From NewPop to… NowPop, and what are we to make of Green Gartside hovering around ‘Someday’ like a very discreet but expensive perfume on the imminent Kylie lp? From the minimal techno of first single ‘Slow’ to the impeccabl[…]

Ahead of forthcoming greatest hits album PopArt, the Pet Shop Boys have put up a streaming preview of the token unreleased track ‘Paris City Boy’. If you were expecting a return to the Desireless/Princess Stephanie francophone glories of […]

Despite the increasingly obsessive reporting of the BBC News Technology section, I don’t believe that we’re overwhelmed by information pollution. Adverts, spam, pop-ups and so on are a matter of technique rather than overload. In fact, […]

Is it our fault subversion is dead? If our interaction with the media of derision (I’m thinking Graham Norton here) is causal, rather then symbiotic, then the prognosis for satire is bleak. Researchers and developers of reality humiliation ha[…]

Condiments I Have Known #2: Hellman’s MayonnaiseThere’s a general rule of thumb in our house that if there’s a food product you like and buy regularly from the supermarket, try making it from scratch at home and see how much better […]

It’s almost certainly just over-excitement, but here I am at last eating at one of those Japanese sushi-snack bars where the food goes past you on a little conveyor belt (Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street). It’s like watching Grand Prix – […]

Further to Mark’s point b2 below: The visuals at one point were particularly noteworthy. Voiceover: Such-and-such spent ages looking for an equation. Cue pic of (absurdly handsome) actor leafing through a tome apparently at random, searching, a[…]

THEORY OF EVERYTHING: more faults

OK so I watched ep two with a VERY SMART PERSON who fears maths but wants to understand string theory, and we agreed that:
a. the order this story is being told in is totally confused and bizarre (on a paragraph lev[…]

Women be shopping! And lose their minds!
So buying expensive things make women crazy, and yet bargain hunters are crazy, too? But don’t you need math skills to figure out real bargains? And men only want to buy cars and electronic gadgets? And […]

The problem with The Bill, these days, is that even LISTING its problems is hard enough, let alone solving them. Let’s see: no interesting or even likeable new characters; the unease abt when stories are exciting (= endless Kilroy-style folk-pa[…]