The news is being reported all over the blogosphere. The zombie holocaust has begun.
It began with a naked bloke in Miami eating the face off another bloke. It continued with a guy in Maryland eating the heart and brain of another guy.
Now a sceptic might ask that, as both of these events occurred in America, might this not be less of a zombie holocaust, and more of a natural progression of a culture based entirely upon worship of slaughter and violence?
I was absent-mindedly perusing the internet recently when the following headline caught my eye:
Tolkien and Dickens grandsons join for book
I don’t wish to seem overly vulgar, nor do I want the integrity of my digestive system to be called into question, but upon reading those words I more or less shat all over myself.
“The heirs of Tolkien and Dickens collaborating on a book?!” I thought, giddy as a girl with a new pair of shoes. “This will unquestionably constitute the best thing that has ever happened in the history of mankind!”
During a recent debate about the proposed Thames Estuary Airport, (“Boris Island”*) a colleague presented me with a perfunctory rebuttal dredged from the Guardian website; not only would the airport have a detrimental effect on the environment, the location means that there would be an increased likelihood of collisions with birds, leading to plane crashes
When my counter-argument** was met with a geographically-ignorant hissy fit, I decided it was time to check out the original report. To be honest, I don’t know what all the worry is about.
I should begin this piece with an apology.
The trailer for the upcoming Peter Jackson film, The Hobbit, was released weeks ago. It has been and gone. Critics have reviewed it – offering up their predictable and (some might say) banal opinions – and fanboys have drooled all over it, their Pepsi-rich saliva dissolving parts of it, like nerdy versions of the Alien. Yet still Johnny Fisher has not commented on it. As a prominent Tolkien expert, this represents a grievous professional shortcoming on my part, and I therefore offer up the necessary apologies:
Sorry for not reviewing the trailer for The Hobbit.
Read more “Thorin Joke-enshield: The Hobbit trailer reviewed”
I dislike the adjective awesome, and I generally refrain from using it.
When I hear it, the word brings to mind a vivid image – namely, dreadlocked Australians standing around on an extraordinarily hot beach, drinking tasteless lager out of diminutive bottles whilst cradling surfboards and attesting to their particular levels of stoked-ness at some singularly uninteresting event or achievement.
There is not a single element within that vision that does not give me the creeps, and I therefore have tried to avoid experiencing it by dropping the word awesome from my vocabulary.
In a recent article entitled What should spaceships look like?, the BBC asks the following question:
As the next generation of spaceships is being conceived, should shuttle designers take their inspiration from sci-fi illustrators?
In posing such a question the BBC have clearly displayed their ignorance of this very blog. Had they been paying attention, they would know I have already definitively answered this question.