(b)logophile

I have a tshirt from (the now defunct) Animals Have Problems Too, featuring an octopus with the caption “Who wants four hugs?” In my dream last night, I was wearing the same shirt, but the caption was replaced by a dotted-line “cut here” box, containing the words “The caption is in the wash, try again [...]

Today sees the close of my first week of fulltime work at Buzzcapture. We (yes we) are a small social media monitoring and analysis company, based in Amsterdam. Despite a PhD in philosophy of language (or something very like it), I’ve joined the team as a programmer. The biggest challenge of the first week has [...]

I needn’t have rushed to the bookstore for Kraken, and I wish Miéville had slowed down a bit too. And that his editor had been a bit more involved.

Tuesday night we saw Natalie Merchant and tonight was Tindersticks: both excellent concerts, but an amazing contrast. Natalie Merchant was presenting songs from her new album Leave Your Sleep. This turns out to be a musical setting of poems by 19th- and early 20th-century British and American poets (including Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins). [...]

Tor.com is celebrating Moomin Week, to draw attention to various reprints of various bits of Jansson’s work. (I have some of the collections of her newspaper Moomin strip put out by Drawn & Quarterly, which are very handsome.) Today’s discovery is that she also illustrated The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and The Hunting of the [...]