Pink Dog archive
My favourite… committee name
It is “The Committee for Measuring the Attraction of Hills”, an English 18th century creation, formed at the instigation of then Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. It was not that he and colleagues had a particular love for hills, if anything the opposite – for the gravitational pull of hills affected sensitive surveying instruments of the time. [...]
The Hobbit: trailer
Fun, fun, fun.
The curious case of the two new London Underground maps
If you’ve got a hard copy of the new (December 2011) edition of the increasingly misnamed London Tube map, you may be wondering quite what I was on about with my recent post, The new London tube map (December 2011 version). And you would be right to wonder. Because whilst my post starts off talking [...]
The new London tube map (December 2011 version)
Just in time for Christmas, a new version of the London Underground’s tube map is out. Well, I say “tube map” but with the latest addition to it, that is an increasingly inappropriate name. “Underground” is not much better either, as the main change is an addition which is most certainly not a tube and [...]
Dear Tesco…
Abandoned shopping trolleys are regularly left scattered along the pavement outside your store on Stroud Green Road, Islington, London. I know your staff sometimes clear them away, but in recent months this seems to happen only very infrequently and as a result the pavement is often blocked by scattered trolleys. Could you get the staff [...]
Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor
The author, Steven Connor, is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, a post that signals the sort of book this is – long on literary theory and short on technical historical detail. It is not a more diverse version of, say, The Pencil: A history of design and circumstance but rather a [...]
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait: book review
K.A. Bedford’s science fiction time-travel murder mystery Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait was short-listed for the 2008 Philip K Dick award and the comparison with the master of dystopian, paranoid, time-twisted mystery plotting shows both the book’s strengths and its limitations. It is a good, enjoyable book – but not in the Philip K Dick class, which [...]
Pizza Express: Euston Road
You sit down in a crowded Pizza Express, on a table surrounded on all sides by other tables in use. As the evening progresses, an exclusion zone appears around your table as each table near you clears out and does not have anyone else sat at it. By the end of the evening, there is [...]
You won’t be surprised to know, it wasn’t a footballer who said this
“The referee makes a decision and if you don’t think he is right, it still stands and you get on with it”. It was Rugby Union player Chris Robshaw.
