A Mind @ Play

Airport Syndrome

Gathered in the departure lounge, with the noise of the bustling airport drowning out the sound of their jitters, the passengers wait. Each of them attempts to show their strength of character, but underneath that calm veneer, the majority of them are unmistakably nervous. Unable to find anywhere comfortable to keep them, a woman at the front leafs through the documents in her hands. Passports, check. Boarding cards, check. Departure gate and boarding time, all as they should be. She fidgets in her seat, making sure her children are still fully dressed and haven’t in the meantime wandered off to see if there’s another plane they can board. Over by the windows, a man looks at his watch for the third time in as many minutes; he’s confused by the fact that the plane seems to be ready to board, but there’s no sign of activity around the gate.

2015-06-02

4 minutes to read

’ave it ’ovis

Bolton’s finest breadmakers with a tongue-in-cheek take for the smartphone generation.

2015-04-24

One minute to read

Key Literacy

I’m sitting at the table one morning, hands cradling a warm mug, that rich smell of coffee hanging in the air. The sun is shining down on a brand new day, only the chittering of birds offering their choral backdrop to an otherwise blank canvas. Then a vibration on the windowsill accompanied by a tinny melody. Dad’s calling.

‘The battery in my car key’s dead,’ he tells me, apparently standing in front of his locked car on the car park, desperately pressing the transponder. ‘Can you find the number to call the AA? I can’t get in the car.’

2015-04-12

2 minutes to read

American Contrast

Cartoon by Manu Cornet .

2015-03-27

One minute to read

Daily Links

A handful of random links discovered on the interwebs.

2015-03-21

One minute to read

Daily Links

A handful of random links discovered on the interwebs.

2015-03-09

One minute to read

V for Varoufakis

The only thing that gives the Jerries the willies these days is apparently the Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis (who appears to have done a bit of consultancy work for Valve on the side).

2015-03-04

One minute to read

Rhubarb Barbara

What do you call Barbs who works at the beer bar where the beard barber for the barbarians who eat rhubarb pie at Barbara’s bar drinks beer? Why Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel of course!

2015-02-28

One minute to read

Lazarus on Firefox

Lazarus may be risen from the dead, but it looks like he’s now been lain to rest again once and for all. This handy plug-in for Firefox , which stores what you write in input fields and staves off the frustrations of having your work lost should your browser crash, seems to have been abandoned by its author and hasn’t been updated for some time. Each progressive new version of Firefox leaves it a little more broken, to the point where I’ve sadly been left with a button that does nothing more than say ‘Loading…’ in the latest version.

2015-02-26

One minute to read

Popnography

We live in an age where being a slave to our impatience and short attention spans is almost a virtue, where watching television has made room for channel hopping, where listening to music involves skipping to choruses and jumping between tracks, where our attentions are constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions by our internetworked world.

It comes then as little surprise that one road to success is to cash in on our restlessness. Take a year’s worth of successful tunes, juice them, dissect them, distil their catchiness, then splice, blend and sew together a Frankenstein of audial goodies. That’s what you get with Daniel Kim’s Pop Danthologies: a highly concentrated concoction of successful pop anthems, a luxurious blend of first flush leaves, condensed and refined, the scion of sonic addiction grafted onto the stock of all that is pop.

2015-02-14

One minute to read