It came to a head for me this week with a phone call…

“I am just so happy for Rui. She has always been in the background and is such a shy person and humble beyond belief - for her to get this recognition is fantastic."

Wish I could BE like…

The Fast and the Furious is too full of vices and cliches to be a great film, but it is fascinating. It has an odd kind of optimality. It is about as good as a B-movie can be: if it were any better, it would be worse.

A tourist-show, a legend told,

A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,

So much, and scarce so much, ye hold

The meaning of Kamakura?

So what happened there? Did I get hot, or was it just my lucky day? I’m not sure myself.

The ritual has a calming effect; perhaps all rituals do. It is repetitive, it invites focus, it gently reprehends distraction.

I didn’t set out to create a ritual, it just sort of came about.

Unlike a maze there is only one path through a labyrinth, there are no wrong turns. The only true choice is whether to persevere, move forward, and meet what awaits… The 28 turns remind us that the way forward is rarely straight or smooth.

What ensued in the 12 minutes that followed was the comic equivalent of Floyd Mayweather fighting six opponents at once, or perhaps the trial of Bukharin done as a Dean Martin roast.

"It’s all in my head, probably.... Everybody’s got their own village green, somewhere you go to when the world gets too much." - Ray Davies

“A mirror is never just a mirror. In Hemessen's day, it was a crucible of virtue, a sounding board of salvation.”

“Our life is what our thoughts make it,” says the great man, and he invites us to not worry over things that do not concern us. I tried this and found the experience quite liberating…for about a week.

Everybody's high on consolation

Everybody's trying to tell me what is right for me…

King of the Monsters is not as powerful or as serious as Godzilla, but it is interesting, ultimately boiling down to a staring contest between Raymond Burr and a rubber dinosaur. I’m calling it a draw.

It was rough and loud, messy and elemental. Scott was shirtless, screaming girls, and I felt kind of sorry I missed it.

The Cannibals were around for eight years, but between gigs, movie appearances (e.g., Tin Men), and their own laborious recording process they made just two albums. The second one, The Raw and the Cooked, covered Elvis and the Buzzcocks (well), and produced two number one hits in America, “She Drives Me Crazy” and the immaculate “Good Thing”.

“What you do affirms the supremacy of all beings,” I told Julius…

“Thanks, thanks a lot,” Julius said politely.

When he came to Ibiza, his first impression of the “White Island”…was rhapsodic: “Freedom, absolute freedom.”

Using steel plates, the team of researchers discovered that the creature can take an applied force of 150 newtons — some 39,000 times its body weight — before its exoskeleton starts to fracture. A car tire would apply force of around 100 newtons if driving over the insect on a dirt surface, scientists said.