• Cars

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    2–3 minutes

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    1 comment on Cars

    In the face of lukewarm reviews, I went to see Cars tonight – you tend to lower the bar on the movies you’ll watch when you live within a couple of minutes walk from a cinema. I’d been ambivalent about Cars ever since it’d been announced, because it didn’t seem to have the potential for…

  • Holiday bumper issue!

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    2–3 minutes

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    Prepare for a special holiday bumper set of posts in the next few days! I’ve spent the last week or so getting up late, reading books and watching a lot of TV, which surprisingly has given me the time to think about a lot of interesting things, such as Sky Movies, zombie language, boardgames, the…

  • Let me back in

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    6–8 minutes

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    Right now I’m on a Virgin Atlantic flight to Los Angeles, to attend the E3 convention. I have inevitably ended up directly behind someone who has chosen to tilt his seat back as far as it can go, and slightly further besides. This sort of thing is like the tragedy of the commons – if…

  • Dark City

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    1–2 minutes

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    About three or four years ago, I bought Dark City on DVD, after hearing that it was like The Matrix, but with a good story. Now, to be fair, The Matrix does have a good story, but I still maintain that it isn’t anything particularly original – it was just well told (I’m not going…

  • Pendolino

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    1–2 minutes

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    2 comments on Pendolino

    I had the opportunity to check out the performance of Virgin’s new Pendolino train last night on the way from London Euston to Liverpool. From the inside it doesn’t look like anything special – it’s perhaps slightly more spacious than their usual Voyager train, and slightly more high tech. On the move, though, it feels…

  • The Stepford Wives

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    2–3 minutes

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    REVIEW – THE STEPFORD WIVES This movie was always going to be a little bit peculiar – Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken’s names rarely grace the same bill, let alone the same page. And while I wasn’t alive when the original movie was released, I’m pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to know…

  • Mean Girls

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on Mean Girls

    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…

  • Fourth Rock

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    1–2 minutes

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    7 comments on Fourth Rock

    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…

  • Slowdown

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    1–2 minutes

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    It’s a Saturday night, and I’m in my room at college listening to someone’s shared iTunes music (Queen), guzzling lots of water and watching the end of Groundhog Day for the fiftieth time. Let’s just say that my plans for tonight didn’t turn out quite as expected. It’s a familiar tale to anyone who lives…

  • Work and hair

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    1–2 minutes

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    My first chemicals arrived today! It may come as a surprise to many, but it isn’t the case (not entirely, anyway) that I just hang around in Oxford waiting for interesting things to happen – occasionally I do some real research. In preparation for an experiment on the mouse visual system, I’ve ordered a bunch…