Month: May 2006
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Val Guest
It was sad to hear about the death of Val Guest. He died last week, but no newspaper (perhaps with the exception of the subs only Variety) has yet run an obituary. He had a fabulous career, working with Will Hay in his early days, through to directing the Hammer versions of the Quatermass films…
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Scanning
Great piece from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine by Kevin Kelly on the state of play in scanning books (via just about everywhere)
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Italian Ad
No doubt this’ll show up in the future on one of those Chris Tarrant shows, but I was amazed when I saw this advert on Italian TV at the weekend. Did someone, somewhere, think maybe, just maybe, that this ad is, well, racist? Someone’s put it on Google Video, so here it is: Still, at…
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The World Is Flat
This book comes garlanded with awards – it’s the FT business book of the year, and the author’s won many a Pulitzer prize. In short it’s a book about globalisation, although that’s far too simplistic a word to truly explain what Friedman’s getting at. The “Flatness” of the world that he’s talking about is the…
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Incendiary
Incendiary had the misfortune, last year, to be published in hardback on July 8. I must admit that I thought that it was a run of the mill thriller. Well I couldn’t have been more wrong. Obviously the cover isn’t really right, and the book is about 200 pages shorter than the average thriller. The…
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New Road – Dug Up!
Don’t you love it when the council relay a road, and it’s beautifully smooth… only for one of the utility companies to come along a day later and dig it up before the road markings have even been painted!
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TV BAFTAs
I’m not going to comment on the winners and losers, although I don’t have any real problems, aside from noting that the fact that ITV had just one winner all evening is a very sad idictment of the current state of the channel’s programming. But perhaps someone can explain why ITV felt the need to…
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Waterstone’s Goes It Alone Online
A little while ago, I noted that Waterstone’s current online offereing essentially ceded the game to Amazon and that they could do something a little cleverer if they tried. Today comes an announcement that from this autumn, the Amazon deal is ending, and Waterstone’s is going it alone. There are lots of big things planned:…
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Bebo
Just like playground crazes of yesterday and favourite toys that nobody can get hold of at Christmas, we are now forever likely to be stuck with knowing about the latest flavour-of-the-month social website. The latest of these is Bebo.com, which The Guardian reported the other day, as muscling in on MySpace. No, I hadn’t heard…
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Monday Lottery
With a great fanfare (of sorts), the Monday Lottery launches today, proclaiming itself to be “the charities lottery.” And there was me, cynically thinking that it was just a commercial operation run by Chariot UK plc… But let’s have a look at that charities connection shall we? Well their website lists 70 charities who, I…
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Arsenal’s Final Day At Highbury
And so to Highbury for the very last time. Today’s fixture against Wigan was the last of the season. There was also the small matter of the fact that we needed to beat Wigan while hoping that West Ham could hold Spurs to a draw or better. That way, we’d finish fourth and get a…