Tom, enjoying Havana
Its Sheeranmania bookends might fool you into thinking that 2017 was just as bad a year for Number Ones as 2016. It wasn’t. For a start, very little could be. But while last year saw the charts reeling under the impact of strea[…]

Hi, I’m Captain Ivan Drago, the Muscles from Moscow and still Undisputed World Heavy Champion if you were the kind of person who wandered out of Rocky IV halfway through and never saw a Rocky movie, or a Creed movie ever again. And I can tell y[…]

Last year I posted the new records I listened to every day on Facebook, deliberately writing nothing about them. This year I’m still listening to a new (to me) record every day, but I’m trying to be more thorough about what I think of them, and I[…]

“Hello children. I’m the Demon Headmaster, beloved patriarchal figure of note who wants nothing more than to educate keen students in the most efficient, hypnotic manner possible. If getting results requires a subtle Orwellian undercurren[…]

I’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best ones, new to me if not always[…]

Culture circulates online within algorithm-driven networks: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, etc. These are also automatic measurement systems. Two particularly valuable things they measure are attribution – the path you took to reach someth[…]

Twas the night before xmas and all through the hut, we/the eaters were judging what works in a buttie
• Bacon is bad not good in this particular context
• Even if cranberry is not your thing, BBQ sauce is probably worse (more…)[…]

What is a ‘sandwich’? The concept of an ‘open-faced sandwich’ suggests a structural flexibility beyond the ‘things between two pieces of bread’ definition; yet several fooderies this year have chucked out the whole[…]

The dirty lunchable secret is that M&S — while good at snacks in general — are quite bad at sandwiches and have been for a long time. They aren’t awful: this I know bcz I’ve eaten 1 x metric fvcktonne in my years on this earth. But theyâ[…]

(posted for magnus who lost his password): Pret have invented the finest Christmas vegetarian sandwich. Ever. Of all the turning points in world history, the introduction of this sandwich is surely going to be one of the best remembered – a miracul[…]