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Celebrity Deaths in 2016
No. I’m not about to pen a piece about sad the death of Prince. I couldn’t ever say I was a massive fan, although I’m enormously respectful of him and the range of his music. But in truth I never owned much of it. I think the album I must have listened most to of…
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Do You Know What Product Placement Is?
Ofcom has just produced a slightly dry sounding report on “UK Audience Attitudes Towards Broadcast Media” based on some of its Media Tracker findings. If you work in UK commercial radio, then the good news is that most people don’t think you’re running too many ads right now. 51% of commercial radio listeners say that…
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Satire, Parliament and Dennis Skinner
Last week Labour stalwart Dennis Skinner was ejected from the House of Commons for the rest of the Parliamentary day for calling the Prime Minister “Dodgy Dave” during his statement on his father’s off-shore affairs to Parliament. The Speaker, John Bercow, didn’t like it, and Skinner was forced to leave. Skinner regularly entertains with his…
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Unseen Avatar
The news that James Cameron has at least four Avatar sequels reminds me that I initially went to see a preview of 15 minutes’ footage back in August 2009. The idea was to whet audiences’ appetites. This is what I said in 2009: …Somehow I wasn’t as completely bowled over as I’d perhaps liked to…
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Early One Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning in Trent Park from Adam Bowie on Vimeo. Taken in Trent Park, Enfield, earlier this morning. The music is Finlandia by Sibelius (criminally cut short, but there you go). A little bit of rolling shutter visible. This may be my encoding solution. And I notice that Vimeo can accommodate higher resolution videos, so…
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Unconvinced by Virtual Reality
Last week Oculus Rift finally started shipping consumer units, two and a half years after it first appeared on Kickstarter. This week the HTC Vive has been launched, part of a system that includes motion tracking. Sony is readying a VR PlayStation add-on for imminent release. And then we’ve had both Google Cardboard and iterations…
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High Rise
I didn’t think about it until during the film, but could there be any more appropriate location to watch High Rise than the Curzon Bloomsbury (née Renoir cinema) in the Brunswick Centre? In Ben Wheatley’s superb adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel, his production designer Mark Tildesley has created a modernist* marvel of building. The way…
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March Books
Oh dear. I’m really slacking now. Just three books this month which is very poor. In my defence Amazon went and released series 2 of the very fine, but not enormously talked about, Bosch. And Netflix went and released a new series of House of Cards, before which I had to watch last season’s. Then…
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Easter Photos
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F1 to Follow Cricket Into Obscurity
Here’s how F1 and Bernie Ecclestone do business: 21 December 2015 – Channel 4 wins terrestrial rights to Formula 1, after the BBC hands them back. There was rumoured to be a fight with ITV for them. Bernie Ecclestone, Chief Executive Officer of the Formula One group said: “I am sorry that the BBC could…
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Telling the Truth About Ages
Back in 2012, James Cridland wrote a very good piece he called Truth in Numbers, which examined how Facebook marketed itself. He showed that while the Office of National Statistics showed there to be 7,482,000 16-24 year olds in the UK, Facebook was somehow selling access to 9,155,804 16-24 year olds. I was curious to…
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A Sheringham Soundscape
Recorded along the coast during a near high-tide this morning. The promenade in Sheringham was quite badly damaged during December 2013 storms, and more than two years later, there is still work being carried out to repair some of that damage. The audio is a mix of different sounds with some “treatment” particularly to the…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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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
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