-
Ducktastic
So where do we begin with Ducktastic? It’s a new play written by the guys who wrote The Play What I Wrote about Morecombe and Wise. It revolves around someone who was previously “the biggest breakfast time magician on the Vegas strip” and who performs magic with a duck flavour (not in the Chinese “duck”…
-
Beethoven Downloads
This article (free subs. reqd.) about the BBC’s Beethoven downloads really annoys me. Not the article itself, but the words and thoughts of John Whittingdale of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. It seems that the record companies are still annoyed that the BBC actually gave away some music free. These were recordings of…
-
Lord Of War
Now here’s a curiosity. If you happen to see a little of the trailer, or happen upon the poster for Lord Of War on the tube you might be forgiven for thinking that this is some kind of Con Air 2 – Nic Cage in a big action movie. But that’s not remotely the case.…
-
Heroes
It’s ages since I last went to the theatre, and that would have almost certainly been a freebie from my friend Simon who works for a theatre marketing company. Yesterday, I read an interview with Richard Griffith in The Observer. He’s in a new play called Heroes, a translation by Tom Stoppard of a French…
-
SF In London
I popped along to this after work, and was reminded once again that I don’t read enough SF. The discussion was getting very interesting before I had to leave for my next busy Monday night engagement.
-
Free Cowboy Junkies Music
Salon have a free download of a track from the latest Cowboy Junkies album available. You will have to watch an ad if you’re not a subscriber. Uncut magazine also has a track from the same new album cover-mounted this month. But not having the CD with me, I can’t tell you whether it’s the…
-
Alex Cox
I’ve just noticed that filmmaker Alex Cox is blogging again. A while back, he used to write a weekly column for the BBC film website. He kept a weekly update of how his filmmaking was going. But probably due to the political nature that his life tended to take, he was removed, and the diary…
-
Two Great Titles For Autobiographies
My Rise to Obscurity by a Mexican actor named Del Zamora and If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else Will by Eric Sykes.
-
The Weekend Papers
So how many DVDs did you pick up this weekend. I got East Is East in The Guardian, Indochine in The Independent and Rogue Trader from The Mail On Sunday (sorry sorry sorry). I didn’t get Cabaret from The Times because I’ve already had that free from a paper before. I may have missed the…
-
The Plot Against America
The only Philip Roth book I’d read before this was The Human Stain, which ultimately I found unsatisfying. I haven’t been to see the film. But when this came out in hardback a year ago it was so well reviewed that I thought that the man who’s regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists…
-
Chance
I stumbled across this slim volume by chance in the bookshop and it intrigued me. It’s a basic (very basic) introductory guide to probability. The trouble is that it’s just too small and light. While the author’s not afraid to include some equations in the text, he embarks on a chapter on, say the normal…
-
Back to Bologna
I thought I’d catch up with the books I’ve read recently. I’m quite a Michael Dibdin fan, and this is the latest Zen novel. He spoke to James Naughtie on the Radio 4 programme, Bookclub recently, and you can hear the conversation here (with Realplayer). On that occasion he spoke about Blood Rain which is…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
-
Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
Check out some of my other photography
