Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.
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James Joyce’s Birmingham: Ulysses on the Buses
Stateless, scrawny James Joyce and his mistressmusewife, Nora Barnacle, were waiting for a number eleven omnibus in the Perry Barr district of Birmingham. It was twenty-six days, five months and one hundred and twelve years after 16th June 1904, although they didn't necessarily spend all that time waiting for a bus. At what precise location in Perry Barr was their bus stop located? By a clay bark’s bank, where a stone lane meets a field of birch. Do you mean by the Barclays Bank on the Corner of Aston Lane and Birchfield Road? Um, yes. What obsolete vernacular term [...]
April Fools
When I was a student at Hull University, lo those many years ago, I was involved in a cruel and unusual April Fools prank that I still feel rather guilty about now.It wasn't my idea, you understand. I could never have dreamt up anything that reeked of so much wrong. I didn't have much to do with the prank's execution, either. I just grabbed a seat at ringside, kept my mouth shut, my face straight and watched it all unfold.The target was my very dear friend, Jude, who was (and still is) one of the loveliest and most genuine people [...]
Read Yourself RAW
I'm currently re-reading - for the umpteenth time, I might add - the great (and, sadly, late) Robert Anton Wilson's first Cosmic Trigger book. While the title might seem a tad hokey and dated (it was written in 1977), the book itself remains fiendishly clever, gleefully provocative and side-splittingly funny. Like most of RAWs oeuvre, it contains such a generous mindbending-idea-to-page ratio that he makes most other writers, philosophers and social commentators seem cognitively tight-fisted by comparison.Anyway, a particular passage jumped out at me today. Let me share it with you:Everybody nowadays thinks they must have an "opinion" on everything, [...]
What the Nyuk?
From Variety:MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for "The Three Stooges." Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome "Curly" Howard.The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe. What? What? WHAT???For some reason, the notion of the recently Oscar-enriched Penn playing Larry puts me in mind of a Woody Allen short story, where a serious-but-struggling writer is commissioned to write a novelisation of a [...]
My Movie Alphabet
Here's something fairly inconsequential for you.This is a meme I saw on Rol's blog late last year. Rol heard about it here, but I believe it originated from here. In any case, the idea is to select a favourite film to represent each letter of the alphabet. As I have lots of favourite films and a fairly temperamental set of taste buds, I've included runners-up in my list. This was to overcome the judgement-call paralysis that hampered my previous attempt. If I didn't do it this way I wouldn't have made it past the first consonant.Annie Hall (Runners up: An [...]
Today… is… International Talk Like William Shatner Day
So declareth Maurice LaMarche - the voice talent behind such animated greats as 'The Brain' from Pinky and the Brain and the self-proclaimed "third most prominent imitator of William Shatner" - and who are we to argue? The mighty Shat turns 78 today, and LaMarche urges us all to celebrate this great man's birthday by adopting some of his highly idiosyncratic verbal mannerisms.He even offers some handy tips on how to do it right:You'll never say the word 'sabotage' in the same way again.Happy birthday, Mr Shatner.
