Its good to see that in the great GIANT SQUID story the BBC no longer trust the standard units of measurement, be they imperial or metric. Instead, as any good news story will have it, the all new SI Units* are being used. In this case the squid is b[…]

Unusually for a big event, there is actually an awful lot to say about Marvel’s Civil War series, the last issue of which hits UK shops today. I’m not going to say an awful lot in this post: basically, as a comic it was kind of rub, as a […]

The pie debate has been rumbling on FT since the dawn of time itself. For the uninitiated, the positions can broadly be termed the performativists and the formalists.
The latter attempt to draw a line that encompasses the common or garden pie in past[…]

The Hello Experiment on Lean Mean Fighting Machine is a grand stab at the kind of science we all wanted sorted out as a child. Could a blind woman make such a good clay bust of Lionel Richie, and could you do it in the time it takes to listen to &#82[…]

Much like those eminently satisfying reports of wine experts preferring £4 Sainsbury’s plonk in a blind taste test, Gramophone magazine finds that an obscure pianist who built a cult following on the back of an astonishing variety of accomplis[…]

“[John Thelwall] also had the misfortune to be a mediocre poet — a crime which, although it is committed around us every day — historians and critics cannot forgive.” —E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class*
It was ca[…]

As we all know the square root of sausage is square sauasge! But what I didn’t know until today that an alias of square sausage was “Lorne sausage”! It certainly doesn’t say that on the packaging of my square sausage – w[…]

Sentimentalist: a new column by me, for Pitchfork Media. The first one talks about music hall, audiences and singers, and expands on a couple of ideas from the Beatles entries in Popular.[…]

“I take my hat right off to the busker man”
There are two ways of viewing this lyric by unambitious bottom-feeders The View. (more…)[…]

Post Lollardry, the brief moment of inspiration re the anti-euphemism of Pigs In Blankets got some of our listeners texting in angrily. Namely that my pig in batter version was shot down in flames. So further scientific research happily proves that e[…]