Random memories of the honeymoon, in no order:

*Stopping at a tiny railroad town in southern Tennessee and going to a proper old soda fountain, where the waitress thought we were French because we said we lived in Paris

*The Grand Ole Opry on our last night in Nashville - sheer genius. Although I remember the adverts best

*The lush cottage in the ( Read more... )

I have been ill and off work today, mooching around the flat on our last day in it, and feeling bored. I really hope I'm feeling better tomorrow, because moving house in my current state is going to be a horrendous task.

I'm reading Davy Crockett's autobiography at the moment; it's a strange book, full of self-aggrandising and political ( Read more... )

I have a lot of Camille on my iPod at the moment.

Try to imagine walking home through the dark streets of the 19th after a late shift, with this playing in your ears:

Click to view

Two memes both stolen from used_songs :

01. Answer each of the questions below the cut using the Flickr search engine.
02. Choose a photo from the first three pages.
03. Copy the URL of your favorite photos here.
04. Then share with the world.

( disappointingly uninspiring montage )

Wow, I thought polls would be a bit gimmicky, but I was actually totally gripped by seeing democracy in action. I might live my whole life like this. It's like The Dice Man meets Pop Idol. Bowing to the majority, I've decided to keep the sign up, except following zenithblue 's lead I will now regard it as a reminder of the inconvenient but crucial fact ( Read more... )

1. I rang a friend at BBC Online last week to ask why we have to spell Radovan Karadžić's name as "Karadzic" on all our websites. The answer: because it has to go on Ceefax, which can't handle diacritical marks. Bah. What's everyone else's excuse? Not a single newspaper that I can see is printing it with accents, which I suppose is not the end of ( Read more... )

Scarlett Johansson's long-awaited/dreaded album of Tom Waits covers is upon us. The first single is this, and my general feeling is that it's a disaster.

Click to view

I particularly love that song, it's a rare one, and one I like to play on the piano. I sing it rather worse than she does, but then I'm not inflicting my efforts on the general public. Bah ( Read more... )

I caught the end of some doco about Chinese hip-hop on Radio 4 yesterday, which was great (it's here, if you want to check it out). I was amazed to hear one of them say that not only is rapping harder in Mandarin, but singing is much harder in general because of having to rhyme tones as well as sounds. This is the sort of thing that I assumed was ( Read more... )

 I watched Black Snake Moan last night, a weirdly fascinating film.  Has anyone seen it?  I love blues music and the way music was used in the movie was fantastic.  But it was a very American film in terms of its sexual politics, with this strange sense that the female sex drive is this mysterious, frightening thing to be "cured".  That irritated ( Read more... )

The ability to write a memorable opening sentence is a real art form, and the mark of a brilliant writer, a fact in no way negated by the lacklustre example you are currently reading. I think it was García Márquez who said he spends months working on his opening line, writing and rewriting it, playing with the punctuation and so on - after which, ( Read more... )