Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.
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Many Small Worlds
I've liked the band Eels ever since I listened to their Beautiful Freak album ten years or so ago. I've never seen them live, but they're touring now so I might try to catch them. The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a forthcoming doc about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett. It turns out that his father was Hugh Everett - he of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham school of quantum physics. Robert Anton Wilson's bloody marvellous Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is what first got me interested in quantum physics. Here's how [...]
Beowulf
Tonight I went to the cinema to see Beowulf. It was the 3D version, so I'm currently suffering from a mild bout of sensory overload. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I thrive on sensory overload. Beowulf - in case you don't already know - is veteran genre director Robert Zemeckis' CG blockbuster adaptation of the classic Old English poem. Featuring a screenplay by the mighty Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and a heavyweight cast of motion-captured semi-synthespians - including Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie - it's already cleaned up at the US box office and looks [...]
Warren Zevon and Californication
The multitude of links between the raunchy David Duchovny-starring TV show Californication and the late, great American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon
Gigpix
When he isn't encouraging, urging and sometimes forcibly coercing the city's artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage, my friend Pete Ashton also finds the time to be a rather talented photographer. That's award-nominated polymathematical Renaissance Brummies for you. I sometimes suspect that his interest in photography is not unrelated to history as a comics aficionado. After all, he's not the first illustrious Peter to have moonlighted as a shutterbug. Anyhow, I was browsing through his Flickr pages and found the following pics he took at gigs I recently attended. They're rather good. Here's Jim White from [...]
