It means nothing without Zone 6 — my first impression of London whenever I’ve visited isn’t of London per se. Or maybe it is but I’ll let the hair splitters decide whether Heathrow is part of London or not.
So what for those […]

Ping Pong (the Japanese film based on the manga) did not seem that unusual a premise for a Japanese film at first. Of course the Japanese are obsessed with table tennis, the inattentive racist in my bonce said. The film picked me up – the scary[…]

The Literary Mind by Mark Turner
A deceptively titled book. It’s about the nature of thought and grammar, and proposes that we invert the way we think about the origin of language, and more specifically the skeleton of concepts underlying langu[…]

Ping Pong – not a film about the dodgiest of Rupert’s chums. Instead a Japanese film about table tennis. Based on a five book manga. That is a five book manga about table tennis. You know the way they say there are manga on every subject […]

BOOM! Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa is a thorough and often fascinating book which still ends up just slightly unsatisfying. He’s been criticised by some reviewers for too many digressions on topics whose connection to the volcano are real […]

The publog has wanted to do something like the Onion AV Club’s survey of crap snack foods for quite some time. We can all be food scientists after all. Was the largest ingredient in Kola Rollerball’s really aluminium? Was their any food v[…]

I had heard a rumour that prawn cocktail was back on fashionable restaurant menus and yesterday I had it confirmed. I was having a business supper at Inn The Park, a wooden ‘British cafe’ at the swankier end of St. James’ Park. Cure[…]

What is Blog 7? This month it is a Blog about London. Next month it is a blog about travel. And October? Well you will have to wait and see. The urge behind Blog 7 was simple, there are subjects that the FreakyTrigger writers want to write about whic[…]

Yesterday I was half-listening to the radio, when Jo Whiley started playing this thing she’d downloaded off the Internet. “Slash dot dash, slash dot com”, over and over again. It sounded really cheap, some joke MP3 knocked up by one[…]

Metafiction in Astro Boy
I’ve just read Astro Boy #14, which contains some of the most remarkable and untrammelled breaking of the traditional boundaries, not just of the comic artform but of any narrative form, that I’ve encountered. Fir[…]