January 2008

Aesthetics On Wheels

A couple of days ago, I was driving along the front at Worthing and saw for the first time the amazing spectacle of the drifts of wooden planks washed up in the recent shipwreck. This was days into the operation to clear the spill and long after sunset, yet the timber loomed unignorably two storeys […]

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Gum Shoe

Mick Hartley links to a Times report of a “serious” novelist suing the proprietors of a neighbouring factory because the fumes it produced so affected her concentration that she was reduced to writing genre fiction. It’s not just a funny hook for a news story; it’s a delicious illustration of how class and status in […]

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Index on Censorship

One of the reasons I’ve been quiet these past few days is that I’ve been working on a new Website for the journal Index on Censorship which went live over the weekend. The purpose of this post is to send some of my Google karma to their new URL: “indexoncensorship.org“. If you believe in free […]

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Amateur Video

While I’m recommending films, I notice that The Amateurs [aka The Moguls] is being advertised on the Apple trailer site as on theatrical release in the States. This is odd because I’ve already seen it cheaply in the UK via Amazon’s DVDs-by-post service. Perhaps it went straight to video here because it had stinking reviews. […]

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The Last Single Man On Earth

One of the things that came up over Christmas was, as usual, my continuing unmarried status as the big four-oh looms. Three different members of the family interrogated me about my non-existent love life. Yesterday, I was offered an opportunity to do something about this as I was invited to a singles event: a Website […]

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Christmas Cuteness On Film

On Christmas Day, I posted a quick snap of my niece and nephew taken with my new freebie digital camera. I’ve just got some scans of developed film back from the lab so I can share a few steam-powered Christmas photos with you. Here’s Sam playing with one of his new remote-controlled dinosaurs: Sam and […]

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Metamorphoses

Apparently there exists an entity known as “Kate Lawler”, who won Big Brother and has since become a club DJ. For an organism in the contemporary UK celebrity ecosystem, the next three stages of development are as follows: [Big Brother winner → club DJ →] chick lit writer → Conservative MP → Alien Queen

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