Month: March 2006

  • Sony Awards (and Ed Reardon)

    I work in the radio industry, and Tuesday night was a very important night. Arsenal completely trounced a tired, lacklustre and aging Juventus team in the first leg of the Champions’ League (I prefer The Fiver’s “Big Cup”) quarter final. But that’s not what this is about. Tuesday night was also nominations night for the…

  • Waterstones/Ottakers

    The Competition Commission has provisionally cleared (PDF) the sale of Ottaker’s to HMV (owners of Waterstones), and I for one am pretty disappointed. I used to love Waterstones – it was a great bookshop to browse at – but bookselling’s changed and it’s lost the sparkle now in places like Waterstones. I’m very lucky to…

  • Partial Eclipse of the Sun in the UK 2006

    They’re in my Flickr stream anyway, but here are the best of the photos I took this morning out in Golden Square of the eclipse. I’m pretty pleased with the results considering the lack of proper equipment and heavy cloud cover. The maximum magnitude of the eclipse in London was only 16.8% at 11:33 BST…

  • ITV Battles C4’s Paul O’Grady Show With…

    …Paul O’Grady Show repeats. Yup. ITV really is so devoid of ideas that the best it can do to combat C4’s signing of Paul O’Grady is to run repeats of previous shows directly up against it in the 5pm-6pm slot. Brilliant. I seem to remember them doing something similar when they got miffed that Tricia…

  • Free Books with The Times

    The Times seems to love giving away free books at the moment. They’ve been running a promotion with their sister company HarperCollins whereby you can pick up a different book each week for 99p when you buy The Times in WH Smith. This is nothing new, as they’ve run this promotion a couple of times…

  • Music in Podcasts

    A quite hilarious “Crib Sheet” from last week’s Music Week about Radio One making unsigned artists available on a special podcast. It’s all behind a pay-wall, so here are a few choice extracts with my thoughts: Isn’t that illegal? Hardly the kind of behaviour I would expect of the nation’s favourite. Well not if –…

  • TV Gaming

    There’s a worthwhile piece in Mediaguardian today about my new latest bugbear – “participation television”, or rather, premium rate TV quizzes. We all know that Richard & Judy and GMTV have for years run premium rate competitions asking you to answer a trivial question with the promise of many pounds if you win. But things…

  • Parallel Worlds

    Michio Kaku is one busy guy. When he’s not presenting a weekly programme on US radio, he’s presenting a four part BBC series on Time. In the meantime we’ve got this book, who’s subtitle is The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. What we get is a whistlestop tour through basic…

  • The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

    The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History to give the book its full title, explains how one of the most famous tricks on earth has actually never existed yet has continued to develop a life of its own. Let me direct you to a great review from a last…

  • A Matter of Death and Life

    I’m a bit behind on keeping up to speed with the latest books I’ve read, so here’s a whistlestop tour. A Matter of Death and Life is the latest Andrey Kurkov novel. This time around our hero decides that life is meaningless and contracts a hit man to kill him. Things quickly get complicated and…

  • New Folk

    I was going to get on my new bike today (more anon), but the weather forecast was poor, so I settled down to a lot of BBC Four’s recent Folk Britannia season that I’d saved on my PVR. First up were a couple of concerts from Celtic Connections in Glasgow. They’re all available to view…

  • Eurostar not quite in St Pancras yet

    Coming home from the London Drinker Beer and Cider festival in Camden Hall, Kings Cross, James got very excited when he saw this sign in the Euston Road underpass: It’s a Eurostar sign all ready for when St Pancras opens to Eurostar trains in 2007. Obviously they only wanted to make the sign once.