In 1978, Ed Ruscha moved from single words or images to phrases. There has been much written about the koan clairty of the phrases, how much of America and Hollywood they compile in a few cryptic words. (I would recommend this elegant examanation by […]

As A Tim Burton Event and even as a remake, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory feels a little TOO predictable and ‘robotic’ at times (Hollywood/ILM/Elfman etc. TOO well-oiled a machine now!) – the latter criticism ironic perhaps give[…]

Harry Hill does comedy series for kids. In many ways a no-brainer for Hill, as it was the Sunday afternoon repeat of TV Burp being discovered by kids that suddenly made it popular. And look at that photo on the BBC webpage. Is there any reason why TH[…]

Mikal Gilmore, little brother of notorious executed mormon-killer Gary, and author of THIS excellent if grim memoir (as well as a lot of rather less excellent rock writing), says somewhere in the memoir, in wonder, that many of the photos of his chil[…]

I was born with this unlucky sneeze
And what is worse I came into the world the wrong way round
Pundits all agree I am the reason why
My father fell into the village pond and drowned.
So go the lyrics to the theme to James Bond. No: really. Monty Nor[…]

There are those who do not care for the beer festival, see Tim below. There are others who relish a challenge, will take on the enemy at face value and like the idea of a good Leo*. And so Sarah and Carsmile got there about three, and I rolled in at […]

Grassroots football nut Dave Boyle wrote an introblog on the Allianz Arena earlier this year. I visited last week to check he wasn’t making it up. The hosts were TSV Munich 1860 and they were playing Premiership favourites West Ham to mark the […]

Imagine if films had a money back guarantee. Well, Cinderella Man, the Russell Crowe depressingdepression boxing movie is being re-released with one. But that’s an actorly film, and this is the studio trying to back a film they think should not[…]

I was officially good at games as a kid. Note, that is games with a lower case g. Which means, in hip-hop parlance, games which were less dangerous, less likely to get me killed and generally played on a board. Or at least had plenty of garish, brigh[…]

An experiment to determine which decade produced the best cult comedy radio programmes
Apparatus
BitTorrent
iPod
Time spent travelling on public transport and not otherwise reading books and news or listening to new music.
Method
BitTorrent is a marv[…]