I came late to Press Gazette, and only really read it online, so didn’t contribute to their coffers directly. It’s a shame to see it go — recent proprietors Piers Morgan and Matthew Freud gave it a shot in the arm, but obviously it wasn’t enough. To find out what’s going on in the industry [...]

Full marks to James Lasdun for his review of Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Against the Day. I’ve read two of Pynchon’s novels, in days when my culture/time balance was the opposite way round from today. Luckily I read Vineland first. As Ian Rankin said, Vineland is a pretty good place for the novice to start. [...]

Just got sent a magazine from the US, and it has this advert in it… What caught my attention, and horrified me, was “Call for your sample carton offer”, like it’s a shampoo. There are so many ways you can take this apart. “The tobacco in most cigarettes contains additives drawn from a list of [...]

I was delighted this weekend to discover that Resonance FM, now my favourite radio station, is available over the Internet. I’m sure that wasn’t there last time I looked, and although I had problems with the Real stream, the MP3 stream worked fine. So no more frustration over extracting a good sound from a weak [...]

…but I didn’t, and didn’t spot that someone maliciously signed me up to Match.com in South Africa. They made up some registration information for me but used my real e-mail address. I ignored the initial “registration confirmation” e-mail as spam, but as the e-mails kept coming it occurred to me that this was no ordinary [...]

Another YouTube winner… The Wall Chart Song from Channel 4′s thisisaknife. (But wall chart as two words? Not sure about that…) Tags: song, wallchart, thisisaknife

I love easy research. Conservative councillor Ellenor Bland has been suspended after she sent an e-mail with a racist poem. According to the Guardian It later emerged that someone had also posted the doggerel on the website of Boris Johnson, the shadow higher education secretary. though of course it had nothing to do with him. [...]

Honestly, you wait years for the English language to evolve, then two changes happen on the same day. Or maybe it’s just Collins having a marketing blitz. Today we get this in the main paper… Rhyming slang is increasingly peppered with references to famous folk, and has become enough of a social phenomena to warrant [...]

Obviously I wouldn’t be the first to wish you that this year. Costa Coffee has gone all festive and is playing Christmas tunes. My wide social network informs me that Starbucks has done the same. Tags: christmas, consumerism

The front page headline in last night’s London Lite was “LIVINGSTONE BACKS TERRORIST’S TUBE JOB”. The front page of Thelondonpaper screamed “ANGER AS KEN BACKS TERRORIST”. The story? A man convicted of terrorist offences in Yemen, and son of Abu Hamza, was allowed to work on the London Underground because security checks didn’t look at [...]