Month: June 2018

This is possibly one of the romantic cartoons I’ve ever seen. Just looking at it makes my heart crack. The character that XKCD calls “Megan” is dancing with pleasure, but her dance – by means of perfectly well understood and … Continue reading →

The moon missions should have kept going in the seventies, but small men and women decided that money was more important (showing ignorance of economics as well as science). Now, the human race may be going back. It proves you … Continue reading →

I think it’s fair to say that The Matrix is the worst movie ever made. The Matrix is so bad that the best thing about it is Keanu Reeves’s acting, which is really dishing it out [1]. We’re not talking … Continue reading →

Not just a great name for a band, but also another essay on my friend Harwant Bains’s revival of Blood at the Royal Court, London. There’s a school of literature that says that the job of writers is to capture … Continue reading →

See https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/07/nasa-mars-rover-finds-organic-matter-in-ancient-lake-bed The coincidence of life both on Earth and on Mars would raise big questions. Is life therefore common in the galaxy? Had one of Mars and Earth seeded the other somehow? If so, which way round? Had both … Continue reading →

I went to see a revival of Harwant Bains’s 1989 play Blood last week at the Royal Court, London. Full disclosure: Bains is a good friend of mine, we go back a long way, and I love everything he writes; … Continue reading →

It’s not a what, it’s a who. George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950) wasn’t the first person to notice that the number of occurrences of any word in any given corpus of literature – of any language – is inversely proportional to the … Continue reading →

An imaginary critic writes of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing:  … style and rhythm come before substance, intention and feeling… the ultimate goal is to show off, to impress his audience, not to inform, persuade or challenge them. Yup, Sork is a … Continue reading →