Although I’m absolutely positive that many of the ingredients found in Yang Guang Supermarket’s – other Asian supermarkets are available – steamed buns have no business being in the human body, they are my current absolute, sell-your-own-shoes-to-buy-one, addiction. If you ever find yourself in London’s Asian district, I suggest finding their modest stall and giving…
George and Syria
An exercise I’ve been recently conducting involves typing “what would George Orwell have to say about…” followed by any random topic into Google. People, it seems, cannot resist attributing opinions on topics such as the Iraq war, ipods, contact lenses and diet cola to a man who has been dead for well over sixty years….
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 Supposedly Fun Thing I Should Never Have Done in the First Place
On any a Sun holiday it is a near certainty that you will – at some point or other – be confronted with awful music, unsatisfactory food stuffs, overpriced drinks and intolerable people. With proper care, some solid preparation and a certain amount of luck, these annoyances can be somewhat avoided. In the case of…
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…
I Hate Inspirational Facebook Quotes
The Facebook news feed was introduced to provide users with a constantly updating list of stories from their social network. I am sure, however, that your news feed – much like my own – functions as little more than a digital cavalcade of triviality, solipsism, credulity and occasional outright stupidity. Always patronizing and invariably trite,…
Christrionics
Finding my way through the begrimed passages that connect the ventricular routes of the London Tube service beneath Piccadilly Circus Station the other day, I happened upon a poster advertising an upcoming open-air reenactment of the trial, torture and death of Christianity’s top rockstar superhero, Jesus H. Christ. The Passion of Jesus, a modern imagining…
On Hemingway, Bulls, Fascists and Aliens
In an attempt to remedy the onset of misanthropy, I have recently been assisting with a West End theatrical reworking of Ernest Hemingway’s break through novel, The Sun Also Rises. Admittedly, my contribution to the production is – at best – very limited, consisting mostly of weekend stage hand dogsbodery. Nonetheless, the experience provides a…
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…
Misprints, Miscommunications and Lies
In his highly entertaining inspection of the many uses and abuses of the English language, The King’s English, Kingsley Amis addresses the struggle between “illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms” [1] by identifying two distinct sorts of offender of whose linguistic habits one is impelled to “deplore if not abhor.” Amis classifies members of…