Let’s start with the big-picture stuff. The Timeless Children was fun to watch, but more than that: fascinating. It’s full of interesting ideas, and they all pretty much make sense. The… | Continue reading
It feels to me that this series is gearing up to be much stronger than series 11, and this penultimate episode does a fine job of setting the stage for the finale. I like that we’re left with… | Continue reading
I feel like the ingredients are all there in this episode, but the somehow they spend most of the episode just sitting there. We have a cast of interesting historical characters in a web of ambiguo… | Continue reading
It was interesting seeing this one so soon after Praxeus. Like the earlier episode, Can You Hear Me? begins with a sequence of apparently disconnected vignettes — this time, monsters in Aleppo in 1… | Continue reading
My eldest son, Daniel, just turned 22. Sushi is his favourite food, but of course we couldn’t take him to a restaurant during the Coronavirus crisis — and even in peacetime, the nearest good … | Continue reading
Dire Straits’ third album, Making Movies, has a stellar side one: Tunnel of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Skateaway. Only three songs, but all of them stone-cold classis, using their extended runni… | Continue reading
I’m fond of the old WWII slogan Keep Calm and Carry On. It’s not just that it captures something appealingly British (yes, there are still appealing aspects to the stereotypically Briti… | Continue reading
The fundamental problem of politics is this: The skills you need to get elected to government are completely different from the skills you need to govern effectively. So we elect people who have on… | Continue reading
I’ve made the point several times in these reviews that it gives my no joy to be relentlessly negative about Doctor Who, a series that I have loved deeply. That I go into each episode with an… | Continue reading
Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: 2018 edition — Ian Dunt I’ve pretty much heard everything Ian Dunt has to say about Brexit from his numerous columns on politics.co.uk, but since his… | Continue reading
Like I said last time, I don’t go into these episodes wanting to hate them. I start each one with as open a mind as I can summon, hoping to enjoy them. And this time, I did. I’m not say… | Continue reading
I’d be hard-pressed to explain why I am, after all, watching series 12 of Doctor Who, but it appears that I am. Tonight, Orphan 55. Look, I don’t go into these things wanting not to enj… | Continue reading
That was … both better and worse than I expected. On the positive side was the opening of Daniel Barton’s tech presentation: On the negative side was … the rest of that speech (we… | Continue reading
Eh, it was OK, I guess. Would have been rather better with lot less running around, riding motorcycles, leaping onto planes, and so on. I get that it’s a James Bond parody, but still. Oh: and… | Continue reading
Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I listen much more to whole… | Continue reading
NOTE. Spoilers follow! A couple of days since I saw The Rise of Skywalker, my desire to see it again keeps getting stronger. Our middle son gets back from university this afternoon, so the plan is … | Continue reading
WARNING. This article will be full of spoilers. Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the film yet. Or, if you do, don’t complain. Spoilers follow the spoiler space. | Continue reading
There is actually something curiously liberating about having been crushed so utterly in the General Election. I don’t know who first said “It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope”, but … | Continue reading
From our old friend C. S. Lewis: If we are going to be destroyed by a far-right government, let that government when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, r… | Continue reading
Let’s just pretend today’s election never happened, and speak of better things. Around the turn of the millennium, I worked at a small company in North London. We had a shared MP3 serve… | Continue reading
I was at a friend’s house last night, as she said she was surprised I’d not written anything about the forthcoming General Election. When she pointed it out, I was surprised, too — but,… | Continue reading
Ordeal by Innocence — Agatha Christie Apparently one of Christie’s two favourites among her own books (along with Crooked House), and I can understand why. The two books share dark atmo… | Continue reading
You may remember that eleven days ago I wrote to my MP, Mark Harper: Whatever your feelings may be about just “getting Brexit done”, you must know that this is no way to do it. I beg you at least t… | Continue reading
Yet another letter to my MP, as the country comes apart around me. Dear Mark, Boris Johnson returns from Brussels with a deal that, according to the best economic assessments, will wipe 6.4% off GD… | Continue reading
