Our journey began in the mountains an hour outside of Chiang Rai, Thailand. My group consisted of myself, my wife Nim, my mother-in-law (Nim’s mum), her friend, a guide (who happened to be a student of Nim’s mum and was a local Chiang Rai businessman), and another guide who was from Laos. A lot of…
I turn 40 in a couple of months and apart from the uncontrolled and unmanly weeping I intend to do on the fateful day of the digit change, the rest of my year and those that follow will be epic.
Dear wordofward readers, I am now in the stunningly glorious Luang Prabang in the equally stunning and glorious country of Laos. It is astoundingly beautiful here. Luang Prabang is a World Heritage UNESCO site and rightly so. It is a town/small city located on a finger of land at the confluence of the Mekong and…
Dear reader, In case you are wondering why I haven’t replied to your messages, answered your calls,let the milk pile up, and generally not write much recently, it is because I am in Thailand. I was worried about letting you know this too much in advance because of the resentment this seemed to cause in…
This is the stuff of classic Science Fiction. Except it’s real. 13,000 feet below the Antarctic ice sheets lies Lake Vostok – the third largest lake by volume on the entire planet. It has been buried down there for 20 million years. Russian scientists, (one of them undoubtedly a beautiful woman unless science fiction has…
I wrote recently about some pranksters reprogramming an iPhone 4s in a shop so that it swore at a kid. It was pretty damn funny. I then talked about Siri in general and how how it seems genuinely handy and can even help you find a place to bury a dead body or get a…
This is genius! Not much more to add really. I saw this on some site or other and thought I would share it. Enjoy. http://youtu.be/6ntDYjS0Y3w
What follows is a pointless rant about coffee. I wrote it yesterday while hopped up on caffeine. I’m writing this in a coffeeshop and quite frankly it sucks. First of all there are about ten kids running around shouting while their parents either remain oblivious to the noise and its affect on others’ enjoyment, or…
Well, China is up to mad-science-that-looks-cool-but-suspicious-from-space yet again. I previously wrote about the huge but weird things they are building in the desert here. (If you missed it, check it out, it’s awesome.) The difference this time is that we know what they are up to and it’s incredibly beneficial to all mankind. It also…
We’re all doomed! On the 10th of January 2012 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (acronym is BAS but BLAMS would be better) moved the Doomsday clock from 6 minutes to midnight up to 5. In case you are unaware of this clock, midnight means we have just blown our planet up and are all dead….
The Japanese are cool. When faced with a problem the average modern Japanese person will probably take a photo and then build a robot to fix it. Or maybe I’m stereotyping. But that is certainly what they are doing to solve their post-tsunami food issues. They are going to spend £33 million on a 600…
After the misery of my last post where I simply listed what happened last year, I thought I would start 2012 off with an amusing local story. In a Tesco supermarket in Coventry a 12 year old lad called Charlie picked up a display version of the iPhone 4S. He wanted to test out…
Every TV and radio show is now poised to launch its end of year review show. Some will be funny, most will be depressing. It has been quite a momentous year all things considered.
If you buy one book this year make it this one. And also read more, that’s pathetic.
I read last week that Larry King, the legendary American interviewer, stated that he wants to be cryogenically frozen. For years, I always said that I wanted a viking burial, where I am floated out to sea on a boat with all my treasured belongings and the severed heads of my enemies. Sadly that wasn’t…
Everyone loves a good Apocalypse and everyone seems to love John Martin’s work. I certainly did. John Martin was hugely popular in the 19th Century and toured the world with his spectacular paintings of the end of the world and scenes from the bible of God smiting the shit out of everything. Obviously most…
Robert Harris’s latest book is a thriller set in the exciting world of high finance and computing. The fact that it is genuinely thrilling, given the topics, is testament to Harris’s skill.
Now that google maps can spy on every corner of the world, the unemployed can systematically check out every square foot of the planet. Consequently one of them has discovered some weird-assed stuff in the Chinese Kumtag desert near Tibet.
I guess I felt like writing about this after being bored with all the news about the Occupy London crowd in front of St Pauls. First there was the Occupy Wall street lot in America and quite frankly they have a massive point. The USA has huge wealth inequality. Apparently the top 400 richest Americans…
Last night we got back from the pub and were tucking in medium rare steaks wondering what to watch on the TV. This is just the way we live, don’t judge us. Predictably there wasn’t much on, so we turned on the Playstation and clicked on the BBC iPlayer. Annoyingly it wasn’t there instantly, there…