October 2007

…and if you haven’t seen it, and DON’T want to have your perceptions of what happens conditioned, possibly wrongly don’t watch this YouTube video. Before dismissing this explanation as the fevered imaginings of geeky obsessives such as myself, remember (1) David Chase wrote and directed the final show himself; (2) The works of Carl Jung…

A million thanks to the many people who texted, phoned and emailed their tales of terrible domestic pet damage to the show on Friday. There were so many crackers – the dog that ate the central locking key fob for a hire car, costing the owner (of the dog) £85; the rabbit that ate the…

On the show today we were talking about odd dishes served up in the name of haute cuisine…I particularly enjoyed this email from Kathleen in Boston: Hi Tom,Love the show!The most bizarre thing I’ve eaten in a restaurant was in Paris…the restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. They served a salad there…

Amazing response on the show today to the question: What has your cat dragged in through the catflap? This was provoked by one of our two, Hamish or Neville, depositing the head of a crow in the middle of the kitchen floor this morning. Not, not the head of a cow. That would plainly be…

It was the Pictish Trail (aka Johnny Lynch) and his excellent blog about the King Creosote Bombshell tour that alerted me to something I should have noticed many years ago: that in all Travelodges, when you first enter your bathroom, one little sliver of soap is balanced atop two plastic glasses. Just like home! Sigh!Meanwhile,…

Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola advertise Suntory whisky, on the set of Kagemusha….the ad was directed by Kurosawa. Many years afterwards, of course, Coppola’s daughter directs Lost in Translation, the story of an American actor in Japan, advertising Suntory Whisky.

Wednesday, and the post is still not back to normal, which means that for bizarre technological reasons I can’t access my BBC email (I need a replacement electronic code-token-thingy, which has to be posted to my home address from London). I really value our local postal service here in Shetland – especially over the past…

Sent in to the show by listener David (I Presume) Livingstone. Check that domed roll! West of Scotland industrial baking at its best! Don’t know if Hellman’s Mayonnaise is really a proper substitute for brown sauce, though.

Having been bitten by the mountain bike bug, I decided to see what Northmavine had to offer in the way of MTB potential, starting with a track I’d walked several times, the looping, diving and alarmingly rough access route to the reservoir called Roer (Red) Water. You reach this by driving half way up the…

The Seven Stanes network of Forestry Commission mountain biking sites includes Kirroughtree, right next to where I was staying for the Wigtown book festival. Never having tried off-road biking on one of the purpose built trails, I was keen to have a go. So I hired a bike at the excellent Breakpad shop (just 12…