Sideways joins American Beauty as a quiet, bleak comedy that came out of nowhere and surprised a lot of my friends with its quality. Said friends subsequently recommended it quite highly, only for me to discover that, while it is amiable enough (and certainly very funny in places), it certainly isn?t the sort of film which watching on video would reduce one iota (it might improve it, given that yo ...

The most impressive thing about Vernon God Little, I found, was the narrative voice, which was first person- nothing special about that (although I am finding, more and more, that it's my favourite kind of narrative perspective and third person voice-of-god narrators are starting to bug me a little bit), but typically first-person narrators are somewhat obviously the voice of the author themselve ...

Have you heard the new NIN single? Apparently there is a new vid around on the website... you seen it... I was looking but couldn't track it down... what am I saying of course you have seen it! I had to respond to my friend that I haven't seen the new Nine Inch Nails video, or downloaded either of the two new songs, even though they've both been available for some time now. Part of the reason for ...

The world?s only British matador is, apparently, retiring. Asked why he was retiring, he responded: ?Well, in order to be a matador, you need 100% of your faculties...well...90% of your faculties.? That made me giggle, for some reason. ...

Happy dude-getting-nailed-to-a-tree weekend! As Bill Hicks was fond of noting: "Where in the Bible do they mention a giant bunny that hands out chocolate eggs? You'd think I'd remember that bit." Anyway, I'm in Hampstead Heath on Friday, enjoying the sun with a bit of red wine, cheese, `n friends. At one point I look up and point out what appears to be either a bin lid or a very large frisbee, tw ...

NOTE: This was written for the online magazine Pick Me Up, which last week asked its readers the question: Have you ever almost died? (along with: What is the best relationship you never had?), but I thought I'd blog it, as well. Enjoy. There have been three occasions on which I have almost died, all of which (rather suitably) make pretty neat stories, but probably would have made rather unimpre ...

I was just now sound asleep when I was awoken by a phone call (which was good, because I was not meant to be sleeping). After I had approximately a one-minute conversation with my sister, I turned on the light and rubbed my face and generally returned to full consciousness (well, full awake-ness) and began to remember fragments of the dream that had just been interrupted. Most of the dream was a ...

Just when I thought life couldn't get any better! AQA has returned to znaddancemotherfucker.com and delivered great news: you can get any one question you like answered FOR FREE! This is your chance, blog-readers! With the power of all of my readers combined, why, I could get.....up to FOUR questions answered! So what are you waiting for? Get over there! The secrets of the universe are waiting! ...

I'm currently looking for somewhere to live, which means I spend the greater portion of my working day staring at the gumtree, looking for flats that fall into my very specific criteria: location, price, size, convenience, shower pressure, the usual. However I'm finding that, while I'm reasonably flexible in all of these areas, I immediately discard any advert that contains the following heinous ...

First things first: I loved this movie, and came out with a really big grin on, just as I did coming out of Rushmore and The Royal Tenembaums, the directors previous two films, with which this film shares the same kind of deadpan, laconic humour, in which very little is laugh out loud funny, but there's an almost constant level of quiet bemusement. I found The Life Aquatic to be superior to both t ...

[this began as a comment on another blog, but it got so long I thought I'd just stick it here. My thoughts on this topic aren't (and could hardly be) original, and are covered far more eloquently and intelligently in other, more eloquent, more intelligent blogs] So, according to the Sunday Times yesterday, the Tories intend to turn abortion into a 'keystone issue' for this year's election. My fir ...

I went to Hyde Park on Saturday, absolutely gorgeous day, I was meeting some friends for a picanic. I walked over from Green Park, and I quickly noticed that all the roads around the park were closed off, police were everywhere. I had a marvellous time, walking down the centre lane of the five-lane blacktop running alongside Hyde Park. Eventually I ran into the reason the roads were blocked off, w ...

The moral of the story is: don't put your card behind the bar and then proceed to get drunk. ...

The problem with self-filming is, I'm forced to look DOWN into the camera, which kind of compresses my chin into my throat, giving me a jabba-du-hutt-like appearance. Which is, like, totally hot. Click to see the video. (58sec, 5MB) ...

What's with all the haters? FROM: AQA [63336]: AQA, like yourself, is dismayed at the level of intolerance in the world. A recent survey revealed the most popular new commandment was 'respect others'. I think I might be developing a little crush on disembodied old AQA, despite the Judeo-Christian leanings they've shown in several of their responses. I also hope work doesn't question all these £ ...

So, I'm on the tube the other day, and I'm reading over someone's shoulders, which is what I do when I have no Metro and no Palm and no book and no Sun-left-on-the-seat-isn't-Dear-Deidre-the-best? This is quite rare (and, look, if you're pregnant, I'm sorry I didn't see you. I don't look at people on the tube. I'm reading. I'll have you know I once shooed two men off their bus seats in order to se ...

