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My brews so far
This week I brewed my eleventh beer, and this is just to give a list of the beers I’ve brewed so far. If they come out well I may be posting more information and recipes. I’ve added my friends comments where I’ve gotten feedback. Nøgne Ø Baltic Porter, but it came out like an Imperial Porter […]
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Lone Star
Without knowing anything about it, I went into Lone Star (1996) expecting a sort of western homage, maybe something like the way that Unforgiven (1992) reworked elements of Shane (1953) for a modern audience. I was surprised to find that although it’s a dirge for the end of the west, it’s less like The Man […]
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The Unknown Known
A few nights ago I was fortunate enough to get to see a preview of Errol Morris’ film The Unknown Known (2013) at the lovely Olympic Studios cinema in Barnes. The film is a documentary in which Morris interviews Donald Rumsfeld about his career and political decisions. It focuses mainly on his second go round as […]
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A new hobby
Last May I went to the Copenhagen beer festival with friends. We had a great time at the festival and at Fermentoren, and I managed to stay in touch with some lovely people that we met from a Norwegian brewery called Nøgne Ø. The webshop manager told me that they actually sold beer kits. Brewing […]
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The best films I saw in 2013
I watched 108 films in 2013. Here are my top ten, and you can see my top 25 over at Letterboxd.
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2014
This is just to say that this blog has not yet died. I’ll be posting at least a few times a month in the new year. I’ll be writing about film, books, and literature, and maybe I’ll start writing a bit about technology.
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The 50 Best Album Opening Lines
I haven’t written much about music because I haven’t been listening to much but the same old stuff I’ve listened to for years. Case in point, today I was listening to Nirvana’s In Utero (1993; can you believe it’s been twenty years?!). The satisfying dissonance of the opening chord of “Serve the Servants” kicked in, […]
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Automation automaton
I’ve been thinking today about automation. Most people I know do not put much effort into automating tasks, even those that are rote, tedious, and time-consuming, because of an implicit but untested assumption that the work involved in automating a task would outweigh any time savings. I seem to have the opposite problem, in that […]
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The Turtle Diary
Last week I read Russell Hoban’s The Turtle Diary (1975) which I quite liked. It’s an understated study of loneliness and a search for meaning in London in the 1970s, and many of its concerns remain of unwelcome relevance to today’s Londoners, however drastically the city has changed in the past four decades. The novel’s […]
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Prisoners
Prisoners (2013) is an abduction thriller which, despite some implausibilities, is a reasonably good film. It is well-crafted throughout and not without surprises, though it’s not particularly original in either its themes or content. To begin with, Jake Gyllenhaal plays what is becoming a bit of a type for him—namely the troubled, ineffectual cop obsessed […]