If you’re going to be in London on the 23rd, 26th or 30th of March, get yourself some tickets to the recording of Bleak Expectations, a new BBC Radio 4 comedy written by Mark Evans, Esq. and starring Messr. James Bachman and a cast of thousands four. The pilot was one of the funniest Radio 4 comedies I’d heard in a long while, and I’m not just saying that. Although even if I were, you should still go.

27 February 2007 · Comedy

Links Here, Be

YouTube overload and more...

Read More · 25 February 2007 · Weblog

Name Your Person

A few months ago I switched on my server’s referrer logs so that I could join in the fun of seeing what search terms people were using to get here. For most pages it was what you’d expect, although there seemed to be a lot of frustrated teenagers wondering “how to quit wanking”, “what to do if while grinding you get a boner” and “how should chicks masturbate”—all of them drawn like flies to this fly-paper. I should put a comment form there so they can swap notes.

Read More · 21 February 2007 · · Journal

Be Here, Links

If at first you don’t succeed: a) everybody hates you; b) success just isn’t your thing; c) try, try again.

Read More · 19 February 2007 · · Weblog

Badly Drawn Boy

Badly Drawn Boy at Queen’s Hall on Tuesday.

17 February 2007 · Music

Ben “I don’t sign my dead cat up to bogus professional organisations for the good of my health, you know” Goldacre on Gillian McKeith and her ilk:

We don’t need any more stupid ideas about health in the world. We have a president of South Africa who has denied that HIV exists, we have mumps and measles on the rise, we have quackery in the ascendant like never before, and whatever Tony Blair might have to say about homoeopathy being a fight not worth fighting for scientists, we cannot indulge portions of pseudoscientific ludicrousness as if they don’t have wider ramifications for society, and for the public misunderstanding of science.

12 February 2007 · UK Culture

Appointed Hours

Believe it or not, I planned to spend these months writing here about the build-up to the big day, not filling the place with links and throwaway gags. But life is racing ahead too quickly on every front. The teaching that’s kept me busy every January and February for the past few years has come round again, and I’m teaching on another course now as well. And in every other hour that I could have been composing earnest essays about impending parenthood, I’ve been busy. Except, maybe, for this one.

Read More · 11 February 2007 · · Journal

Someone Alert the Capitol

Gateau de Terroir

11 February 2007 · Whatever

Here Links Be

All the free copies were gone within a day, so I had to settle for the actual novel. (Which I might even read. I was already halfway through one of RLS’s travelogues, and enjoying it.)

Read More · 10 February 2007 · · Weblog

Officer, Arrest That Man

Man Blamed For Warming

3 February 2007 · · Events

Be Links Here

I’ve updated my 2005 copy of Mozilla, but can’t quite warm to the Firefox interface (mainly the way you can’t close multiple tabs from the same mouse location). Fortunately the alternative branch of Moz 1.x in the form of SeaMonkey is pretty good, with nice new touches on top of the familiar layout (previews of what lies behind each tab; spell-check in form fields). The only drawback is that every window title is now appended with “SeaMonkey”, making idle browsing feel like a succession of playground taunts. “Speedysnail – SeaMonkey.”

Read More · 2 February 2007 · Weblog

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