Some people leave no path behind them in this world. Some people think punching out a few sprogs will do the trick. Other people make albums or write novels or leave a mile-long trail of shotgunned dead. My legacy is secure, however, because I've done this: ...

The first thing you should know is: I'm really scared of dying. Not of being dead. I'm sure that whatever's next, be it nothing (which, based on my experiences with unconciousness, I'm sure it will be), or anything else, I'll probably rapidly adjust, I'm good that way ("Only one red-hot poker in my earhole today, Satan? Ooh, lovely. How's the wife?"). But the run-up to being dead doesn't sound so ...

While I constantly maintain a sort of low-level state of general health (blocked nose, brain fatigue, insomnia, lower back pain), it's actually pretty rare that I am stricken with an illness that is so severe that I can't make it into work. I mean, every time I wake up with symptoms that you might associate with severe flu/being dead, but I find if I just 'fight through them', they rapidly dissip ...

Er, God, I can only pick one? The pressure, the pressure!!! Right, well, a song I really haven't been able to get enough of recently is ah, hey, 'Drop the Pressure' by Mylo. This is all Ross' fault, having turned it into the skiing anthem (song you hear in your head when you're skiing) earlier this year. So whirl this one on the dancefloor and I'll start grooving to the left and to the right, sla ...

I kind of went off short stories, ah, about fifteen years ago, actually. I'm just a novel kind of guy, I think. I really like that feeling you get, when you finish a novel, like you've been transported somewhere, and you take a journey with the characters, and when it ends, you're sad it's over. That can really only come from spending some serious time with the characters, which only novels can do ...

So, I?m sitting at this gig the other day, and I?ve got a couple of thoughts chasing round in me old brick, two of which are of pertinence today: The first was, well, before I started this here blog, I was already a pretty active member of the old blogging community, checking out all your sites and things, making comments, occasionally guest-hosting here and there. And something I?d often ask oth ...

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Astute readers will have noticed that this site, still in its infancy, was actually visited by AQA itself earlier this week, revealing themselves to have a website! The website allows one free question (from a pre-selected few, annoyingly), from which I chose: Is there a Latin word for Gobbledigook? FROM: AQA [63336]: The word 'gobbledygook' derives from the sound of a gobbling turkey. A synon ...

I love live music. Some of the best nights of my life have been at gigs. You're with your friends, you're drinking, there's music, you dance your ass off. It's great fun. So when Grande Cobra said there was a spare seat on thier tour bus, I jumped at the chance for a trip to Birmingham. They'd played the night before, that was a kickass gig, I had a lot of fun, and, true to my videoblogging wor ...

This is the moment. ...

Oh man, I've got to learn that me and my friends' sense of humour is a lot darker than regular folks. So I'm in a meeting and we're discussing asbestos safety regulations, and someone mentions that the iron girders in the World Trade Centre were coated with an asbestos spray to 'prevent heat damage'. "It didn't work." I deadpanned, only to be met with fifteen seconds of silence and mouths gaping ...

Hey, this isn't a real blog entry, it's more of an experiment. I've been advised that 'videoblogging' is the hot new thing, and this weekend I am going to take my little camera with me to a gig and record what I see. This is just an experiment to see if the whole MOV thing is gonna work, even. I have no idea what my bandwidth restrictions are, presumably only broadband users will be able to play ...

Why are hallucinogenic mushrooms legal, when most other mind-altering substances are not? From: AQA [63336] 'Magic Mushrooms' as such are not outlawed in the UK. However, the active chemical, psilocybin, is a class A drug so cannot legally be in your system. Oh, AQA, you were doing so well, only to let me down now. You just repeated my question back to me. What I want to know is WHY are vendors ...

We gather under the Marble Arch, about twenty of us, all told. If you were to stand here at this same time six months from now, there?d be over two hundred people, strapping on their boots, putting on their pads, the more bold among us chatting amiably to the more nervous. But it?s February, and it?s cold, and only the people who are dedicated are here now. Cold does not concern us- once we start ...

"Have you bound those files for me yet?" "Uhm, no, actually, I've been really busy. They're all printed and waiting by the binding machine, if you have some kind of low-level functionary available to bind them." "You are the low-level functionary." "Ah." ...

It?s happening again. It?s funny how we fall into relationship patterns. Like, you can see the same mistakes occurring, almost before they occur, over and over, with different partners. You try to blame them, but when the same mistake keeps happening, you have to at least consider the possibility that it?s you. It all started with LA Gyms, in Golder?s Green. We started out great, y?know? We?d s ...