A mention of nipples in BBC2’s otherwise pointless Grumpy Old Men show brings back a story that relates to a posting I recently made on Proven By Science, about losing touch with reality. Back in the ’60s a Marvel comic editor had a go at[…]

Desperation in narrative: the voiceover artist in Wild Down Under, a wildlife show about Australia and thereabouts, did his best, but no one could make this feeble line dramatic: “And New Caledonia has its own monster, the giant gecko! It&#8217[…]

Losing your grip on the real world: I’ve done this myself, when you forget that what you (and maybe your social circle) know and understand does not necessarily mean that everyone knows this, but not with such persistence as an old friend of An[…]

I don’t know if it is cheating to ask this here, but the memory was prompted by Geeta’s keynote article talking about the deadening vanilla teaching of science in schools. My chemistry teacher once threw me out of a class – he was t[…]

Regarding rock stars remembering where they are, there is a Spinal Tap guest shot in The Simpsons where one of the Tap looks at the back of his guitar before shouting “Hello Springfield!” Despite this kind of tactic, bands have got it wro[…]

Then again, perhaps I will just…
I just went from watching Grass, a Fast Show spinoff on BBC3, to reading the final story in the Essential Human Torch volume that I mentioned below. This story features the Watcher, and I realised that I see him[…]

Remember option two of how to expand a comedy show, especially for a movie? Option one was always send the cast on holiday together, but a close runner-up was to add a weedy crime thriller plot, usually where our hero(es) witness some awful crime. Th[…]

Current mainstream explanations of evolution are all very well – the standard idea of randomness filtered by fitness – but do they explain it all? Some people have suggested that the random formation of proteins, let alone RNA or DNA or w[…]

Much as I approve of Tim’s outrage at people insisting there is only one way to play the game, and ignoring his own (no doubt ironic) final normative statement, I have to say that I disagree with a lot of what he says.
Tim would be one of very […]

There are many kinds of stupidity in old comics. I commented on The Essential Human Torch here before, but I hadn’t reached the bit where he refers to the Sub-Mariner as “webhead”, nor where the scriptwriter forgets that only one of[…]