Oh Sesame Street, take me to the Snackside Down! I’m not usually a fan of scary horrific alternate realities but when they’re part of an alternate Sesame Street parody reality where Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit show where up is down and down is up and your laundry bill to Continue Reading
TV
Game of Thrones: How symbolism is used to represent its various houses
Any way you look at it, Game of Thrones is a clever, complex, multilayered show. Part of its appeal is that it invest meaning in every scene, every characters words and actions, with nothing left to chance. As the knowledgeable people at ScreenPrism beautifully explain, this extends to its use Continue Reading
Do the Dance of Joy! Perfect Stranger Things is here!
A sitcom staple in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Perfect Strangers was a delightful, if unchallenging, tale of two distant cousins, one American-born, another an immigrant, who have to overcome all kinds of cultural and other hurdles to arrive at something approaching domestic bliss. The humour was more Continue Reading
Happy Birthday Bert! (5 months late) #SesameStreet
I love birthdays. My birthday. Other peoples’ birthdays. And pop culture characters birthdays. If it involves cake, friends and a party, real or imagined I am there with figurative bells on (or depending on the party, actual bells). I also don’t restrict these celebrations to the actual day of Continue Reading
Star Trek Discovery: “Into the Forest I Go” (S1, E9 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND KLINGONS BUT HEY YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY RIGHT? “We are about to face the most difficult challenge we have ever attempted. Today, we stare down the bow of the Ship of the Dead, the very same ship that took thousands of our own at the Continue Reading
Finally watched: Schitt’s Creek
If you were to look at Schitt’s Creek‘s premise in isolation, you might be tempted to wonder if we haven’t been down this folksy, poorly-bitumenised road before. That’s hardly a crime of course since most TV shows owes some debt of gratitude, large or small, to their broadcast antecedents, Continue Reading
The John Lewis Christmas ad 2017 is here! And so the festive season begins …
Year after gloriously festive year, the Christmas ads of UK department store John Lewis are that one rare exception to featuring commercial ads on this blog. That’s largely because the ads, while obviously selling something, are far more creative than your usual “Hey we have Christmas stuff! Come and Continue Reading
Star Trek Discovery: “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” (S1, E8 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND ALIENS TOO DAMN PEACE-LOVING FOR THEIR OWN GOOD … AND PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE ELSE’S Grab your tie dyed T-shirts! Get used to eating tofu and mung beans! Make love not war and slap a peace sign and some rainbows on a Volkswagen Beetle – it’s Continue Reading
Jane Goodall and her love affair with Africa (documentary)
I have long had a fascination with the natural world. It’s hard to say where it started exactly – the books of Gerald Durrell? The documentaries of David Attenborough? – but one thing is for sure, the magazines of the National Geographic Society, which my parents subscribed to for Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: To every letter of the alphabet, a pop culture icon
Now if you’re anything like me (way older than school age), it’s highly likely you haven’t been asked to recite your ABCs or sing the Alphabet Song for quite some time. Which is a pity because two artists, Tom Whalen and Dave Perillo, who recently exhibited their work at Continue Reading