MacNicol is solid gold
 
‘Ah Dr Venkman, yes, I am seeing your television program…quite enjoy.’
‘Scourge of Carpathia, yes, yes, you have said this…’

‘You didn’t even have a Slinky?’
‘We had part of a Slinky. I straightened it.’

And as CGI costs drop, the new tiresome schmindie trope arrives. That thing we can just about afford to put in the sky - it's gonna change our lives! Quirkily!

Blake said that Milton was 'of the Devil's party' and didn't know it. He's certainly more interesting…

I thought this was what Sheldon was for. He gets to be all of the horrible 'funny gay' things you'd be rightly censured for if you gave them to a gay character nowadays (fastidious, wimpy, screechy, oversensitive), but it's because he's poorly socialised and has unspecified mental problems so that's OK…

It's even worth booking a day off and doing it all in one go: the relentlessness of it is partially the point. It's broken into hour long 'episodes' so you can take a break if you need to, but do it over a few sittings and it looks more like a really odd TV series than a cohesive whole…

More than that, I think: it’s one of those rare covers that has the distinction of surpassing it’s original. Not that Bragg’s version is bad, it’s just a not-enormously-remarkable bit of acoustic straightforwardness (i.e. it’s a Billy Bragg song). Who know it contained the seeds of such a joyous power-pop ballad?
 
Annnd…

I don't necessarily, I should point out, think it's true - I don't have enough data for that, and there's all sorts of unprovable shades of nuance between 'conspiring to get rid of the king' and 'not trying as hard as you otherwise might to prevent him from having to go'. I'm just vaguely surprised it's not something…

You should totally read 'Embassytown', if you haven't already.

Brooks and Stewart are the only two actors who strike me as having the most appropriate attitude to what they did - a genuine delight in having been part of what is (for better or worse) an enduring cultural phenomenon tempered with not taking any of it overly seriously. Pretending it was a grand heroic endeavour is…

SPOILY-DO

Kazuo Ishiguro wasn’t making things up in ‘The Remains of the Day’: Edward, and a wide swathe of the British aristocracy, had friendly meetings with high ranking Nazi party members at diplomatic and other functions before WWII broke out, and vocally expressed admiration for Hitler’s views (see: Unity Mitford). Even…

We’ve been willing to build an entirely new religion just to get a king what he wanted, lady-wise. If this thing had been happening in the 1900s and the King didn’t think that this Hitler chap was a jolly good fellow with a lot of interesting ideas I’m sure the government would have just got a few tame constitutional…

Indeed. I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more of a conspiracy theory around this angle. Kings had flings all the time, so why make a big fuss over this one?
 
Unless, of course, you were desperately trying to find an ‘out’ from a situation where that king was going to have provable sympathies and contacts with the…

When he was editing New Wolds magazine, Brian Aldiss used to call them "shaggy god stories".

Mention should surely be made somewhere of Half Man Half Biscuit’s classic ‘Running Order Squabble Fest’ (“Half past four? Half past four?/You said half past ten to us…”)

Where Omnianism ends up, particularly in Carpe Jugulum, is a bit more interesting than a ‘kinder, gentler version’ – Pratchett seems to be parodying the Church of England: it’s well- meaning and liberal, but its more thoughtful adherents like Oats are uncomfortably aware that there might have been a baby swimming in…

I only really noticed the problems with the other books when Cryptonomicon's ranty philistinism and soldier-fetish finally got on my nerves..

Oh dear god yes,, those terrible humanities types with their elvish, metaphor-laden nattering and their failure to see that all technological development is inherently good and, IIalsoRC, their DISRESPECTING OUR PROUD VETERANS!!11!! It's good to see that they're getting less of a raw deal. And interesting to note that…

Not being a literary critic, I don't think it necessary to approach everything I read with olympian detatchment. If an author is (to take one example) expecting me to sympathise with a judge who has no moral problem handing out summary capital sentences or supervising torture sessions then yes, I'm going to respond…