For Christmas, I bought Miss Barnes the Miss Marple DVD boxset
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Text-heavy this time round, so you children of the post-literate age might not like it (in other words: no Youtube for you).

1. Guarded optimism on Making Light about the forthcoming Watchmen film. Read the comments for plenty of discussion about Starship Troopers and Lord of the Rings. Personally, as with the latter film(s), I can see them quite ( Read more... )

On my walk to the train station every morning I pass a small apartment building that's in the process of construction. The hoardings outside now tell me that it's "70% sold!", however the same hoardings tell me that it's comprised of "only 8 flats".

A website that our retailers could make fruitful use of...

I'm doing a late shift, and now it's raining, blowing a gale (or at least what passes for a gale in London Town) and it's Autumn. Hello there, my old friend, leaves on the line.

Recently, I spotted a blurb in a listings freebie for a radio interview of Ken Dodd by Ricky Tomlinson. Although Tomlinson was born in Blackpool, he's spent most of his life in Liverpool, of which, of course, Dodd is a famous son. Which brought me to thinking: if I had to interview a famous local inhabitant, who would it be? Initially I could only ( Read more... )

Apparently, it's shocking news (or "Dramatic New Evidence" as the Evening Standard had it last night) that a man, whose job is to take photographs of famous people in newsworthy situations and then to sell them on for large amounts of money, took some photographs of a famous person in a newsworthy situation and then tried to sell them on for a ( Read more... )

A link for Des von Bladet. From the always-recommended Strange Maps blog, it's the Belgocentric map of Europe. What I'd like to see are lingocentric maps of the world, that is, maps centred on a language's "homeland" (admittedly not an uncontroversial concept), and then the world map is warped on the basis of how many place names there are in that ( Read more... )

What's your stock surreal animal? That is, the type of animal that you routinely mention when attempting to be somewhat surreal in an off the cuff moment? In my case there are three. In descending order of reliance they are ( Read more... )

A few links for you:

1. A collection of photos of some amazingly baroque libraries (via A Fistful of Euros).
2. Marilyn Manson doesn't do exactly as he says on his tin.
3. Stephen Poole boggles at a NASA job description.