Pete’s post on giant pandas reminded me of something I’ve often thought about when contemplating our rabbits, namely: is cuteness an evolutionary strategy? Pete’s right that in every other sense the giant panda seems to be an animal[…]

POPNOSE MP3 OF THE WEEK
5. Muumilauluja – “Moron Valituslaulu”
This MP3 comes from the Finnish version of Moomin Voices, recordings of songs co-written by Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins. A bop in the eye for my shrivelled inne[…]

Just got back from a brief and very enjoyable holiday in Finland.[…]

Slaine The King
Music Zone (there’s one on Oxford Street) is having a sale, and I picked up this nice hardback comic album for under a fiver (they also have the complete Halo Jones at the same price, among many other things, lots of Judge Dredd[…]

Cinema: Still Dying After All These Years
“Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It&#82[…]

You Won’t Find Me in the Matinee
Far more than attitues to on-screen sex, the 9 Songs saga has shown up reviewers’ difficulties with music. The issue is key in 9 Songs because in some ways it’s a concert film. Some reviews have atte[…]

Homeless.
Diaspora, Refugee, Homeless–the ideas are abstractions, even the concept of palestine is an abstraction–so that to talk about them, it becomes a dystopian non oz. Reading it, one forgets the ironies, the complexities, and the ve[…]

We love the underdog right? Nature doesn’t. The history of evolution (and one would imagine slightly less intelligent design creationism) is full of animals which did not quite make it. The dodo for example was a big stupid evolutionary backwat[…]

Boring admin post for all the regular posters on FT: we’re starting to use titles! Currently it’s only Blog 7, but when the blogs are tweaked to match the front page a bit better, we will probably turn on titles on all the blogs. To help […]

The Physics Detective Part Eight — Feng is Bond, James Bond
Didn’t the guy seem a bit too smooth? Up until now he’s been portrayed a bitter person who jumped to the enemy camp looking for vengeance against his former boss. But under[…]