Who the fudge is Benjamin Judge?

It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing Car Wheels on a Gravel Road as the set up to the pay off of Essence. Or it is for

Well, well, well. Over the weekend, twenty of you recommended albums, most of which I hadn’t heard before. This is turning out to be one of the best ideas I

Do you believe in divine intervention? Fate? Coincidence? How superstitious are you? How much money would it take to make you spend a night in a cemetery? Would you display

Björk – Debut (Iceland) We start with an absolute classic. Suggested by jummo70 (@jummo70), Debut is obviously a great way to start the day. Get the kettle on, let’s have

Again, I watched The Mandalorian and Better Call Saul, like everybody else, and I started that Tiger King documentary on Netflix, like everybody else. And what else? I watched BMX

This isn’t a review really, just a straight up recommendation. I love this book. It is very good. I think that if you read it you will enjoy it. I’m

The One is a parallel universes film. So (and let’s try to keep this brief) there are 124 universes that make up the multiverse. Loads (or possibly one) of those

Really big, commercial albums. Abba Gold, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Abbey Road. Normally I wouldn’t reach for them very often, but having a bit of a sing is a nice

OK newly-fledged bird nerds, let me blow your mind: THERE WERE NO COLLARED DOVES IN THE UK BEFORE THE 1950s. I know. Head, boom! Am I right? Yep. The UK

Kilkenny’s greatest rock band, Kerbdog should have been massive but weren’t. Like quite a few bands in the 1990s, they signed with a major record label and things went badly.

Confession time… OK… so… I know De La Soul were smarter and A Tribe Called Quest were better and yeah, of course, other bands were other things too but… when

Yesterday was such a success that I thought I would do it all over again. This time I listened to bands beginning with A that aren’t from Europe. I think

So, homeschooling eh? Who knew? Who knew? At first you are enthusiastic. The school sets a little video on baby animals for the children to watch and you whack an

What did I watch this week? Well, obviously, I watched what everybody else did: the latest episode of Better Call Saul, the latest episode of Picard, and the first two

Doesn’t even rhyme, mate. It’s man tell not mantle. Fine. Whatever… So, right, hear me out, I like Hilary Mantel, I do, I really do, she’s great, but… …I struggle

John Carpenter claims that he always intended Ghosts of Mars as an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek film; something like Commando or Rambo: First Blood Part II. I have no reason to doubt

OK, so you are going on a camping holiday in France and you need to take one of the main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation with you. Don’t

According to Peter Hill’s ‘Birds of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough’*, jackdaws were scarce in the area until about 1960 and the first communal roost wasn’t recorded until 1979. There are loads

I mean, it’s just noise innit, but like really really good noise.

Re-listening to this album it strikes me that a) I have never heard any of Orbital’s other albums from the 1990s, and b) if In Sides didn’t have that big

So, that’s that then. Friday saw the last school run of the academic year, and only twenty or so weeks early. I am the teacher now. What could go wrong?

And Saturdays are film days, which seems about right, I reckon. I thought I might recommend a film each week but instead I think I will just tell you what

So, Friday is book day, I think. Cool? Cool. I somehow managed to get a copy of The Mirror & The Light from the library just weeks before we all

Turn It Up was, I suppose, Jason Statham’s first mistake. Sure, there’s that Erasure video, with its hundred or so almost naked Staths writhing and bopping around in metallic body

There was a jay in the big tree at the end of (but not actually in) my garden yesterday. I haven’t seen one in the garden before so, you know,

A gift from a friend (hello Dan) who reviewed it for his university magazine and found it just a little bit too country. It’s quite country. It’s not exactly Merle

Horrorcore is a difficult genre to get right. The proportion of good to bad horrorcore albums is similar to that of horror movies, which is to say there is a

OK, so, I’m familiar with this movie. Very familiar. My love of Jason Statham stems largely from his performance in Snatch. I learned very little watching it for the thousandth