I for one am glad that things are getting back to normal and we can all get back in our cars and make up for lost time. It’s bad enough that police have been enforcing speed limits during this period, wasting their time when they could be investigating real crimes like the massive accounting fraud […]
During this lockdown period, I have enjoyed my bike rides sans helmet and wearing clothing that looks (to the untrained eye at least) like ordinary clothes. I do this (unironically) pour encourager les autres, because I want some of the “new” cyclists out there to see that you don’t have to dress in the Full […]
For a few months now, as previously mentioned, I’ve been getting to grips with the McCartney solo material I had long ignored. This is thanks to a variety of podcasts, including Nothing is Real and I Am the Eggpod. The latter is a mixed bag: a tendency to be a bit bland but some high-profile […]
I’m looking forward to getting back to school – no really – if only to shut off the torrent of opinion columns on the subject. Anyway, here’s mine. First of all, I’ll only really believe it’s happening when I see the Back to School aisle in the supermarket – preferably a French one. Oh to […]
I noticed, early in the lockdown, how certain film topics seemed to be creeping up the lists of recommendations on the platforms. There was Outbreak, something called Pandemic (bit on the nose), 93 Days, The Forgotten Plague, and, of course, Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh film with the stellar cast that had completely passed me by. […]
While I still have a lot to learn, things have been improving on the pizza and other fronts, as I’ve fired up the oven a few times. The gallery below shows some of my efforts. It takes about half an hour for the floor of the oven to get hot enough. This is actually a […]
Someone posted a ‘funny’ clipping on Twitter this morning about a town in California declaring itself a ‘sanctuary city’ for businesses and flagging its intention to defy the statewide lockdown rules. (For future historians puzzling over this fragment, there was a viral pandemic in 2020, and the United States, led by sociopaths, had the highest […]
Sooner or later, science fiction comes down to the question of what it means to be human. The situations and settings vary, but the question is one of the oldest we have: the ontological debate between free will and determinism. Philosophers, religionists, and scientists have all approached the problem in various ways. We are biologically […]
Huh. I read a couple of reviews of this series and they were lukewarm at best, and yet I found it really enjoyable and burned through it in a couple of nights. Now suffering bingewatch remorse. As ever my tastes are off beam in comparison to the critical opinion in the quality press, but I’ve […]
It wasn’t even pizza that made me realise that I’d grown up in pizza ignorance. We were in Alsace, it was the early 90s, and we were driving haphazardly down through the Route des Vins, though not in a van. We were in a red Ford Fiesta. We stopped in one of those picturesque villages […]
