None of yer self-indulgent blogs, thank you very much. This is mesmerizing, and strangely beautiful. And it could only be shared thanks to the web and YouTube. I’m still trying to work out how they did some of it, and I would love to know how long it took. A friend of mine posted this on Facebook and I wanted …
This Just In: Americans in Bad Beer Shock
A small, but sweet, moment of vindication over the weekend. I am often mocked by my friends for liking warm, flat beer. Of course, I consider it my duty as an Englishman to mock them right back. With the honorable exception of some excellent micro-breweries, American beer is utterly without character. I’m talking here of the Budweisers, Coors, and Millers …
Yo. Innit.
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 copy of Kind of Blue and calling yourself a jazz enthusiast. My first cautious foray into rap was inauspicious, to say the …
Good Question
Catherine, our four year-old, to her mother: “How come we always never go to Disneyworld?”
Reading Pynchon. Or not.
I idly remarked in this post that I didn’t seem to be reading much fiction these days. Part of the reason for this is that reading other people’s fiction can mess with my head a little while I’m writing… but I’m not writing much (except for this blog) at the moment. But my struggles with Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice, …
A grumpy bastard writes
I’m sorry, but I really don’t give a damn about Kanye West. And while I’m always sorry to hear of someone who dies too soon from cancer, I’m not going to grieve for Patrick Swayze, either, just because he had nice hair in a few crappy movies more than twenty years ago. All of which means that I am going to …
Reading List
Must. Stop. Buying. Books. This is getting ridiculous. Here, in no particular order, is what is presently on my book shelf, waiting to be read: 1959 – The Year Everything Changed (Fred Kaplan) The Land Where the Blues Began (Alan Lomax) Rhythm-a-ning; Jazz Tradition and Innovation (Gary Giddins) The Great Influenza (John Barry) Fiasco (Thomas Ricks) Cobra II (Michael Gordon) …
Sweet Chilli Sauce and Economic Theory
Still reading Matt Crawford’s book, and still thinking. One of the unexpected pleasures of this summer has been our garden. For the first time we tried to grow some stuff, and, rather to my surprise, it worked. We have more chillis than we can ever use. We harvest our little plant every couple of days and still they just keep …
Not a Suicide Note
Yes, I am indeed sticking my head in an oven. But don’t worry. The oven is electric. I know, because moments after this photograph was taken I was flung across the kitchen with 220 volts zinging through my fingers. I’m posting this picture partly because it will look as alien to people who know me as the photos of me sitting …
Worth the Wait
Yesterday was a big day. It was Catherine’s first ballet lesson. It’s been a long time coming, but was all the sweeter for it. My daughter is an astonishingly single-minded individual. She has been wanting to have ballet lessons for at least two years. We enquired about them when she first started asking, and were told that she would have …