arts & entertainment
music, stage, writing, comedy, cinema, telly, arts, sport, crafts, photography – all this and more!
Sunday Singalong: Donna Summer
So sad to hear she died this week, reportedly of cancer at the age of 63. Her biggest hits were the disco anthems of “Love to Love You Baby”, “Hot Stuff”, “Bad Girls”, “No More Tears”, “MacArthur Park”, and my very favourite, “I Feel Love”. She had an incredible mezzo-soprano voice.
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Friday Hoyden: Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson
In the new Sherlock Holmes adaptation by CBS – Elementary. Johnny Lee Miller will be starring as Holmes. It’s set in Manhattan. Wheeeee! WATCH ALL THE VERSIONS!
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Weekly Whimsy: would you give this hitchhiker a lift?
This week’s whimsy is courtesy of a weirder than usual fashion photo from Queen magazine in 1960. Please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you.
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This week in Game of Thrones: Theon Greyjoy is horrid and horrider
Lots of other things are horrid too. Have a general snarking on Westeros thread.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
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Quote of the Day: Bleeeeeeeep edition
Apparently BBC America bleeped The Thick Of It. Must have sounded like a lorry reversing into a heart monitor.
Sunday Singalong: Alabama Shakes
How much do I love this sensational new band from Athens, Alabama (soon to join Athens, Georgia in indie-rock iconography)? How much do I love their singer, Brittany Howard? Let me count the ways.
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Friday Hoyden: Joanna Russ
Guest post from Tansy Rayner Roberts: Joanna Russ is one of the mighty legends of the science fiction field that everyone needs to know about. As well as writing many important novels and short stories, she was a brutal literary critic, a brilliant academic, an unflinching feminist, and a devastatingly articulate commentator on gender, not only in science fiction but in the history of culture.
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My rant on The Hunger Games
Here be SPOILERS!!!
I’m interested in addressing it as an instance of popular culture that again has kids tearing through books, hungry for more, at the controversy and ‘moral panic’ that it seems to be creating, and in looking at the elements of what, for me, made it something out of the league of the ‘Twilights’ of the world.
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Who’st the jackanapes who failed to sweetly convey the imminent dawning of Talk Like Shakespeare Day, that I might more timely partake of such delights that roll most trippingly off the tongue?
It’s splitting from the nave to the chops time!
Actually, I’d rather watch this collection of fine videos from the Talk Like Shakespeare Day website.
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Sunday Singalong: The Breeders
Once upon a time there was this perfect punk rock band and it was The Pixies. Then The Pixies broke up, partly because Kim Deal kept getting side-lined in the band and partly because Frank Black had ‘temperamental genius’ staked out, and when they broke up you could tell everyone assumed it was a man’s [...]
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Sunday Star Wars: I find your lack of dancing…disturbing
Darth Vader vs Emperor Palpatine dance-off – this is a thing now. Please treat this as a general whimsy and weirdness thread – what have you spotted in the wild recently that you feel you just have to share?
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