I do not read as much as I would like to, and I see far fewer movies than I used to. As noted before on these pages, many times, I try to keep up-to-date with two sets of award-winners from the worlds of books and movies: Booker Prizes and Academy Awards (or Oscars). I regard… Continue reading … and up-to-date with Booker winners again
For the first time in just over two years I am up-to-date with Oscar winners, so the following paragraph from my Projects Menu is still true: I have seen every major Oscar-winning movie going back to 1947. By “major” Oscar winner I mean every movie that has won at least one of the following: Best… Continue reading Up-to-date with Oscar winners again
Reflections and facts about winners of the Academy Award for Best Director. [1100 words here, followed by a table containing 26 rows of data.] The 93rd Academy Awards ceremony took place last month. As in the majority of previous ceremonies the same film won for Best Picture and Best Director. For only the second time, the Best Director award went to a woman, Chloe Zhao for “Nomadland”. The… Continue reading Oscars Trivia: films that won Best Picture but not Best Director
Last summer, during the FIFA World Cup Finals in Russia, I wrote this piece about Lionel Messi, the Barcelona and Argentina footballer. I observed that in several hundreds of hours spent watching Messi and his rival Ronaldo playing for their respective clubs on TV I had never seen Messi score a goal in live play.… Continue reading Lionel Messi: the hoodoo is over
As I noted in this piece on the Projects Menu (“A UK #1 for every year”) I can sing and play at least one UK chart-topping song from every year between 1954 and 2013. This repertoire developed from over 20 years’ worth of learning the odd song here and there and finding that many of… Continue reading More than Once at One (39 songs)
Last night, around 10.30pm, I finished reading “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, Marlon James’s 2015 Booker Prize-winning novel. This means that I have read every Booker Prize winner. As I have written elsewhere, the words “I have read” mean that my eyes were open and they passed across every word on every line on… Continue reading On reading every Booker Prize winner
[There are over 1,000 words in this post] I am a big fan of the “Desert Island Discs” archive and recommend it to everyone. [NOTE: the link in the last sentence, which previously took you to the “Find a Castaway” page, is now broken; this link will take you to the new Home Page for… Continue reading “Desert Island Discs”: the year so far
Yesterday morning, just after 7am, I finished reading “The Tempest”, Shakespeare’s last play. These days I get up early if I can. If I get to bed before 10.30pm (which was unthinkable until about five years ago) I generally get up before 6am the next day. If I could control my sleep cycle (which would… Continue reading On reading every Shakespeare play
The Compartments 