Mssv

Written on the flight from London to North Carolina
REVIEW - MEAN GIRLS
The title Mean Girls conjured up images of a thoroughly depressing drama involving troubled young women, no doubt set in a prison or something like that, when I first heard about it earlier this year. I knew this couldn’t be entirely true since the [...]

Some of my most prolific writing gets done in the air. Perhaps it’s because I have so much free time (at least until they install in-flight internet connections) - or perhaps it’s precisely the opposite; that I have plenty of work to do but can’t bring myself to start it on the plane. Either way, [...]

I made the impulse decision this morning to join a couple of friends to see Oleanna down in London. This particular production has been running for a while at the Garrick Theatre now and stars Julia Stiles (Ten Things I Hate About You, Mona Lisa Smile) and Aaron Eckhart (Possession, Paycheck), the former of whom [...]

Some time ago, I wrote a long article about a fascinating way of playing the strategy computer game Civilization 3. That article - A Clash in Civilization - has now finally been published online at Kuro5hin, where it successfully ran the gauntlet of the highly cynical and hostile reviewers and emerged unscathed and on the [...]

Usually it’s the other way round, but after listening to the incredible Children of Dune TV movie soundtrack, I feel compelled to buy the DVD (and the CD - I believe in buying stuff I listen to a lot). If you’re wondering why I decided to listen to the soundtrack of a movie I haven’t [...]

Almost three months after I bought it, I finally got around to playing the Settlers of Catan with my friends at college this evening. I’ve written about it before and there’s a more detailed description at BoardGameGeek but in brief it’s a very playable four-player strategy building game that features a lot of trading.
The other [...]

8:30am - I wake up with a totally parched throat, despite drinking a huge quantity of water the night before. Less than six hours to go before the relay race I signed up to a couple of weeks ago begins. 3.6 miles per leg - I’m hoping to do it in under 30 minutes, at [...]

Lal, Kim, Lat (Lal’s sister) and I met up in London last night to see the first part of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’. Naturally, in true Culture style we only managed to get to our seats in the very nick of time, not once, but twice! (it is nothing less than an [...]

I was on my way into Marks and Spencers foodcourt today when I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of self-service checkouts. I know these checkouts are not uncommon in the US but I’d never seen them anywhere in this country until now. For the uninformed, self-service checkouts allow customers at shops [...]

Instead of watching the Superbowl last night, I ended up catching A Life Less Ordinary, which was assuredly a better experience than seeing American Football and Janet Jackson. It’s a much more quirky comedy than I thought it would be, and could in some ways be seen as a proto-Moulin Rouge; it even has a [...]