Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 360

Spamglish

Here’s a tip: If you’re going to spam someone in English, try to make it look vaguely like you use English as a first or even second language.

I just received this:

‘An impressive sharings, I simply given this onto a colleague who was doing a little bit evaluation on this. And he actually purchased me breakfast [...]

A Brief Respite from Sideways Rain

Admin is cold, damp, chesty and fed up, lacking oomph and zip. His get up and go has gone. Lacking Vitamin D, heat and light in what must be the wettest, windiest, most miserable of miserable summers global warming has yet visited on his home city, he has gone here for a few days, to [...]

Neglected Films No.2: ‘Harold & Maude’

Believe it or not, there was a time when people associated with the film industry could simply phone stars up and chat. Knowing that my business partner loved Hal Ashby’s dark romantic satire ‘Harold & Maude’, I rang the Atheneum Hotel, where the industry used to put all of its stars, and spoke to Bud [...]

London’s Hidden Histories

‘The Secret History of our Streets’ is the kind of old-school documentary series at which the BBC excels. If you live near any one of the six streets being featured over each hour-long episode, you’ll know how accurate the programme-making is proving to be. At the top of my street is the Caledonian Road, the [...]

Flaming Hell

Recently I deleted a post on my website. After putting up what I felt was a fair and decent rebuttal to a reader, she got in touch and made it clear that she was not happy engaging in discussion. A quick check through the efiles revealed that she was one of the snarky Twi-hard fans [...]

Five Plays, A Tenner Apiece

This is a bit of a good deal. The Michael Grandage Company has launched a season of five plays at the Noel Coward Theatre comprising new writing, classical and twentieth century repertoire. They want to reach as wide an audience as possible with over 200 tickets for each performance at £10 and over 100,000 across [...]

Site Redesign On The Way…

Over here at Fowler Towers, designer Simon Moore and I are putting our heads together to take the site over to an HTML5 build that looks clean and is easy to navigate. I’m not convinced we’ll need Twitter and Facebook feeds but we may add them. And that pointless column to the right will go. [...]

It Came From Behind The Shelf No.4

Another poke about down the back of the bookshelves produces a file of covers – no point in me saving the Polish edition of ‘Spanky’ – from editions around the world, including Japan, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden and a few countries I can’t quite place. What’s missing is the staggeringly awful Balkan edition [...]

Yet More London Books

Another week, another slew of London books. ‘Ode To London; Poems to Celebrate the City’ is a slim volume perfect for browsing, edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, and is filled with graceful transport posters of the city, as well as some nice choices of London poetry, some very familiar, some not at all.

‘Lost London’ by [...]

Neglected Films No.1 – ‘A Handful Of Dust’

Satire is not always easy to appreciate. Too broad and it displeases the critics; too narrow and it displeases general audiences. The critics branded Merchant Ivory films ‘heritage cinema’, a lazy catch-all that suggested ladies in big frocks emoting beneath proscenium arches. Their coded meaning was that the films were politically conservative. But they had [...]