This is sort of thing makes me happy, although I’m not quite sure why. I’ve already written about Old Spice parodies proliferating on the web. Now we can all get in on the action. Thanks to a fellow twitterer, I found this great website, which allows you to put the Old Spice dude on your phone. Now, if someone could please …
Lousy Excuse of the Week
Upon being asked why she was still awake half an hour after bedtime, Catherine tearfully announces: I have all these buttons in my head, and I think I must have pressed the “Scared” one. (Oh, and she’s still awake now.)
Video Book Trailers, Part Deux
A little while ago I posted an item about book trailers. As I noted then, these can often be rather clunky affairs, due principally to the insurmountable chasm between the product (a novel) and the media being used to sell the product (2 minute You Tube video.) Gary Shteyngart’s answer was to say nothing at all about the book – …
Deliver Us from Deliverance
Family traditions can be pernicious things. Bizarre rituals – whose precise genesis nobody can quite remember – are dutifully repeated year after year, simply because that’s what’s always been done. Quite often nobody is having much of a good time, but nobody is willing to admit it. Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. This weekend saw my …
Good Question
For more of the same, go here.
Exciting New Book from, um, Alex George
You couldn’t make this stuff up. A little while ago I dabbled with the idea of a slight name change, reducing myself to a pair of gnomic initials in the manner of Chesterton, G.K., Rowling, J. K., Byatt A.S., and Hartley, J.R. (inside joke for my English readers with long memories.) Anyway, that didn’t last too long, and here I …
When Musical Genres Attack
The story so far: I wrote here about my first cautious steps into the netherworld of barbershop singing. Then earlier this week I re-posted something I wrote a while ago about rap music. Neither genre, I will be honest, is where my natural musical tastes lie. I do like a spot of jazz, however, and regular readers of this blog will …
Rap Repeat. (Yo-yo.)
[Here’s a blog entry I wrote a while ago, which I am re-posting now, ahead of further, related silly stuff later this week.] I am not a real hip-hop fan. A cursory review of my CD collection reveals precisely six rap/hip-hop albums – and probably six of the most well-known in the genre, at that. It would be like owning a …
Better Titles
Given my on-going struggle to find the right title for my book, I was excited when I read about this site. It’s done by comedian Dan Wilbur, who might just be on to something. The idea is that these new titles “cut through the cryptic crap”, as Wilbur puts it, and tell you what the book is really about. I …
Freedom!
No, this is not a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel – although I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (The online book community has talked about little else for days, it seems. People don’t know whether to celebrate Franzen as the (quite obviously) brilliant novelist that he is, or to snipe about why he doesn’t have the …