A while back I published my recipe for bolognese sauce. Our eldest is starting a scheme where he cooks for us once a week, and last week he used that recipe. This week he wants to do chili con carn… | Continue reading
Dear Mark Harper, Whatever your, my or anyone else’s views on Brexit, it is surely obvious to all of us that no one man should be able or allowed, in a Parliamentary democracy, to shut down P… | Continue reading
When I started this blog over nine years ago, back in February 2010, I made an about page that said I was 41 years old and had been happily married to Fiona for 17 years. I said I was father to thr… | Continue reading
Popcorn — Ben Elton More Elton, this one the story of a film director, clearly based on Quentin Tarantino, who makes very violent but very stylish films; and about two copycat killers who bre… | Continue reading
Our family was away from 24th-31st July, cruising in a boat on the Norfolk Broads. In fact, we were in this specific boat, “Glistening Light”: During that week, my middle son Matthew ha… | Continue reading
Dear Mark Harper, I have written to you more times than either of us probably cares to remember about Brexit, which I believe is a bad deal for Britain and particularly for under-privileged areas l… | Continue reading
A few years ago, I got into playing Skyrim on our XBox 360. There are many wonderful things about Skyrim, including its immersive sense of place, its vast and varying geography, its brooding landsc… | Continue reading
Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote I went back to read this source text after having been fascinated by the film. The novella is perfectly written: terse, just as descriptive as it … | Continue reading
Nine years ago, I wrote Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way, then followed it up with Still hatin’ on git: now with added Actual Reasons! Both posts evidently resonated with a lot of p… | Continue reading
I have much less to say about 2008’s The Incredible Hulk movie than I had to say about 2003’s Hulk, because the film is much less ambitious. It’s a strange thing to say about a su… | Continue reading
If you use semantic versioning in your project — and you should — then you fix bugs in patch releases (e.g. going from v2.4.6 to v2.4.7), and add new features in minor releases (e.g. from v2.4.6 to… | Continue reading
One of the characteristic tricks that crops up in Beatles songs is the use of major and minor chords on the same note. A lot of the Abbey Road album is built on movement between C, its relative min… | Continue reading
My friend and colleague Matt Wedel is not a fan of the 2003 Hulk movie. In an email exchange back in 2008, he classified all the then extant superhero movies into four bins and concluded: “Yo… | Continue reading
I get mailings from the optimistic Labour For a Public Vote group. Today, I wrote back. Here’s what I wrote. Hi, Mike. Thanks for somehow finding the energy to push on with this very dispirit… | Continue reading
I’m watching my way through the first series of The Incredible Hulk, mostly with Fiona. When I’m in the mood for an episode, I invariably invite her to join me in the following way: … | Continue reading
In Defence of Fascism (Bob the Angry Flower) — Stephen Notley I went back to the very first collection of Bob the Angry Flower comics, which is wildly uneven but contains some superb strips. … | Continue reading
Recently, I’ve been going through a Hulk phase. I thought it would be interesting to compare five different manifestations of the Hulk: the original run of comics starting in the 1960s, the 1… | Continue reading
Almost all of the UK’s European Election results are in! We don’t quite have all the results yet, but there’s enough for us to see the trends. Let’s look at the numbers and … | Continue reading
With the European elections nearly upon us, it’s nearly time to decide how to cast our votes. Unfortunately, the choices are very complicated. A friend has asked me to lay out the options, an… | Continue reading
Arkham Asylum — Grant Morrison and Dave McKean I was so disappointed by this. I can’t remember whose recommendation I ordered it on, but when it arrived and I flicked through it, I imme… | Continue reading
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead — Agatha Christie More Poirot, and more of Christie’s Mary-Sue character Ariadne Oliver. This one is rather good, with a gradual homing in on the solution rath… | Continue reading
I have just sent this email to the Labour party candidates for the local elections that are happening today. Dear Jackie Fraser, Doug Scott and Shaun Stammers, I will be voting today in the council… | Continue reading
I stumbled across this old favourite moment from Jurassic Park: “If I may. I’ll tell you the problem with the art you’ve made here. It didn’t require any discipline to attai… | Continue reading
The Timewaster Letters — Robin Cooper The original to which Return of … was the sequel. Robin Cooper writes childishly earnest letters to a variety of organisation proposing ill-conside… | Continue reading