I took last week off and spent it slumming around London, so you now get two art reviews for the price of one. And when i say 'art', I mean of course playing in odd playgrounds for adults. The most talked about of course is Test Site, the enormous slide in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Only five? They should have filled that thing with slides! The queuing system was very oddly handled. W ...

Much like learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere, or humming a song you haven't thought of in years and then suddenly hearing it a dozen times on the radio over the next week, since posting The Culture Defence I have been running into example apon example of how tradition is pretty much the only reason anyone does anything. One of the more amusing ones is Amanda's take on crusi ...

To: Office All Subj: To whoever stole my cheese from the Office fridge Dear whoever stole me cheese from the office fridge, I hope you enjoyed my cheese. I was looking forward to eating it for lunch, and I certainly hope the joy you gained from stealing it surpassed my annoyance at having it stolen. You will be happy to know that I have replaced the cheese, along with several other food items, a ...

I watched, ah, 'Death of a President' last night. Probably the only time I've actually stopped what I was doing and made a special point to watch TV since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was quite heavily hyped, so I knew it would be a part of pop culture, or water cooler talk, if you like, and plus I'd heard some intruiging things about it, so thought I should give it a look. To be ...

Like Pix, I'll be going Pink for October. Well, a sort of mauve. Those of you who know why, know. Those of you who don't, ask. ...

No-one's happier about the Hoff revival than I, and I think the series of self-mocking Pipex ads is a lot of fun. But the above picture is just plain creepy and there's no getting round it. Is it me or does his head look way, way smaller than his body would indicate? Scott says that the Hoff has taken so many steroids that his balls have dropped off. I don't know how he knows that. ...

I often have thoughts about things which I find hard to articulate. I know I think something about those things, but I'm not entirely sure what. One example that sticks out in my mind was a poster which had a London street, and everyone's heads had been replaced with security cameras. I think the slogan was something like: "Help your community by reporting suspicious activity." or something, but I ...

So I just got kicked from Ade's post about belief and tradition, because I happened to raise the dreaded C-word (circumcision), a topic that is dear to my heart and I love ranting about, not least because it continually strikes me as one of the oddest paradoxes about modern society: we run ads about how awful it is to hit children, but we're more than happy to chop bits off of them when they're a ...