Keown, Coens, Dostoyevsky, and Salinger's Heroic Son
I saw Martin Keown in the street on Thursday evening.If you don't know who Martin Keown is, I've included a delightful picture of him. He's a former Arsenal defended and an occasional BBC pundit.He's also one of a certain breed of footballer: the brutal, thuggish, troglodytic hulks that turn out to be quite thoughtful and eloquent. Iain Dowie is another example.You would expect them to talk in grunts and snar

Random Wiki Nuggets II
Here we go! Another installment of Random Wiki Nuggets.Despite the fact that it reclaims the proper use of 'random' from every blonde-haired puffy-jumpered private school princess in the world (to whom a chance encounter with a baker, or a fatal car accident, can be labelled 'random'), I don't like that name.[That was an unwieldy and unpleasant sentence. I could go back and edit it, but there isn't time. I could die in the next few minutes of sheer excitement.]Does anybody have any ideas for naming this feature?That's right. It's a feature. Or an item. It's content. Like what professional entertainers do.If you have no idea what I'

Home Invasion
We have ladybirds.I don't mean 'we' as in 'the planet Earth' (though that's obviously true); I mean it in the sense of 'we have rats' or 'we have damp'.There's always one or two flying around our living room. Except they don't really fly. They crawl about, and refuse to be moved. The crawl up drinks cans, crawl up light-fittings, and fall on our faces.In the corridors of our block of flats, they're more numerous. There are dozens of them clustered around the corners of the window frames.I'm not that bothered by them. They're definitely nicer than rats. I think people wouldn't mind infestations so much if the creatures weren't ugly. Ladybirds l

My Preceding Heart
Yesterday I started a blog post called 'My Bleeding Heart'.And by started, I mean I wrote the title.I don't know what the content of the post was going to be. Probably an exploration of my increasingly liberal politics. Or perhaps a photograph.I'm feeling quite creative. It often happens late at night when I should be going to bed. It's difficult to know what to do in these moods. Sometimes I want to do something more immediate than writing. Typing these words seems like a clumsy and inefficient means of communicating ideas. I'd be better off sculpting something, or singing a song.But it's late. And everyone is in bed.Maybe I'll tr

Puppet-Based Consolation
To counterbalance the gloom of the previous post, I thought I'd post an episode of Histor's Eye from This Morning With Richard Not Judy. These sketches never fail to cheer me up!