I just found out that the logo for Chupa Chups lollies was designed by Salvador Dali. I’m not sure exactly what can be done with this information but I had to share it.
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A Billion in the Bank
Every day for the last year, I have bought the exact same £100,000-prize-scratch-card. With the exception of a few small wins (my largest was £10), as yet, I haven’t struck it rich. It is now getting to the point whereby I am no longer buying the tickets with the hope of winning the jackpot but…
Back in London
I returned to London after spending my Christmas in Bristol. Walking to Westminster Station, I took this quick picture of the Abbey with my phone. Such an incredible building. Follow my blog with Bloglovin
The Quick and the Pointless
It is a curious thing that you are now just as likely to find a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a second-hand bookshop as you are to find a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It reminds me of the comedian Stewart Lee’s joke that, considering the current condition of the literary world, the…
Insert End of an Era Cliché Here
I was in White City earlier this week and took a stroll by the building previously known as BBC Television Centre. With the vacant office lights off and the complex’s main entrance barricaded shut, I was put in mind of the occasion I visited the disused ship manufacturing district in Belfast City (referred to by…
Looking back on Galway
In the initial months of the Irish economic collapse, I lived like a down-and-out amongst the bohemians of Galway City. My hair was long, my clothes were scruffy and I had no greater aspirations in life above funding my next meal. As if things couldn’t get any worse, I joined a writing group. While, as a collective, the group…
Traveling better with Tubiquette
Even at the best of times, riding the Tube can be a labored and infuriating experience. And it’s not even the delays, cramped carriages or bronchiole clogging tunnels that’ll drive an otherwise sane person to screaming at non-English-speaking strangers, but more a confluence of small, regularly occurring, irritations; tourists standing on the left side of…
The Charming Irrelevance of Russell Brand
Last night, I watched uncomfortably as Russell Brand ranted at Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight. Coming across more as a disaffected first-year-undergraduate-soc-and-pol-student than any sort of credible political commentator, Brand demonstrated not only an unsettling propensity towards demagoguery, but to be the most frustrating kind of citizen. That is, one that doesn’t vote. In fact,…
The Hard Brass Backbone of Bristol
It is perhaps quite fitting that the ugliest part of Bristol’s city centre is its high-street Shopping Quarter. I cannot recall ever being in a district so under-representative of its host city as Bristol’s shopping quarter. Combining faceless high-street retail brands and desperately ugly, mid-20th century architecture , the shopping quarter is a ghetto of charmless consumerism to…
The Best of Living Dead Movies
Exploiting the current popularity of the zombie genre and since Halloween’s just a few months away, I present the best zombie movies to watch over the holidays. Shaun of the Dead (2004) Shaun of the Dead combines an intelligent and self-conscious script with enough violence and gore to keep any zombie movie enthusiast satisfied. For…
Much Love for Milwaukee
The citizens of Wisconsin are a people after my own heart. Combining a love of beer, a fixation with cheese based food products and a cheerful sense of humor, ‘sconsonites (‘sconsonians?) are very easy to get along with. Traveling North from Chicago, I made my way to Milwaukee, home of the Miller Brewery, Harley Davidson…
Literature, Icebergs and Movies
The members of the Pure Cinema Movement of the early 20th century understood film and literature as two irreconcilably differing artistic forms. On the contrary, I’ve always thought that beyond cosmetic details the two actually keep to very similar conventions. If you have ever attended a creative writing course then I’m sure that you’ll be familiar with the…
A Film Review That I Wrote A While Back
In March 2008, Variety magazine reported that Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller had approached Disney with intentions to develop a script for a new Muppets movie project1. The combination of Segel and Soller, backing from Jim Henson Studios and a $45 million budget assured the project a heavy market impact. Upon its release in 2012,…
A Distracting Ramble Through Nowhere in Particular
Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness – George Orwell, 1946. I recently saw a youtube video of a 2003 interview with the late David Foster Wallace in which the writer expressed concern with what he regarded as a decline in the willingness of Americans to…
Vege-might
Leopold Bloom may have eaten with relish the “inner organs of beasts and fowl” but I fear my own meat eating days could be swiftly drawing to an end. The decision to quit meat has been in the pipeline for several years. Whilst grudgingly employed as a chef, I maintained that the moment I was able…