to get ready for the POP WORLD CUP. The point of this post is very simple. If you want to be a manager in the Pop World Cup, put your name in the comments […]
12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]
9 Jan 2004
Independence Day. Isn’t it marvellous? Hurrah hurrah let’s kill the stripper and those hippies! That’s the kind of morals I WANT from my films! Until the aliens bugger up by deciding just to kill EVERYBODY. Where’s the subtlety, the art, the je ne sais quoi indeed about that? Who cares when we have plucky heroes […]
8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]