2009

  • “We have a big fire problem here,” he said. He mentioned that he has his own pump house. “We take the pool water, mix it with Class A foam, and pump it out over the whole property. Everybody else just runs for the hills.” He threw his hands up and did a squeaky voice. “…

  • Font capture

    Fontcapture makes an honest to goodness font out of your handwriting. It’s actually quite a weird feeling to see a whole page of your writing you didn’t write.

  • The Jobs home

    Gizmodo has a kind of silly article about Steve Jobs’ house. I prefer to think of it like this, sat on the floor with just a lamp and a kick arse stereo.

  • Thereafter, TV One revisited, like a dog returning to its vomit, the Michael Jackson circus every night, for significant periods, for the next 11 nights. Ian Bayly, I love your work.

  • It may have been a mistake to read this right after White Teeth. The Autograph Man is on a completely different scale to its  predecessor, the narrative taking only a couple of weeks and centering around one main character, Alex Li-Tandem, an autograph collector who loses his father in the opening chapter. Alex lacks charm…

  • My main was the Rack of South Island Wild Boar with a roast apple. It was a little bit chewy in places, but nothing to do with how it was cooked, which was beautifully. I got three generous sized ‘racks’ and a bit of pork belly, which didn’t last too long. Birthday Girl went for…

  • Three and a half years ago I bought one of my most favorite gadgets ever – my first iPod. 4th generation, 20GB, that vanilla white. We had a lot of fun together. The iTrip meant I could play it over any radio, and when I changed cars, the new stereo had a cable to plug…

  • Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny’s

  • What is it with writers putting themselves in their books? Brett Easton Ellis went from being a kind of bored god to me  to totally frickin insane (in a bad way) in Lunar Park, and Douglas Coupland did much the same by sauntering into JPod in an exercise in twee pointlessness. It’s a sequal of…

  • This was kind of like reading Michael Chabon for the first time – I couldn’t wait to finish so I could rush out and read everything else she’d done. Set in London, White Teeth bucks its way over a hundred years or so to tell the story of three London families. But that’s kind of…