“They’re just trying to shock.” This seems to be a bogus criticism of art in the first place (can you tell its Turner season again?) – shock is an exciting reaction to have, it leads to thought and discourse more directly than[…]

Waiting For Happiness feels to me like the kind of film African directors have to make to get shown in arthouse cinemas in Europe. Whilst the French funding is supposed no strings attached, the truth of the matter is that if the film is not seen in c[…]

Bars we have known. (And a moment of synchronicity with Mark’s last post). On Sunday morning, as you do, we wondered whether Wispas were still being made. Yours truly drew the short straw and made the long walk for the Sunday papers, and was al[…]

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(Facesaving item just this second remembered from same documentary: WISPA narrowly avoided being marketed as ROMBO)[…]

Pop’s Romo Roots!: this fansite to production and songwriting team Xenomania (Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Dannii, Abs, assorted others) has a couple of very intriguing entries – Xenomania started off as remixers of choice to the Romo ‘a[…]

Fantastic though his mishearing is, the word Mark’s looking for is “countline”. But what does “countline” mean? (It refers to pretty much all bar-type or tube-type chocolate and sweets) I’ve vaguely assumed the &#8[…]

Re: Alan’s shape query: years ago I saw a documentary about the marketing campaign for Yorkie, during which they announced that it belonged to (as I heard it) the “cantiline bar” category. Googling now I can only find this engineeri[…]

At the party to celebrate my upcoming wedding a couple of Fridays ago, we finished the night with Mr. Acker Bilk’s “Stranger On The Shore”. After some frenzied numbers it was a signal to wind things up, turn the lights back on, put […]

Worst Guardian Pop Music Story EVER!: Yes, quite a claim I know, but go and check it out yourselves and gawp at i) the staggering idiocy of the ‘researchers’ and ii) the desperation and gullibility of the ‘newspaper’ recycling[…]

Kit Kat Kubes are not shaped like cubes. In fact they are no shape at all*!. A kicking-cuh Kube turns out to be a shortened piece of single-finger, regliar KitKat, a fact you can’t tell until you buy the opaque and overpriced pack. If they had […]