A little bit of artistic magic

30 Oct 2009: The extremely talented Wayne at Adeptise has done a nice splash page for us to promote The Discount Sorcerer, our new online shopping venture. The problem with sites like these is that they go in and out of favour with Google, so for times when ours is out of favour, we hope this splash page will pop up in the Google results. Let us hope so. If you haven’t seen The Discount Sorcerer yet, it’s a site we’ve created which finds all the biggest discounts at Amazon UK through some IT magic, and presents them in a nice easy-to-use format for you to click straight through to. There’s also a really great weekly newsletter which summarises many of the great [...]

Review: Monty Python at the Albert Hall: Not The Messiah

23 Oct 2009: Never has so much goodwill flowed from an audience to the performers. Really, Eric and the gang could have sat and read the papers and got a standing ovation. But fortunately, it was an evening to remember anyway. I don’t think anyone expected a sketch show, or even Spamalot, which was lucky, because “Not The Messiah” was virtually an operatic piece, with the full BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. However, straight-laced it was not. In fact, for much of the time it was very silly. Just as you’d expect. Eric Idle, present on stage throughout, and John Du Prez, conducting, were obviously the main forces behind the show, but the other Pythons naturally stole the show in their bit parts, [...]

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

15 Oct 2009: I don’t know if this is ironic, or just a palindrome or something, but on the day I consigned the September 2009 edition of The Word magazine to the recycling, with Robert Wyatt on the cover and a Half Man Half Biscuit interview inside, the postie delivered a December 1985 issue of NME from eBay, with, er, Robert Wyatt on the cover and a Half Man Half Biscuit interview inside. Neither act give any impression in their articles that they expected to still be around 24 years later. Anyway, here’s the Half Man Half Biscuit interview from December 1985; the band had just released their first LP, Back in the DHSS, which would become the biggest selling indie LP of [...]

Another “Eureka Moment”. Can they do this?

4 Oct 2009: Curious news that The Times is about to launch a science magazine called Eureka. But hang on… there’s already a long-established, well-respected technology magazine called Eureka, published by Findlay Media. Whilst the subject matter may not be exactly the same, there sure as heck are many potential advertisers in common, so it could easily be argued that the two would be competitors. Eureka (the long-established one) has impressively survived a meltdown in the trade press over the past ten years, which saw the demise of long-established titles such as Design Engineering and relatively short-lived newcomers such as What’s new in Design. What I’m sure it doesn’t need is this sort of confusion in the market. Back in the early nineties, [...]