Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Archiving Podcasts
This week, it was announced that WTF with Marc Maron would be ending its run after 16 years. The show will end sometime in the autumn (aka ‘fall’) having produced more than 1,600 episodes over that time. Maron’s podcast was one of the big early titles, and it’s fair to say that although Maron was…
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Die Hard 4.0
I’m sure earlier in the year, or perhaps late last year, I saw trailers for Live Free or Die Hard. But in the meantime, somebody noticed that Web 2.0 was a bit of a buzzword, and since this film is all about using the power of computers to bring down the state, it was renamed…
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Pointless
No no no no no. Being interviewed in Second Life is utterly pointless. What next? Political interviews in the middle of Deal or No Deal?
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Alan Johnston – 100 Days
Alan Johnston has now been held in captivity for 100 days.
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The Progressive Patriot
The Progressive Patriot is one of those books that’s going to defy categorisation in bookshops and libraries. It’s part autobiography, part history and part social history. Bragg takes us on something of a personal journey to understand his roots. We travel this journey, partly by way of his East End/Essex born family, but dip in…
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Cloud Cuckoo Land
Exactly which part of Cloud Cuckoo Land does Home Office minister Liam Byrne live in? He’s reported today as saying that Blair’s pointless, over-priced, Big Brotheresque ID Card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century. How exactly? The building of the railways brought great positive…
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The Special Edition
So I’m popping in to HMV after work to look for an album, and can’t help but notice all the special editions of albums that are on sale. It’s pretty typical these days for albums to be packaged in at least two different manners. It might be that one set comes with an additional DVD,…
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Programme Scheduling
The undoubted hit TV show of the last week or so has been a strange talent show called “Britain’s Got Talent.” Now I haven’t watched a single episode, but seemingly 11m tuned in for the final yesterday evening to see an opera singer win (Great! More light operatic albums on the horizon. We sure do…
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Misc
BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian “I counted them all out, and I counted them all back” Hanrahan. I’m flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis. Incidentally, isn’t it ridiculous that…
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Old Man’s War
I picked this up in Waterstones the other day, purely because it was the SF novel of the month. But I’m glad I did. John Scalzi has created an interesting world in which 75 year-olds, their bodies decrepit despite organ transplants and cosmetic surgery, sign up to fight for the Colonial Defence Force, millions of…
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Nature Girl
Nature Girl is the latest Carl Hiaasen novel, and once again we have the usual set of misfits and ne’erdowells. The novel mainly takes place amongst Florida’s 10,000 Islands in the Everglades. The story is the usual complex affair of inter-twined happenings that, unlikely though it may be, all manage to be in the same…
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Chronicles of the Winds
This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly… well exclusively really… for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander’s daughter, who’s lately become a police officer herself in the series. But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that’s where this novel…
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Stardust
I’m really not at all sure how I’ve managed this, but I’d not previously a Neil Gaiman novel. This is a terrible oversight, since I own more than one, and I’ve been reading Gaiman’s blog pretty assiduously for the last two or three years (it’s really good). I did see the TV series of Neverwhere…
Hadrian’s Wall
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