Anti-Beatles Prejudice
It can be hard to disentangle judgement and prejudice at times (actually it’s always impossible, but you can do a fairly decent job most of the time). I occasionally wonder whether my dislike for and low opinion of the Be[…]

I have what I imagine is about an average amount of fear of crocodiles, heights and so on, but what I have always found much the most terrifying thing to imagine is being stuck in a narrow tunnel (and I am guessing it didn’t make the top 25, so[…]

Ig Nobel awards
This year’s Ig Nobel prizes have been announced (Guardian article). The economics award goes to the man who invented karaoke, the medicine one to someone who claims a link between country music and suicide, but the best is the e[…]

Procol Harum
Those who know me reasonably well wouldn’t expect me to like this lot – there is almost nothing one might classify as psychedelic or prog that I do like. But they were the first band I ever saw live (well, discounting support[…]

The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban
I’m not sure why, but my respect and love for his work is much greater than my memory for him. When I think of my favourite writers, or the best living British writers, he seems not to leap to mind, but he should[…]

Brain damage
I wrote here a while ago about some aphasias, linguistic losses due to brain damage that say perhaps surprising things about the way the brain processes language. I’ve been reading about some other losses, not just around language,[…]

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
I read The Scar first (and reviewed it here, in April I think), but this was his first novel set in the extraordinary SF/fantasy world he has created. It’s not on as grand a scale, not as spectacular in […]

Best holiday drink
Pete’s piece below about best meals didn’t evoke any holiday meals with me, but it did bring back the greatest drink I have ever had. We (my wife and I) had arrived in Calcutta early in the morning, and our train down t[…]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
It took bloody ages to read this. I’ve not finished any other books this long (it’s about a thousand pages plus a hundred of small print notes) that I haven’t absolutely loved – 1001 Night[…]

The Legend
I just watched this tremendous Jet Li film again, and it has one absolutely magnificent role, that of Jet Li’s mother, played by Josephine Liao. [um, spoiler alert and all that, if it’s applicable to an old movie that’s b[…]