For older readers, BREAK THE SAFE factors in one further strength, which is that it seems to be a descendent of Waddington’s long-vanished SPY RING: inherited elements include safecracking, “secrets” as tablets you have to seek out […]

Proven By Snack Research: my mum was right!! Further study reveals that flavoured crisps were invented by the manufacturers of the crisps with the BEST NAME EVER, and that the little blue paper-twist of salt dates back to 1923 (before google, only a […]

CHEAP FOOD WE LOVE: Supplementary (Crisps, History of) So who invented them, and when? I don’t mean merely thinly sliced potatoes, deep fried as a garnish – bcz the answer to that is almost certain to be the French, probably during the a[…]

FURTHER HOME EXPERIMENTS WITH CHEESE: dose yrself with a huge chunk of parmesan last thing at night, when you haven’t eaten anything else all evening
results:
i. you don’t get to sleep for hours (note to self: similar to the PRINGLES eff[…]

Impromptu art sightings #3: winning the mark s Poetic English As She Better Be Spake prize, combining elegant symmetry and bold semantic-grammatical precision, the phrase “this has to have been being filmed” in Tim’s post immediatel[…]

Sentences you never expected to read #3984: “I say, Tom,” cried East, having hit on a new idea, “don’t you remember, when we were in the upper fourth, and old Momus caught me construing off the leaf of a crib which I’d t[…]

Politics is boring bcz of Grey Men in Suits blah blah: this is of course a cliche and therefore I disdane it utterly, esp.as I was already anyway avidly watching the IDS-unravels-before-our-v.-eyes saga. BUT NEVERTHELESS: there is a minor player in a[…]

You can see why Robert Carlyle WANTED to play Hitler, I think: histrionic carpet-chewing must be tremendous physical fun when you have such a cast-iron historical excuse, and the psychology at least a certain technical fascination, but this two-part […]

Mathematics and the people who inhabit it: this is the beginning of a nice idea (portraits of three mathematicians each with their favourite equation), though the webpage resolution does the algebra no favours, and I wish artist Lynn Hughes had taken[…]

ANNALS OF EXPERIMENTAL DOMESTIC SCIENCE: it is SO science, i cd have i. discovered marvels that brought me fame and wealth, ii. burnt and/or poisoned myself!![…]