Here’s a simple way to tell if software is any good or not: is it fun to use? If you struggle and wrestle and curse, it’s probably a heap of crap. Probably an expensive heap of crap. I’m finding more fun playing with Google Maps right now than anything for a while. It’s quite spellbindingly ...
Dinner with friends some time ago, and, things having been a bit lubricated with wine, a friend of theirs aimed a question in my Limey direction, a reasonable paraphrase of which would be something like: “So. The Royal Family. What’s that all about then? Hmm? Hmm??” The edge of belligerence in his tone ...
Not the least of the problems facing any film adaptation of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide (I prefer it with the hyphen, so there) is this, and it’s a big one: Adams’s structural skill was something very Pythonesque, or maybe Carrollian; it was for elaborate, precise, whimsical play with words and ideas, and not, ...
Almost the first thing I wrote on this blog, almost a year ago, was a small piece about the beginning of filming of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. Almost a year later, spare a thought for the film itself, because it’s become the locus of so much baggage and anger that it’s no longer just a film. ...
Zarquod knows, I’m not (quite) old enough yet for Blimpish Letters to the Editor, but I did send something cranky to the relevant cubby-hole at the BBC about its use in this piece of ‘Edinburgh Fringe Festival’ to refer to the ‘Edinburgh Festival Fringe’. It’s been mostly changed now — ...
It’s striking how many of these are about a desire to escape from life, either chemically or by actually physically running away. But, fucking hell, this one isn’t just a secret; it’s a story. Once it doesn’t seem tasteless to do so, I imagine these will be the stories that are told about that day. ...
John Gruber, who is the person to read for informed, incisive Mac advocacy, takes a piece by Paul Graham and spins from it a discussion of the appeal of Macs to either end of the techie spectrum, but not the middle. Here’s the money quote from Graham: And open and good is what Macs are ...
Via Daily Kos, Digby refers, in passing, to the ‘Constitution Restoration Act of 2005‘, currently supported by a nut-cluster of the right. Here’s Digby’s quotation of the first clause, with her emphasis intact: The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 – Amends the Federal judicial code to ...
We’ve been listening to some BBC Radio 4 before bed lately: The News Quiz, the fantastic Mitchell & Webb, some odd bits of older archived comedy. It’s wonderful to get a bite of the concentrated Englishness of Radio 4 from so far away. I get a tiny bit cranky when the archived copies of recent ...
The whole meat-in-pastry thing continues to baffle and bemuse the New World. My eye having been caught by reference to ‘The Pasty Shack’, a modest emporium of said comestible in Sacramento, in this month’s Sunset magazine, I went a-Googling for a website. I found it, only to be somewhat disappointed by its ...