Rafael Behr

I know, I know. The blog is slowly dying. I blame ...

... I dunno ... Facebook? Not really. I'm sure it's killing blogging somehow but I don't spend any time on it.

Children? Definitely the most urgent - and rewarding - demand on my time, but it seems a bit harsh to hang daddy's digital fecklessness on their tiny shoulders.

Work? Well, some people seem to manage to combine blogging and day jobs, but maybe they don't watch as much bad TV in the evenings as I do.

TV. Yes, responsible for everything. Always.

But if it weren't for TV, there wouldn't be 1980s adverts, and if there weren't 1980s adverts there wouldn't be nostalgia for 1980s adverts, and if there weren't nostalgia for 1980s TV adverts then there wouldn't be video mashups of the Beach Boys and 1980s TV adverts.

Plain weird. Good weird.

Nirvana meet the Supermen Lovers: Come as the Starlight. (Mashed by Overdub)

It's a metaphor for something, but I don't know what (IV)

Is there a word to describe the potentially infinite cycle of cheese and cracker eating.

You take a bite that finishes the cheese, but are left with a bit of cracker. So you cut off some more cheese, but it is too big for your cracker. So you take another cracker for your stub of cheese, but ...

It seems to capture some essential truth about the human condition, but I don't know what.

Source: the internet

The ponciest idea ever

Emerging from sleep the other day, I had a half-conscious idea to write a satire on the Tory shadow cabinet, based on Boccaccio's 14th Century picaresque epic. I could called it 'The De-Cameron.'

And I could hint at Notting Hill culinary metro-sensibilities by publishing it under the pseudonym Focaccio.

Then I woke up properly and poked myself in the eye until I begged myself for mercy.

Words that don't exist but should (XV)

If many arcane things constitute arcana, why can't a collection of mundane things be mundana?

Official: ladybirds are the new squirrels

Ladybirds: cute, right? Wrong. They are pests. And a threat to our national sovereignty too.

I have a ladybird infestation at home. I didn't think that ladybirds infested. I thought they were rare, delicate things, like butteflies. Christ, they named a series of children's books after them. That's how innocent they were. You don't get 'cockroach classics' about Peter and Jane, do you?

But a quick Google search reveals that I don't have the charming good-luck-to-touch indigenous British ladybirds swarming over my window sills. I have the pernicious Harlequin Ladybird. Over sexed, over-sized and over here.

It's red squirrels/grey squirrels all over again.

Internet makes old thing new, better

It's Garfield minus Garfield.

Words that don't exist but should (XIV in a very occasional series)

Hevel verb trans - to groom, arrange in order, make presentable; the opposite of which is to dishevel, or make dishevelled.

Quick! A mashup!

Why fight, when you can dance?

Time to hear the Deep Message.

(Credit: DJ Moule)