1) A Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch.
2) The FIAT Ritmo/Strada commercial it made reference to.
I have no idea why I know about any of this, because I think I was two at the time, but watching both jiggled my memory banks.

The only bad thing about the new Casino Royale is the title song by Chris Cornell. Discuss.

There’s a story linked to by boingboing.net about why a certain TV programme called Lost doesn’t work. I suppose it’s not really surprising that someone who gets paid to write for New York magazine took over two series worth of programming to notice what I did within two episodes. What is surprising is that so [...]

My friend Dr. Ellis Jones has just published a new book, The Better World Shopping Guide. He’s launching it at the Varsity on Saturday 18th November. There’s also a new website, Better World Shopper. It’s a very handy reference if you’d rather avoid buying products from companies whose practices are unethical, like Nestlé. You can [...]

Yesterday was my mainstream movie day. I caught The Departed and The Prestige at my local evil five-plex. Both good movies, and The Prestige was particularly noteworthy for being a fantastic exploration of artifice and deception, a real puzzle of a movie where the structure of the movie is the same as the structure of [...]

In his review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton plays Devil’s Advocate for theology in order to make some pointed criticisms of Dawkins’ rhetoric. As a firm atheist, I’m looking forward to reading The God Delusion over the festive season, and as someone who respects Terry Eagleton’s scholarly work, [...]

Sometimes I wish there weren’t so many options for ordinary folk to leave their responses on serious articles on newspaper websites. For example, I saw this today at the bottom of a brief, lightweight article on neuroscience in the Guardian:
Didn’t dinosaurs have two brains at one time? Where did the other brain go to? Didn’t [...]

For no particular reason, other than I’m in the mood and some of this stuff is classic, here are a bunch of songs (with videos) from early eighties Britain which prove the first seven years of my life weren’t all bad make-up, pixie boots and synthesizers (not that there’s anything wrong with a good Moog [...]

Here are some of the highlights of the 15th September binge. It’s about 15megs of streaming Quicktime file. Click on the “read the rest of this entry” link to see the video.

Last night at the Varsity we showed Michael Winterbottom’s movie, The Road to Guantánamo, in conjunction with a local human rights group. The day before the screening one of the members of the group received a threatening phone call. Here is a transcript of that call:

Yeah, you commie socialist pig. Let me tell you something. [...]