The City and The City is a unique and fascinating book. Plus it is a good one. Set in the fictional Eastern European city of Besz it follows a policeman as he tries to work out who killed a young woman found on an estate. Having spent time in Eastern European cities, Mieville’s description of…
No one can accuse thewordofward of not having its finger on the pulse. You want zeitgeist? This is it baby! i-Dosing is allegedly the new craze sweeping the easily swept youth of today. It works on a principal that uses ‘binaural beats’ where opposite ears hear differing sound waves. If I was to be cynical,…
I saw a documentary the other day called ‘The Cove’. It was a pretty awesome documentary about a secret bay where a load of Japanese slaughter thousands of dolphins for no real valid reason. At the start of the documentary, before you see the slaughter, the activists involved are a bit baffled as to why….
Sorry for being controversial but the Pope is coming and it has annoyed me. If you are Catholic please ‘turn the other cheek’ and forgive me. There aren’t many left in Britain anyway, so I feel fairly safe. I am an atheist and have nothing against those of you who wish to believe in all…
This is a really cool video that, like the Total Perspective Vortex, makes you feel like a utterly pointless speck of nothing. In case you aren’t familiar with the Total Perspective Vortex, it appears in what must surely be one of the greatest series of books / greatest radio plays of all time – The…
Can I get through a whole review of Pirate Latitudes without resorting to spouting pirate cliches? No shivver me timbers I can’t Jim lad. There, got that out of the way. This is Michael Chrichton’s last ever book. Which is incredibly sad because he was a great author. Not one to settle on any genre,…
Pretty topical stuff here at the wordofword. Fairly surprising too, if you knew me. Generally speaking, I couldn’t give the tiniest shit about football. Especially the premiership where individual games cease to matter and it is all about ‘doing pretty well over a year’. I just don’t want to invest an hour and a half…
It’s been E3 recently. If you are unaware of what E3 is, you should have less of a life and embrace the beauty of gadgetry and gaming. It’s a huge Electronic Entertainment Expo (three Es get it?) in LA that attracts the likes of Paris Hilton, Redman, the god-like Stan Lee, and the still Vulcan-like…
So another nutjob has gone mental and killed a load of innocent people because of their massive inadequacies. This time it isn’t some whingeing goth teen or surviva-mental-ist, it’s a podgy middle aged cabbie. I’m not going to write much about this because absolutely everything that can be said already has been – a million…
What with the economy being broken and credit crunching and blah blah tedium, more people are having what has annoyingly being termed a ‘staycation’. We thought we’d give one a go. I’ve always wanted to go to St Ives and Cornwall in general. It was also my wife’s birthday. I knew there was both art…
It’s the End of The World as we know it. Well the end of England anyway. The land part. Ok, I’ll stop, this is getting a bit tortured. In case you didn’t know, Land’s End is at Britain’s most south westerly point. Not including islands we have in the Atlantic, obviously. If you are visiting…
I was a bit worried about commenting on the situation in Thailand, in particular Bangkok. Although I lived there for two years and worked as a journalist, I mainly did lifestyle pieces, interviews, and reviews. Shallow stuff to be precise. So I got in an expert. Mrs Wordofward to be precise. Here is what she…
Well, as promised, here are some guys walking on water. Well, running to be precise. This is an awesome vid. How cool is that? Apparently it’s a new craze that is sweeping the world as we speak. Go and try it for yourself. It is not a clever viral marketing video at all. You just…
We humans have just created life. Not in the get-drunk-can’t find-condoms-should-be-ok-9-months-of-massive-discomfort-followed-by-a-few-hours-of-agony-and-there’s-a-baby traditionalist way. That way sucks. Except the first ten minutes or so. Nope, we’ve created a blue bacterium that it’s proud parents have called Synthia. They’re scientists ok? Yup, the team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland has created the first…
I saw this in the paper and thought it was worth a brief comment because it made me laugh on the tube. A guy has been arrested for having kiddie stuff on his computer and rightly so. This is always disturbing but seems to be happening alarmingly frequently and the man should clearly have his…
A man called “Man” and a boy called “Boy” walk down a road called “The Road”. Ok those aren’t literally their names, they just don’t seem to have any. On purpose. McCarthy wants the story to be about people as opposed to characters. People struggling to survive in a world that’s fucked. Everything is dead,…
If you are a puerile and easily amused politician (like I’d be), then you’ll probably be happy to be in the current situation and being in a ‘hung parliament’. I’d always suspected that the lack of ‘being hung’ was what drove someone to want the admiration needed to be elected in the first place. Being…
I find politics about as interesting as I find accounting or different species of slug or anything to do with finance. I know I should care more as democracy is a wonderful thing and people died so that I can have the vote. Can’t think who exactly, but it’s a common expression so it must…
I’ve been wanting to go to the Eden Project for years just because of some awesome looking photos I saw on the internet. If you don’t know what this project is, you should read more about it. It’s brilliant. Massive bio-domes in an old clay quarry in Cornwall. It’s being done as an experiment with…
Unlike lots of other countries we’ve annoyed, we British have never actively pissed off Iceland as far as I’m aware. It’s colder and further north for a start. The thing about the British Empire was that it was largely an excuse to get some sunshine and stop ourselves getting drunk all the time and fighting…