NOT MAD AFTER ALL SHOCKAH
Last night in the pub we were discussing the Diversity Awareness yummy chocolate sweets, Vice Versas. From this we moved on to Scrollers and then Tasters, Cadburys attempt at rebranding Scrollers (no need, if you arsk me but[…]

WATCH WITH* MOTHER: The Hunt for Lord Lucan
*mark s watches 20 mins alone b4 suddenly thinking that mum s might not know this is on as it’s on BORING CHANNEL FOUR*mark s (shouts up stairs): there’s a programme abt lord lucan on! mum s: w[…]

Atlantis found again: this one tiresomely credible, however.[…]

I went to a book launch yesterday – having never been to one before this was pretty exciting. I am sure it was fairly typical of book launches in most ways – snacks, red wine, milling intellectuals, good company, ginormous hats. There was[…]

There’s a weird gag in ‘Bridget Jones 2’: two people sitting next each other on a plane to Thailand both get out ‘The Beach’ as holiday reading. Now, the book, published in 2000, is set in about 1997, so the joke makes s[…]

Sloppy Science: the athletics edition
The September 30 issue of Nature featured a brief communication with a study comparing men’s and women’s sprinting. The authors concluded that by the 2156 Olympics, the winner of the women’s 100[…]

Camille Claudel
I seem to be engaged in a series of appreciations of undervalued artists from a century or so back here (see Bartholdi and af Klint pieces below). I’ll stop after this one, but I do want to mention someone who I think was a grea[…]

ex memoria
They weren’t all elderly and they weren’t all white, but the number of shoppers wearing poppies in Tesco in omnicultural Hackney, as the Armistice Service Parade wheeled out of St-John-at-Hackney into the Narrow Way, definitel[…]

That guitarist is defensively naive…
Have you ever wondered why commentary on African football is like criticism of soul music? Probably not, but if you want to find out, go to Everything They Say About Soul Is Wrong. It’s mostly about mu[…]

I once had a conversation with a rock fan about favourite guitarists: I mentioned Steve Cropper, of Booker T & the MGs, who also produced and co-wrote many of the great Stax recordings, such as Otis Redding’s. This guy hadn’t heard o[…]