Book of film Book on station track Book of book with soundtrack #fallfriday youtu.be/TNkQmYvoh8A?...

Looks like she's won a gameshow in front of a studio audience of the undead

Cometh the hour...

Mornings on BBC2 consisting entirely of Pages From Ceefax

I didn't expect miracles from Starmer, but I did expect him at least to show occasional signs of being conscious

I gave myself a rope burn teaching myself to abseil down the stairs at home.

Remarkable medieval panel in the Courtauld Gallery depicting the bathing of the infant Van Morrison

Switched on Radio 4 to what sounded like a really dark episode of The Archers - residents of Ambridge moaning about lambs blood, God has left us, etc. Turned out it was TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Alan soliloquises amongst the limestone geology of the Arno valley until lunchtime. Meanwhile, Mark Rylance (as Leonardo) gets a trip to Wookey Hole

Absolutely heroic expense account bashing from Alan Yentob in this 2003 Mona Lisa documentary on BBC4. Extemporising over a glass of red, brandishing cigar at a hotel bar. "The only way to clear this up is to go to Milan", yeah sure Alan

Also this one. By An Ebb, published by @pressfuturist.bsky.social

(Odd how these lines, written in 1975 or thereabouts, kind of work as a foreshadowing of social media algorithms, motivations and codes of behaviour).

W.S. Graham, from 'What is the language using us for?'

Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence of Arabia How Green Was My Valley of the Dolls The Railway Children of the Corn

The Wicker Man Who Knew Too Much The Empire of the Sun Strikes Back Carry On Doctor Zhivago

I used to use Spotify only for work-from-home wallpaper, a loop of indifferent Brian Eno ambient stuff, just because it was boring / non-distracting. Imagine my horror when the Wrapped thing said I was in top 2% of Eno fans, and then Brian's shiny pate popped up to thank me earnestly for my support

I hate the I hate the Die Hard discourse discourse

Remember when budgets were one-offs, like Play For Today, instead of the disappointing series finale of a self-indulgent 115-episode Netflix series?

Watched Edge of Darkness on the iplayer last week, having never seen it - it's brilliant (and weirder than it first appears)

If you see this, post an album cover with a motor vehicle on it.

Casa del Frutetto (House of the Orchard), Pompeii

Cafe Nero, Stansted Airport, where celebrity autobiographies go to shed their dust jackets and die

I ring up Dial-a-Poster I ring up Dial-a-Poster I ring up Dial-a-Poster And say "that's not where I would put Llanberis" (But overall, it's a lovely bit of work).

Proustian rush as the Ronseal Tile Red Garage Floor paint I am using on a workshop floor recalls the Oxblood Doc Martens I coveted in the summer of 1989

"Ringing the doorbell would kill the burglary sector" is the easy response, but also he's just plain wrong: plenty of companies develop and train specialised LLMs/ SLMs quite legally, asking permission. Some do really useful things, in medicine and tech, with human monitoring of the output... 1/2

Peak season.

Pity the poor tabloid hack who's just been ordered to dredge for vaguely "woke" statements from the new Archbishop of Canterbury to go under the inevitable "Sarah Doolally" headline

I'd heard of this, but never seen it till now. The greatest, weirdest bit of guerilla TV ever broadcast, when Sergei Kuryokhin got an hour-long slot on Soviet national TV to expound his theory that Lenin was a mushroom (1991) youtu.be/ExXDxpBFFR0?...

Praising Russia for never having "waged war... on air travellers" is a fantastic illustration that these people live entirely in their own culture-war irreality pod. All is metaphor - consequences, morality, actual missiles fired at passenger planes, and lives lost, simply do not exist.

Look what we have here then.

"And inside these big sheds are twenty-foot-high chickens, because of all the chemicals you've put in them, and these chickens are scared! They don't know why they're so big"

I came to Cardiacs too late, alas, but listening to the 'posthumous' album, out today and it's a marvel. (It's not quite 'Sing to God', because that's probably the best album ever made).

Travelodge Du Lac

Continental Breakfast at Tiffany's

If you see this, repost with a vampire that is not Dracula.

Top work here from the trillion dollar brain.

Authors of this 1974 pamphlet have no time whatsoever for any of your unempirical, new age, hippy bullshit

The 'Nine Maidens' standing stones, of which eleven are still present. Diminutive enough perhaps to have inspired that scene in 'This Is Spinal Tap'.

Mounts View Cottages, Madron.

St Ives Gothic

Black Slab, Bosigran, Cornwall. A Colin Kirkus route. Easy but spectacular.

All together now: "But I can put a tennis racket up against my face/And pretend that I am Kendo Nagasaki" Jasmine Paolini performs unexpected HMHB tribute at the US Open.

Last 5 gigs: Josienne Clarke (doing Sandy Denny) Adwaith Half Man Half Biscuit (Bethesda) Oyafestival Oslo 2024 (PJ Harvey, Pulp, etc) Half Man Half Biscuit (Coventry) ... should go to more gigs, really

Little Fashy Crowds

People who warn of "tinderboxes" always reek of petrol.

Kayaking trip. Crow in Exmouth Harbour

Moderate Breakfast Traffic sounds like what you'd get in the Neutral Milk Hotel

Which reminds me of my dad, circa 1983, pointing out Tony Benn nearly getting rolled over by his own car in the car park of an M1 service station after he'd forgotten to put the handbrake on. "That's Wedgie!" he said, confusingly

Broad definition of 'celebrity', but I once chased after the hatchback of reclusive avant-garde poet JH Prynne in order to tell him that his exhaust pipe was hanging off

Now look online to find out if Iain Sinclair really is Clive Sinclair's brother