One oddity about this year’s hopefuls* is that not one has done political material. What are the chances? This is a fairly catholic smattering of forty or so comedians from all over the UK (though mainly London) and after a few nights of hearin[…]

Stand-up comedy, like all art forms, has a few hardy perennials. In the plastic arts you’ve got landscapes painted with oils, for example. In standup you’ve got jokes at the expense of disabled people. In theatre, say, you’ve got bi[…]

The last big event the Hackney Empire will put on before it goes dark for an indefinite amount of time next year – thank you Arts Council – is the New Act of the Year. Theoretically anything goes, but “new act” has come to pre[…]

It’s the time of year when i say: Come and see HIBBETT in Edinburgh! If you’re lucky, you might even see a SPACE DINOSAUR wandering up and down the Royal Mile (hint: it is ME).
AH-OO AH-OO AH-OO
We’ve even got a trailer this year: ([…]

art inspired by maurice sendak’s 1963 classic, at TERRIBLE YELLOW EYES[…]

he calls himself “seth edenbaum” and “d. ghirlandio” though i don’t think either is his name (her name? my instincts say no, but a mask is a mask is mask…); he may be an artist; this may just be a disguise
he&#8217[…]

Yes yes, swine flu. We are all wearing masks and batmanning the barricades against piggy pox. The news is all a flutter and how will we survive with the panicked prognostications of all major news outlets.
However the vectors of the spread of a disea[…]

aka web 4.0[…]

I am writing a piece for a market research mag on the current “hottest thinkers” that industry people like to namecheck. Inevitably many of these people are as much derided as loved, so I decided to ‘crowdsource’ a list of the[…]

Lem was a Polish SF writer, occupying a strange place within the genre. He despised most SF (Dick was the only American SF writer he admired – an opinion that was not remotely reciprocated) for its vacuity and shallowness, which accurately impl[…]