26 members recommend...
‘Sideways’ on DVD (Fox Searchlight, Amazon £12.99)
Deftly written, this hilarious yet poignant variation on a road movie sees Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) get into a series of scrapes on a wine-tasting tour of California the week before Jack’s wedding. Giamatto puts in a delightfully lugubrious performance as a struggling novelist with a taste for Pinot Noir. Lashings of fine wine, middle-aged angst and the trials of getting your manuscript published... subjects close to the heart of many 26-ers. JD
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‘The Clumsiest People In Europe: Or, Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide To The Victorian World’ by Todd Pruzan and Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer (Bloomsbury, £10.29 on Amazon)
Fabulously funny book in which American editor and writer Pruzan shares his fascination with Mrs Mortimer, the Victorian children’s book writer. She wrote rabidly insulting travel guides such as ‘The Countries Of Europe Described’ without venturing further than the English coast. ‘...The Spaniards are not only idle, they are very cruel,’ opined Mrs M. ‘Though the Welsh are not very clean, they make their cottages clean by white-washing them...’ ‘Nothing useful is well done in Sweden.’ And much worse. A hilarious and deftly handled study of peevishness and xenophobia. Great holiday reading. TR
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Email disclaimers
Sick of the legalese, veiled threats and authoritarian paranoia attached to the emails you get from anyone working at a large business? It’s not your friendly employee-friend who is responsible – the disclaimers get attached automatically to every email that’s sent, it seems. What a great opportunity for a big corporate to differentiate itself. While we wait for that to happen, here are some awards for laughably mad disclaimers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/18/readers_letters_the_email_disclaimer/ TR
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‘The White Stuff’ by Simon Armitage (Penguin, list price £7.99, Amazon £6.39)
26 favourite Simon Armitage’s second novel is out in paperback. The tale of a marriage at breaking point as a couple struggle to conceive a child, its narrative voice gracefully flits from the laddish banter of pubs and stag parties, to a more graceful internal prose used to highlight the male protagonist’s inner torment. Oh the angst of being a modern-day man. JD
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‘Nouvelle Vague’ by Nouvelle Vague (Peacefrog, £9.99 from Amazon)
Reworkings of classics songs by the Clash, PiL, the Cure and the Specials, among others. And when I say reworkings, I mean reworkings. They’re sung by a couple of laid-back French chanteaux, in a kind of catchy, low-key, bossa nova meets easy-listening style. Quirky to say the least. And it goes to prove one thing – those raucous 80s anthems hid some fine lyrics and cracking tunes. JD
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http://abecedaria.blogspot.com
Suzanne McCarthy’s blog is, it says, “about keyboarding in diverse scripts, literacy and digital literacy”, which is a dull way to describe a fascinating bazaar of language-related insights, oddities and observations. Wonderful stuff on Cherokee and the alphabet, plus entertaining ruminations on letterforms and some seemingly profound stuff about the language of computer code that lost this visitor completely! TR
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‘Dexter’s Laboratory’(Cartoon Network, every day, 6am-6.30am and 12.30pm-1pm or Cartoon Network + 7am-7.30am and 1.30pm-2pm)
How a typical suburban American family spawned a short, squat child genius with a Mittel-European accent and a secret, custom-made laboratory is left unanswered. But Genndy Tartakovsky’s superbly animated cartoon series certainly gives ‘The Simpsons’ a run for its money in the writing stakes, with quick-fire gags, infectious catchphrases, and canny cultural references. Not to mention the maddest, baddest theme tune on television. JD
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http://www.cucumis.org
A new free online translation service. Become a member and get access to a community of translators. “Cucumis roughly translates as ‘Watermelon’ from Latin, a spherical fruit like the earth, full of vitality and happiness. With about 3000 spoken languages over the world, we hope this website will help us to get to know each other.” Lovely stuff. TR
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http://www.weaselwords.com.au
A site for people who have silently wept into a crumpled copy of their company's mission statement, for teachers who want to work in classrooms and not customer service points, and for all those who have been underpinned by an innovative, value adding, creative, sustainable, diverse and optimised framework. TR
This month’s plugs by Jim Davies and Tim Rich. They aren’t necessarily the views of 26, but we hope they’re not too far off the mark. All contributions gratefully received.
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