A moment of rare drunken self reflection hit me at half past ten last night, and I mused about parallel universes. There I was just cracking on to the second bottle of port and puffing at a cigar in the Smoking Room of the National Liberal Club, thum[…]

stick with the beasts we got plz #4: the ROC
yes yes it is the biggest bird ever SO WHAT?
i. it is telling i think that the roc’s EGG features more in stories than roc herself ii. haha “a roc chick”
conclusion: cf also the ZIZ, n[…]

PORCO ROSSO
dir. Miyazaki Hayao
Some friends of mine have been Miyazaki freaks for a long time but I don’t envy them their familiarity with the older films because encountering them for the first time each means a freshness that I can savor &#8[…]

Tally ho, vatos, or, um, something — The Cat and Fiddle on Sunset in Los Angeles is a somewhat unusual spot, really. The location itself isn’t unusual, in fact it’s pretty prime as it goes — some notable venues nearby, theate[…]

Hamsters I have known — when growing up I wished to have a hamster, as I thought them cute and furry. And so over the course of about five years, from 1980 to 1985, I owned three hamsters in succession, the first two of which passed on peacefu[…]

All the papers yesterday were stuffed to the gills with their tributes to cricketing god-bothra Davey Sheppard, they missed out the death of one of our most loved broadcasters. Perhaps “just” having a distinctive voice seems a bit of a mi[…]

UNDER THE LOVING CARE OF OUR FATHERLY LEADER
by Bradley K. Martin
You gotta love the title. I mentioned it to my dad and he said, “Sounds like something from North Korea” — which in fact it is. Martin’s huge-as-heck book is […]

Heavens, i kill IE with guns pt yada yada yada
Thanks to this blog for letting me google a long-standing bug in the appearance of FT on IE.
“Combining the border-left or border-right parameter with a padding-top or padding-bottom parameter, and[…]

Somersault is a female coming of age drama. Of course in the cinema no-one comes of age like people in real life. For us it was a few weekends hanging around phoneboxes with three litres of MAX cider and then a fumble at a mates party. In the cinema […]

stick with the beasts we got plz #3: the ANT LION
so this lion and this ant got it on and hey presto! The cub-larva has big cat’s face, insect’s thorax, eats only that which is both meat and grain, hence ie starves STRAIGHT AWAY!!
i. i[…]