I just got a vivid sense memory of how the pages of a fresh Smash Hits magazine used to smell. They smelled like excitement and pop lyrics.

Pulling the blind down because the crows that have trained me to feed them walnuts three times a day don't like to eat the walnuts if they think I'm watching, and wondering where I left my self-respect.

This is good, and important, despite the fluctuating beard continuity throughout.

The bluest of skies.

@seamas.bsky.social please consider not using the word moron anymore. It's an ableist term popularised by eugenics & historically used to corral & exclude people with cognitive disabilities.

Which very famous bit of classical piano music does the new AppleTV mnemonic share notes with? I can hum it but I can't remember its name. youtu.be/6sX_BfDnyrg?...

this is where the magic happens

Ghostbusters is on and I am once again willing to trade several viscera for Sigourney Weaver's pink apartment (haunted fridge excluded).

Why can’t she use tinsel?

Trying to think of TV shows & films where *most of the action* takes place on one long aeroplane flight. So for films there's Flightplan, Non-Stop, Snakes on a Plane, Airplane!, Con Air. For TV, Hi/Jack, Red Eye, Into the Night. What else? (Not including crash docudramas, I want pure fiction.)

My son is watching the episode of The Simpsons where Principal Skinner gets fired &, though I've watched it often before, today Seymour's* sweat, mussed-up hair, loosened tie & capable forearms are doing weird things to me. * Armin's

A small selection of the fun retro covert art in this shop.

I always come to a second hand book shop on new year's day. This book has the least succinct back cover précis ever.

For no particular reason, I've added up the ages of the performers in Jools Holland's Hootenanny tonight and by my reckoning it's 755, with an average participant age of 54. We're none of us getting any younger though.

Crazy to think that if she hadn't been sent into space, Laika the dog would have been 71 years old now, just chilling in her doggy dacha with her samovar, enjoying her retirement rubles.

Any broadcast geeks know - why do the subtitles on TV showings of films from previous generations tend to abridge the dialogue, when newer film subtitles try to render it faithfully? Watching BTTF2 now, saw Casablanca the other day - both drop lots of words & even paraphrase to make more succinct.

On a platform at London Euston, I waited to board the Caledonian Sleeper beside Ian Rankin.

Big fan of Thomas Olde Heuvelt's books. Just finished his latest and it's great: bleak as hell, thrilling folk horror.

Someone on Reddit just described a small cannabis plant as 'a bongsai'.

Advert for a kitchen. Trying to decide if they've rendered a fitted unit over a rug, or if they're suggesting you get rug-effect flooring fitted around the unit.

Fck Christmas youtu.be/hdX3eRMXOD0

Enjoyed this year's Ghost Story for Christmas. Puzzled by this Guardian warning though - it's a supernatural chiller broadcast at 10pm, not a CBeebies pantomime.

I would like to read an essay on the use of phones in Pluribus: how they enable and hinder true communication, and what that might be intended to say about real life.

M'pal @ceona.bsky.social sent me a lovely Dilys Margaret Cat tree ornament in honour of my grumpy oppo.

@whatkatydidnext.bsky.social Thankyou for the lovely Christmas card. Xx

My two favourite recent films that were very, very, very clearly filmed in England while being set in the US are The Roses and Wake Up Dead Man. Both really good films. Both couldn't look more English if they tried.

Just heard the sad news that my (now adult) son's primary school head has died. I once described her as the person I'd make my one phone call to if I was ever arrested, which delighted her. She had, beneath a surface level of bustling near-chaos, an enormous calm and cheerful capability...

My 14-yo-son has recreated the climax of Back to the Future in gingerbread and I thought you should know.

Embra.

Enjoy is not the right word, and admire is definitely not the right word, but please *boggle* at this story of utterly incompetent criminal intent. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Belatedly realising that the New Zealand Taskmaster's assistant made this cool track some years ago. youtu.be/DcqO8-uLxiw?...

I'm reading a graphic novel, Dry Cleaned by Joris Mertens, that has the most gorgeous pictures of a vintage rainy city.

My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.

The remarkable end-papers for 1966’s Rupert Annual, by Alfred Bestall.

About 15 years ago I went on a railway expedition to Kyle of Lochalsh & as part of it we were all given small maps of the Highlands with half a dozen cartoon pictures of landmarks & notable places. One of the places illustrated was Aleister Crowley's house with accompanying text pointing out that...

My furby is teething.

I see that Pret a Manger has changed its name for Christmas. It's now called Pret a Manger. (26th straight year of making that joke.)

Literary cinema seat dedication.

Rescinding what I said about not wanting to see the new Superman film because I'm hotter than the surface of Venus and I just remembered cinemas have air conditioning.

95% of Victorian ghost stories begin 'Having been thrown into utmost poverty by missteps outwith my control, I had been forced to take a tiny old cottage, & live there in utmost squalor & obscurity, with only 4 maids, a cook, 2 gardeners and a groom, this last of whom lodged beside the orangery.'

Love the idea of a Manchester Underground.

A lilting Welsh child saying 'don't be silly, things like that only happen in stories' from a 1980s children's BBC drama serial I can remember absolutely no further details of, except that it was broadcast on Wednesdays.

Just spent 10 minutes trying to remember what TK Maxx is called while my brain insisted that the only two options were TFI Friday or TJ Hooker.

Saw the trailer for the new Superman. Was onboard until Krypto turned up. Turns out I'm fine with flying dudes but flying dogs get me all 'what in the cartoon nonsense?'.

I'm incapable of remembering what milquetoast means. Every time I read it I just feel hungry.

Going to tell my grandkids this was a 650 mile coastal walk I did with my dead homeless husband.

[Americans in 1348] oh no creg's got the pleg

I didn't know Candyman was based on a Clive Barker short story but here I am four paragraphs in (brutalist estate, graffiti, a visitor called Helen) going 'ooh! Ooh! I know this one!'