A trivial but surprisingly passionate argument with A. a few nights ago, which reminded me of the scene in Radio Days in which the fictional Woody Allen describes his parents arguing about which is the greatest ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific. How we got there isn’t important, but our point of contention was whether ...
I don’t need to worry any more about drifting towards bastardised mid-Atlantic speech-patterns. Or, rather, I still need to worry about it, but I don’t need to worry that it’s already happened, because I have what seems to be a foolproof test: if I can ask for some butter at a commercial eating ...
To Vons, a few nights ago, to buy some old-fashioned incandescent filament light bulbs, because the batch of long-life fluorescent bulbs we got at Costco a few months ago lend our living room the snug, inviting glare of a car parts warehouse. Standing, slightly baffled, in front of the display, it took me a few ...
One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask – I’m an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said: Free admission if you mention this truck. Trying to imagine exactly how I would ...
I find that I don’t actually know what ‘R.I.P.’ means. It’s splashed everywhere today before or after Kurt Vonnegut’s name — along with enough lazily glib trottings-out of ‘So it goes’ to dull the senses. But what do people actually mean when they say ‘Rest in Peace’, ...
To Costco last weekend, where I was a taken a bit aback by this message prominently displayed on the side of a large case of Coke: 36-pack 50% more than 24-pack It has the parsimony and the profundity of haiku: its simplicity, one imagines, can’t be anything other than the skin atop a porridge of ...
(Because I did the washing yesterday at my favourite place in Venice — the one with the Sav-on next door which always has Oh Henry!s at four for a dollar or some such unmissable chocolate deal — wearing my PJ bottoms with the penguins on. How very Californian I’m becoming.) A small group of what ...
Cory Doctorow whines a bit over at BoingBoing about the Lego company’s redirect from legos.com, and the accompanying bit of trademark defence. Might be just me here, but I don’t see a whole lot on the redirect page there which ‘scolds you viciously’, and the BoingBoing whine seems a lot more whiny. I ...
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 ...
So I’m reading the new(-est) Pratchett, Going Postal, and it’s shaping up nicely as a tale of the value of the public sector in a free-market world — with jokes. Last night, though, I hit a sequence that actually made me grouchy. Pratchett introduces a very minor character who has a fundamental problem with ...