The phone rings in a darkened room. The glowing digits of the bedside clock read 08:50. An arm reaches blindly, searching for the handset to stop the infernal ringtone. The arm’s hand clutches the handset and pops it open with a click. “Nic Walker,” the owner of the arm says, trying not to sound like [...]
Archive for May, 2007
Death Row Pardon: LIVE!
29May07The title of this post was a program idea dreamt up by a friend of mine upon hearing that Dutch TV is on the verge of broadcasting “The Donor Show”, a reality TV program where a terminally ill 37 year-old woman gets to choose the recipient of her kidneys after she dies. These apparently insensitive, [...]
Bigger Red Bulls
27May07I spotted this pair in the Lower Regent Street branch of Tesco Metro today. I was looking for milk and bought wrapping paper, these two cans of red bull and a can of red wine. It’s hard to say why Tescos are responsible for accepting one in eight of every pound spent in Britain, isn’t [...]
Power Failures in Chez Nic
21May07Our house, for some reason, has the flakiest electricity I’ve ever known. That includes two years at university living in a house with perpetually stoned, necessarily lazy housemates whose financial misprudence, procrastination and often downright bloody-mindedness conspired to let the metered electricity, run first into credit, then die completely. These frequent power cuts led mostly [...]
Braille in Japanese
17May07During our beer tasting sessions on the first couple of nights in Japan we noticed that some of the cans sold in the local shop had braille embossed into their tops. This led to some speculation on how braille in Japanese works, speculation which is of course entirely sated by Wikipedias article on Japanese Braille. [...]
Nekobukuro
16May07On one of our days in Tokyo, we travelled to Ikebukuro and took the chance to visit a mini cat petting-zoo place called Nekobukuro. It’s on the eighth floor of the Tokyu Hands department store, the rest of the floor taken up with a pet shop. You pay 600 yen to enter and you are [...]
