Author Archives: Paul

Bye Mum

My Mum passed away last Friday. We’d originally planned a holiday for the last two weeks, but cancelled that and switched to a week in Derbyshire. We’d go out during the day with the kids (Gulliver’s Kingdom, Alton Towers Water Park, etc.) and then I’d visit her in hospital in the evening. By the Thursday [...]

End of Days

I was driving with the kids to the local garden centre, listening to a news item on the radio about the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico. It struck me that, as a Stephen King fan from a while back, driving the kids to the local garden centre and hearing about a disease outbreak far [...]

Monsters vs Aliens

We all went to see Monsters vs Aliens today because, well, it’s called Monsters vs Aliens. What’s not to like? Well it turns out the film is what’s not to like. Great voice work, sadly drowned out by the constant dull thud of dead punchlines, plus animation that at times barely looked one dimensional, let [...]

S&P

An interesting bit of trivia, I think: If you play with the graph here you can show that since Obama came to power the S&P 500 (which I chose because it’s a better indicator than the Dow of the overall market, though still far from perfect) has fallen around 10%. That’s pretty shocking. Not as [...]

On Chimps

Here’s an interesting article on the perception of African American as apes even today: The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper’s third study failed to find an ape association with other [...]