Month: May 2006

  • Random Thoughts

    …someone got off the train today carrying a copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt and with a pre-recorded video in her bag. I thought that maybe I’d gone through some kind of time warp… …I got in and turned on the radio to hear the Hungarian national anthem being roundly booed by the…

  • Drama on 3 This Week

    So, the question is, what’s being broadcast in the Drama on 3 slot next weekend on Radio 3? After this week’s play, the announcer trailed something that made me very happy indeed – an adaptation of Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. I’m a big Kurkov fan. But all the listings, including the BBC’s…

  • Al Gore at Hay

    I’ve just been watching The Guardian’s webcast of Al Gore’s speech at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival (he’s got a book coming out later this year, so there is some reason for him to speak). He’s quite a speaker isn’t he? I think sometimes we forget that politicians, whatever we may think of them, have to…

  • Death in Iraq

    Tragically, on the day that John Simpson put up a sterling defence for journalists doing real work out in Iraq, and not just being holed up in the Green Zone in Bagdhad, two British journalists working for CBS television have been killed by a roadside bomb. Simpson was responding to complaints from Rageh Omaar, quoted…

  • Death on Everest

    This being the end of May, it also marks the end of the so-called Everest season. It’s that brief window when the weather allows climbers to attempt to ascend the world’s highest mountain. But this year an awful lot of climbers have died on the mountain. Every year, the number of parties attempting to summit…

  • Yes Man

    Now a general rule of thumb I’ll always make when deciding if I’m going to read a book is this: if Davina McCall gives the book a ringing endorsement, then it’s probably not for me. (As an aside, I learn with shock that some publishers are actually embossing the Richard & Judy Bookclub logo on…

  • Genius

    I went to see a recording for the new series of Genius this week. It was at the Cochrane Theatre and it was raining outside. Very soon, it was raining inside too. I’m reliably informed that producing such an effect on demand would have been very expensive. The Cochrane Theatre’s roof made it very cheap…

  • A Glass Half Empty?

    Well worth a read or a listen.

  • The Front Page

    The British Library has a new exhibition at the moment called The Front Page. It’s a retrospective of around 100 front pages from British (well, I reckon English actually, since I didn’t see any papers from outside of London, with the possible exception of the Manchester Guardian) newspapers from the last 100 years. It’s fascinating…

  • VOIP Phone

    I’ve played around quite a bit with VOIP but thus far, I’ve not really embraced it. A while back I mentioned that I’d seen Tesco selling cheapish phones accompanying their own VOIP service. Today I crossed over to the darkside and went into Tesco where I noticed a sign that suggested that the phones had…

  • X-Men: The Last Stand

    The Last Stand (or X-Men 3 as it was known until pretty recently) is the latest, and possibly final entry in the X-Men film series. Although Bryan Singer was univerally praised for his first two, they always left me a little cold; perhaps because I was more a DC comics reader than Marvel. Singer, of…

  • Deal or No Deal… The Book!

    Wandering aroud Ottaker’s today I couldn’t help noticing that someone’s managed to publish Deal or No Deal, the book. So, I wondered, exactly how do you turn a guessing game into a 400 page book. A quick flick through it, revealed that it must have been “written” inside a week. As I say, Deal or…