My answers to a sequence of questions from a friend, asked as part of personal research, and posted here with a big FWIW disclaimer. Her intro: Explanation: In this paper, I’m looking at sexuality as identity – specifically in the BDSM and spanking communities. Identity is different than action: a man who had ...
Of which, I suppose, I’m now one, but Peter Preston’s funny and perceptive piece in the Guardian about the transatlantic miscommunication inherent in Match Point gets my vote, at least for the first half of the film — which is really the whole of his thesis. Up to somewhere around its mid-point, Match Point is ...
This package is sold by mass, not weight. (Please consult local acceleration due to gravity.) Some unsettling of contents may have occurred during zero-g shipment.
Film is everywhere in LA, both blaring transiently from billboards and seeped into the brickwork. Beetling bus journeys a couple of days ago took me past the Grand Olympic Auditorium, where the final fight scenes in the first Rocky film were shot, then past the Shrine, from which King Kong escaped before rampaging across a ...
Placed on the page just where it ought to be, so that I could nibble on it as I was taking a break from the cryptic crossword yesterday, itself a break from some HTML hand-coding (yum!), I was enjoying a piece in the Guardian which looked at the results of the latest Bulwer-Lytton Contest as ...
Obviously this is a spectacular ruling — not least because of the Judge’s apparent excoriation of the ID bone-headed activism. But the Reuters hack then steps in a huge pile of dinosaur poop: Intelligent design holds that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must have been the work of an unnamed creator ...
[This piece probably works as a companion piece to that one.] We talk about the lever as the simplest machine, but it really isn’t. The simplest machine is entropy, so long as we take a very human-centric view of what work is. If I turn over an almost-empty bottle of shampoo so that the viscous ...
The accepted wisdom with Rowling is that her world-building skills trump her thin characterisation and flat prose and make them irrelevant, but I think that’s a myth. She’s actually not all that good at world-building. What she’s good at is ideas, but in practice they don’t really fit together to ...
Considering how relatively few — relative to a truly committed fan (my excuse being that I’m a Middlesbrough fan) — football matches I’ve been to in my time, an oddly large number of them have had a significance beyond their immediate competitive stake. I was at the game at Wembley on a chilly night (though ...
(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 ...