Sweet Nothings

Years really do come and go thick and fast as you get older. It's also increasingly difficult to pick out milestones each time, though maybe this is no bad thing. The early part of my 2009 was dominated by fires - two near work and one a bit too near my old flat. Luckily my smoke alarm did its job, luckily these things only come in threes, and luckily I found a new, better flat. Funny how even though Palmers Green is a far less fancy area, and even though I've had problems (broken washing machine, broken boiler) here already, it feels much more like home. I've even put pictures up and everything! It's also helping me do my bit for the environment - and my wallet - by being warm enough, relatively speaking, for me to not have turned the heating on once. Bonus! So then I turned 30, started running, got some glasses, committed to a crazy month-long trip to South Africa next summer, and that's about it. Can't really complain, all in all. And as last days go, today h...

The main problem with being an avid fan of Mark Kermode and the Kermode/Mayo "Wittertainment" brand is trying to avoid basing my opinions exclusively upon his. I try not to always agree with him, but such is the strength of his character that I find myself absorbing his views by an odd kind of osmosis. Take Inglourious Basterds , for instance. Even though I really enjoyed the movie and it had those two incredible sequences (the opening one in the house and the one in the bar), I share every criticism the good Doctor made of that film and its creator - overlong, undisciplined, self-indulgent in the extreme, etc. It's just that I love Tarantino's style so much that I can forgive him an awful lot (I've not seen Death Proof , to be fair). Basterds wasn't my film of the year though. Film studios and critics everywhere will be devastated to know that I haven't really decided on one. All the big Oscar-fodder came along in January in what has become the annual ...

One of the more pernicious music industry inventions has to be the annual BBC Sound of... survey of music critics and industry figures, which presents us with a helpful list of all the acts with the biggest marketing budgets for the coming year and whose records we are therefore expected to buy. Let’s see who was in the 2009 top ten (in ranking order): Little Boots (disappointing considering the amount of time and money that must have been invested) White Lies (hilariously death-obsessed, yet more Joy Division-reduced-to-mainstream-glum fodder although the one guitar band to break through this year) Florence and the Machine (critical and commercial success - hurrah) Empire of the Sun (good tunes but too wilfully weird to cross over) La Roux (see below) Lady GaGa (see below) VV Brown (seems like you can have too many electro girls. Brown got literally nowhere) Kid Cudi (quite big in hip-hop circles by all accounts) Passion Pit (haven’t really broken through) Dan Black (I saw him do a fe...

Oh blimey. Myself and plenty of other Wolves fans were perhaps guilty of jumping the gun a couple of weeks back with talk of handing Mick McCarthy his P45. A couple of vital wins since then have put us right back into a competitive position, so all was looking rosy. And then he goes and plays the reserves against Man U last night... Mick's logic is easy enough to follow. We gain three entirely unexpected points against Spurs on Saturday, so we are already 3 points ahead of our expected total for this week's matches. We also have a crucial game against Burnley at Molineux on Sunday, which we have a good chance of winning. Mick reads an article about how players can't perform to their best three days after a match, knows we'd struggle to get a result at Old Trafford at the best of times, and therefore gives the entire first team a rest. At 7:30 last night I was shocked, but not exactly angry as I didn't expect anything from the game, and ultimately Mick is the manager...

The murder of Meredith Kercher ticked all the right boxes: young British female victim, in a foreign country with a somewhat different legal system (which for some immediately translates into "inferior legal system"), and a young couple heading the list of suspects, one of whom just so happened to be an attractive woman. Anybody who believes that feminism is now obsolete because women are basically men's equals now and in some cases have more rights (and there are plenty of blokes who complain about TV adverts portraying men as spineless gimps, etc) need only take a look at the media coverage of Amanda Knox to discover how wrong they are. Her then-boyfriend and a small-time drug dealer have also been found guilty of the murder, but they are both (a) male and (b) non-English speaking foreigners, and have been given comparatively few column inches. On the other hand, American hottie Amanda, aka Foxy Knoxy, has been fair game from the start. An awful lot has been written and...

I've blogged nothing for ages, which is not necessarily a bad thing for anybody involved. Especially me, as it shows what a busy November I've had both at work (busy is on balance better than not busy) and on the exciting going out type front. Sadly, everything seems to have gone tits up in the last couple of days, especially on the football front. It's not just Wolves who are depressing me - that would be bad enough on its own. A deeper malaise seems to have descended around football in general, and it's bloody annoying. Thing is, this season was meant to be a great one for the neutrals. Man U sold two world class attacking players in the close season, and it felt like Chelsea had missed their best chance for glory when Hiddink went back to Russia, leaving an ageing team with yet another new manager. Meanwhile, Liverpool appeared to have hit on a formula for success, Arsenal surely couldn't fail to improve, Man City were spending stupid money and looked like genuin...