Hello, my query is this. Lately I have been doing a lot of cooking using no additional oil or fat in the pan apart from the skin of the meat I’m choosing. The obvious question = why is this a new and exciting thing to me, given it’s bleed[…]

I didn’t write about The Wrestler when it came out because, as good as the film was, I couldn’t quite get a (Kurt) angle on it. I toyed with the discussion about Mickey Rourke’s chances of an Oscar, and then thought better of it. Be[…]

We resurrect I Was A Goblin to bring you a link to this visionary post: “Personal Branding is a Real Life RPG”.
“Every person on this planet is playing the same game as you – the game of life. We are the ones who realize this […]

Putting the sin into sin drums…
Knock On Wood is one of those party staples which ended up representing a whole scene. You can understand why. Not just because it is a consummate disco record, with its infectious opening like a tube train whoos[…]

The wrong kind of rock and the wrong kind of snow….
“They do not like all that about ending and failing,” said Merry. “I should not sing any more at present. Wait till we do get to the edge, and then we’ll turn and give[…]

Having spent a fair chunk of my blogging time yesterday talking about rating scales, this Financial Times piece came as an eye-opener.
“Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to disti[…]

FM (Wednesdays, ITV2, yes ITV2) is a very odd little concept, but kind of works, I think?

So you get 20 minutes of him off the IT crowd and her off of teachers doing pretty standard “embarrassment and swearing” comedy set in a thinly-vei[…]

Here’s a post from Hitsville raising an interesting point about Metacritic scores. The case looks pretty clear-cut: movie critics are harsher and more discerning than music ones.
Harsher, yes. More discerning? Well. Allow me to get all research[…]

An extraordinary passage in Huizinga’s The Waning Of The Middle Ages comes to our attention:
The taste for unbridled luxury culminated in the court fetes….Nothing could be more insipid or ugly than the ‘entremets’, consisting[…]

We’re back, and we’ve taken advantage of the unscheduled interruption to improve the site a bit.
Here’s what you might notice:
– a streamlined new design: still pink, but a bit less garish and using the space we’ve got r[…]