So, I’m quite young-ish. Well, sort of. Teenagers still think I’m old and weird but I do qualify for a railcard and that. As a result, I have only really quite dim memories of Michael Jackson before he turned into a really odd person who […]

Things I have never really understood.
a) Pies at football
b) People going to the toilet during a movie
Both of these are predicated on the same issue really. Football matches take less than two hours. They take place, usually, in the afternoon &#821[…]

Drag Me To Hell has been hailed as a return to horror for Sam Raimi, a break from the relentlessness of the Spider-Man films (thankfully post the annoying SM3). A chance for Raimi to go back to his roots and entertain without being slavishly devotion[…]

It’s halfway through 2009, and for once I’m going to be completely shameless: here are links to the best dozen things I’ve written so far this year. Almost all of them are quite long: if you don’t like long pieces, click no fu[…]

Hundreds of posts now hang off Steven Wells’s intensely moving farewell article at the Philadelphia Weekly, which ends with an atypically cryptic Swellsy in prophet mode, quoting Michael Jackson, before the thread-flood of sad affection and baf[…]

Andy Murray chastises a tennis ball

During Wimbledon’s inaugural set of night-time tennis on Monday night, played under what’s become the most famous roof since the Sistine Chapel, I found that I loathe every particle of Andy Murray.
No[…]

So I listened to the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 for the first time in – oh, I don’t know, years. Like a lot of the audience, I was ambulance-chasing: I wanted to see how the download-led charts would cope with a superstar death. I was hoping &#[…]

There is a remarkably unremarkable piece of news on the BBC website. Apparently according to that old favourite “A MEDICAL EXPERT” the appearance of so many fat people on TV normalises obesity. Or as BBC News Health section put it: Fat St[…]

Perhaps it is important to good actors to do mediocre films for you to recognise how good they are. Ditto with good directors. The only question is why would said people, possibly at the height of their careers choose such flat projects? Its a questi[…]

There is a sequence in Red Cliff where the sneeky tactician for the good guys lets go a dove to gather intelligence, and said dove flutters over the lake acting as a battlefield. In this flight the dove takes in everything, the boats, the standing ar[…]