Why didn’t I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I’d had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he’s a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as ...
Evidence that I’ve been thinking too much about web-design lately: I was looking at a very elegant multi-column university letterhead yesterday, and I thought to myself: “Oh sure, it looks good now, but how will it cope when someone resizes the paper?” Funny that a window has become my default, rather than ...
During those existential lacunae at the supermarket checkout when even the curiously austere Hershey’s chocolate seems appealing for a moment, I find myself both drawn to and repelled by the train-wreck of narcissism that is The Oprah Magazine. Whatever might be on the cover this month, I wonder idly to myself. Oh, ...
Started today in a really crappy mood – long story, and not one I’m telling here – and it didn’t improve much. I did want to commemorate something that’s become important to me, though. Sometime in the, oh, the next decade or so, I might finally end up getting some new glasses. My current ones ...
I never did go back to see how my Bad Wolf musings turned out. Not so well, as it happens. I’d hoped for a new nemesis, and that didn’t really appear; Davros always worked so much better as Evil Genius than some bland Dalek Emperor, for obvious reasons: it’s possible to take something which clearly ...
Having started to read Half-Blood Prince, aloud, at bedtime, to A., I’ve accepted that I have no choice but to wade through the flabby prose and clunky exposition that forms the first two-thirds of each of the books, before the bombs she’s laid finally get to explode in the final third. But that doesn’t ...
Maybe I’ve been wrapped in the deadening clutches of US bureaucracy too much lately — yesterday at a branch office of the INS/CIS, fetchingly situated in the end unit of an unlovely strip-mall — but it occurred to me yesterday as I sat with the other hopeful souls that, while the essence of a country ...
Maybe it’s been done already, but someone ought to write something Kafka-esque in which a Josef Q finds himself compelled to join queue after queue in an impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy, the end of each interminable one leading to the beginning of the next, only to find, at the moment of apparent conclusion, ...
Live 8 was a collision of so many different motivations, there’s been something for every cynic to complain about: that it was all about rock-star ego; that its Anglo-Saxon whitey-whiteness was offensively patronising; that it was a missed opportunity to raise some hard cash; conversely, in a game of bluff and ...
They’ve headed back down since, but for quite some time gas/petrol prices here were kept below three dollars a gallon only by the bulwark of the number system. Apart from one place in Beverly Hills which seemed to leap with abandon from the $2.90s into the $3.20s in order to skip the whole argument, everywhere ...