FREAKY TRIGGER NEEDS YOU: attention!!! This Friday, your Humble Author will be attending the Big Brother live eviction!! Your Humble Author intends to take a banner and get their ugly mug on the goggle box.  But readers!! I have no imagination a[…]

Walking down the street on the way to the pub the other day, I notice a big poster for an upcoming Thunderbirds film. As a youth I rather enjoyed the works of Gerry Anderson, theme-tunes notwithstanding, I found his childish simplicity and vision of […]

Bringing pride back to African restaurants: ladies and gentlemen I give you the African Kitchen Gallery. After our appalling service in Addis a couple of weeks ago (as recounted here, here and here) it is nice to find a restaurant where service is ev[…]

I am never drinking any cocktail EVER AGAIN, (hem hem),  which isn’t listed on webtender.com. Yes, that means NO MORE PUBS “own-brew” cocktails, YES that means YOU, The Ben Crouch. No more random “blue” stuff for me[…]

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MASTER OF MAGNETISM?
 

 
The other day I started thinking about Magneto. A summary of Magneto’s comics career (as understood by me) illustrates the qualities and perils of a character-led approach to comics, I reckon[…]

Spiderman 2..

is really New York 2 feat. Spiderman (also feat. the return of New York public spirit)
suggests that Spidersman 1-3 will all feature villains with voices in their heads. Which may make it easier to attract the stars, in fairness.
twic[…]

Interview with Brian Higgins, aka Xenomania, that’s an interesting counterpoint to Marcello’s onslaught on pop (see below). Higgins turns out to be like a lot of other pop auteurs, trying to smuggle a bit of the other (other) into the cha[…]

We’ll be putting the totaliser on the front page during the week. Meanwhile the good news is that we’ve raised our first £30 already, with a staff member selling an unwanted Belle And Sebastian ticket to an anonymous benefactor. The[…]

turner prize nomination:
Just 36 words long – good necromantic number that (not inc.three for title) – the Independent’s no-pix cover for its 15 July issue was the best, sparest, most forceful use of a newspaper front page i can re[…]

I’ve been missing wild strawberries.
When I was a kid — a very little kid — there were wild strawberries growing down by the lake where we have our summer place. The houses are all built on a sloping rise crescenting the beach: the[…]