Wednesday 25 January 2006

Business News Editor In Sense Of Humour Shock

So, Pixar studios - you know, the animation studio behind Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, etc, and officially one of the Best Things In The World - has finally been bought up by Disney. A story the BBC News Website (coincidentally another of the Best Things In The World) has chosen to illustrate with this still:


Well, yes. Quite.

Thursday 19 January 2006

Mixed Messages

My girlfriend, because she knows me well, gave me lots of books for Christmas. The first one I unwrapped was called 'Never Let Me Go'. Hmm, I thought. Perhaps a little clingy. I unwrapped the next one... 'How To Be Alone'. Ah.

Thursday 12 January 2006

For sale: The Oxo Tower. Wld suit first-time buyer.

I do like watching a film somewhere where a line or a shot gets an entirely local reaction it wouldn't get anywhere else. The last good example was when I saw 'Shakespeare in Love' in Cambridge, and all the mildly high-brow literary in-jokes about John Webster or the dark lady were met with the ostentatious guffaws of English students anxious to prove to one another that they got the reference.

Well, there was another one yesterday. We went to see the new London-set Woody Allen film 'Match Point'. (Not perhaps the most subtle and nuanced work of his career. For instance, four people, three rich and one poor, are ordering in a restaurant. Rich Person 1 chooses 'Baked potato with truffles. Yum yum yum!' Rich persons 2 and 3 opt for 'the caviar'. Poor person goes for 'roast chicken'. Oh, I see. Because he's poor. Later on, this line is spoken: 'Perhaps it would be more fitting if I was to be apprehended.' Because that's how people in England talk, you know. I mean, you comprehend.)

Anyway, we saw this film at Angel, and easily the biggest laugh of the film came when the (admittedly very rich) newly-weds entered their enormous new flat, and the wife told the husband it had a lovely view. Cut to the view: a vast panorama of the Thames at Westminster, up to and including Big Ben. At which the audience, all of whom had presumably rented or bought flats in London, collectively wet itself laughing.

Friday 6 January 2006

I'm fine, and broadly speaking I'm fine.

Happy New Year. May 2006 be full of the sorts of things you like, with barely any of the sorts of things you don't like.

Graffiti in Starbucks:

*Hello
*Everybody
*Hows life and hows your life in general

So many questions... Why did you separate the 'hello' from the 'everybody'? What is the mystic purpose of the asterisks? How are you hoping for 'everybody' to respond to your biro-on-coffeeshop query? And most of all... why the last six words? What's the difference between how life is, and how life is in general? Were you really worried that asking 'everyone' 'how life is' was a bit too specific?


Ha. See how I pick on only the loftiest and most worthy targets to bring down with my mighty gift of sarcasm. That's taught her a lesson!