Hitchcock showed unequivocally that birds are the enemy, making it all the more important to know their ways... For many years I used to wake up screaming, having had nightmares in which the apocalyptic vision at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds came true. I took these terrors to be ... Read More...
Year: 2012
This week Mr Slang is banished to Gobbler's Knob... We moved last week. Approximately 50 m. One side of the block to the other. So not far but still we moved and it meant a change of address – possibly harder for the recipient to absorb since all that has altered ... Read More...
Spiritual enlightenment and the wisdom of the Zen masters - yours for only a penny!... Keen Dabbler readers may recall my fondness for the joke about the man who has an orange instead of a head. In fact it is not a joke at all but a profound Zen parable. And ... Read More...
It's received terrific reviews. But what did Dabblers think of our latest selection? First, we hear from Dabbler Book Club Member and Scotland's first soupmonger, Elaine Mason, then from Dabbler Editor, Gaw. Elaine Mason: Some books you pick up as a distraction. Others are relaxing; an unwinding at the end of a long ... Read More...
Luke Honey writes about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. Today he veers away from victuals and reacquaints himself with a national institution... We've just had a most entertaining half hour or so watching "The Sky at Night", apparently the longest running ... Read More...
What a drunken satyr, a grotesquely inflated armadillo and a parachuting nonagenarian have to tell us about not just our death, but everyone's... Wisdom is proverbially reticent. The wise need to be eked from their crabby shells; we are, perhaps rightly, suspicious of philosophical or rhetorical fluency. In a story related in ... Read More...
Nige pays tribute to the greatest dancer... Fred Astaire - especially when dancing with Ginger Rogers - is (and I admit to a sizeable blind spot in the area marked Dance) almost the only dancer I can watch with that rush of aesthetic pleasure, the tingle at the nape of the ... Read More...
To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we're exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. The latest episodes can be heard below. You can catch up ... Read More...
Jon Hotten meets his cricketing hero and finds himself saying exactly the one thing he had been determined not to say... When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he ... Read More...
Quintessential Mahlerman this week: four exemplary unions of music and film... A few weeks ago I took a sideways look at plagiarism in movie scores, going on to name the guilty men and sit them on the naughty-step. But a much easier route has always been available to film producers when ... Read More...
