Rereading children’s books as an adult – those you haven’t looked at once since childhood – you sometimes slam into a particular contraction of response: a sort of ultra-localised Tom’s Midnight Garden Effect (TMGE), in […]

DON’T BORE US
DON’T WATCH THE CHORUS
Perhaps it is a testament to the real poverty in French cinema at the moment that the really big box office successes from over the channel seem to be stuffed to the gills with cute kids. The Chorus is[…]

lonely aquatic dinosaur seeks similar for laughs, moonlit walks. no smokers or stegosauri
i. all other lake monsters have better names viz ogopogo, mamlambo, bessie oh wait ii. at least mamlambo (“half-fish, half-horse monster”) EATS PEO[…]

NOT PROVEN BY SCIENCE AT ALL IN ANY WAY
Just got some fliers at work for this pair of seminars: The UFO Contacts Seminars. Presented by “top” radio presenter Mike Allen these seminars will explode the myths behind the UFO Conspiracy final[…]

This morning I met a woman who claims her dog can find its way home. On the bus. Getting both on and off at the right stop.
We’ve all seen Lassie, but I for one am sceptical. If any canine scientists out there would like to shed light on this p[…]

Finch
The problem with making words like boring, banal, decorative and pretty compliments, is that there is nothing left when a critic encounters awful spectacles like this: http://www.spencerfinch.com/[…]

Day 26: Clouds Across The Moon
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 LOUSY TUNES
I had to admit that I never expected to die on the Moon. Traveling to the moon was never really on my to do list (unlike rolling some heavy stones on the Rolling Stones and thinking u[…]

(So Much For My)Happy Ending Watch:
It seems to be a current obsession of mine that more books, films and whatnot seem to have incongruous happy endings. And I don’t just mean rom-coms. Books which are explicitly structured as tragic narratives[…]

This is a mantra I must take up full time. I have eaten three risottos out in restaurants in the last month, and been disappointed by all of them. My weekend savoury rice pudding experiment was at Branca, an Italian restaurant in Oxford. A smoked had[…]

Oh, and Hitch is the first Hollywood film to really rip-off The Office, in as much as it shows Hollywood has discovered just how funny bad dancing can be. And that is a dead horse flogged over most of the credits (where we also get to experience how […]