I not only don't want to be late for the trailers, I don't want to be late for the adverts. Movie magic....   (read more)

Watching Hangover Part 2 on a Saturday, staying in drinking Coronas and cooking full English breakfast. Would be really churlish to complain. New song totally worth the price of admission alone....   (read more)

So here's a meme you may have missed. It all started here with Shit Girls Say... and spiralled well out of control from there....   (read more)

This is a threat kept from the Look At This F*&%ing Hipster VERSUS People of Walmart Best Of Smack-Down, when I ran out of hipsters before people of Walmart. Dispatch from the Razor's Edge: trawling the depths of horrifying sites for the good stuff, so you don't have to! Enjoy! [sic] ...   (read more)

A 'Best Of' Smack-Down Between Everyone's Two Favourite Micro-Sites...   (read more)

"Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real." - David Foster Wallace, The Pale King...   (read more)

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This four-minute TED talk is totally lovely (plus funny and wise). Everyone likes firefighters....   (read more)

Yes, Dispatch from the Razor's Edge trawls everybody's favourite micro-site, Hot Chicks With Douchebags, so you don't have to....   (read more)

Schneier's newsletter, Crypto-gram, recently-ish had a special on the absurdity of security questions that one sets and is asked on the phone to authenticate one's identity. The resulting piss-takes were classic....   (read more)

FREEDOM - Not to be fucked with...   (read more)

The Photoshop Rap from CollegeHumor.com is nothing short of sublime. It's so good you can actually pick up useful Photoshop tips from it....   (read more)

Here's a little something to get you through the Great Monday of 2011. Michael Macintyre is our - not to mention Britain's - consensus favourite funnyman. He rocks....   (read more)

It's over; it's official. I have identified the coolest thing ever. The floor is closed for nominations. Here it is. Hang on to yourself....   (read more)

Most wild animals will only attack you if you directly threaten them or their children. But polar bears will track humans down and take a week to do it....   (read more)

Pandora's Sisters Kindle edition, Rockn' music from Damone, running like a maniac out in the snow, and fun-making military videos - all in today's entertainment-packed dispatch. (Warning!: music auto-start.)...   (read more)

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In a couple of months, Ms Havrilesky has her first book coming out - a memoir. This event provides a critical re-balancing of a universe in which I had book deals, but members of the original Suck cadre had not. ...   (read more)

Is there really any need for Shia Labeouf? Would we, perhaps, be better off without Shia Labeouf?...   (read more)

When she had last been around this group, they had all been full of optimism and excitement and initiative and self-confidence. Now, they had been out in what we call the real world for three years. And all of that was just gone....   (read more)

So when we last left our heroes, they were hiding out from the marauding solar death ray beneath the canopy of the 20-mile checkpoint, lapping up Lucozade and choking on trail mix, reaching down deep for the necessary sack to tackle the final 6.2 miles....   (read more)

Right, so at the 17-mile checkpoint, major themes were shade, and foot maintenance. We both topped up with water - going dry out here could be a serious problem...   (read more)

Finally, Tim and I pick ourselves up, gear up, and head out. Me: Well . . . it's not going to suck itself. Tim: I've been waiting for that. Me: I've been letting the tension build....   (read more)

So having topped up water and touched in with the team at the first checkpoint, I've once again taken off at speed to try and catch up the leaders....   (read more)

It's 6AM and I'm woken by my phone alarm - direct from a vivid dream where I'm manning a WWI machine gun emplacement. I don't think that can be a good omen for the day....   (read more)

We wandered into a warren of barricades and ranks of police officers, some of them visibly equipped for heavy weather. My onboard radar for such things perked up and I declared: "Gotta be the Israeli Embassy....   (read more)

So those of you who have already seen Iron Man 2 will not need me to explain which sequence of Scarlett Johansson's I'm talking about here....   (read more)

So what better cutesty animal video to kick off Good Friday with than Christian the Lion! (No, he didn't get the name from eating Christians.)...   (read more)

So this is what is widely known on the Interwebs as The Amazing Predator Rap. Maybe you've already seen it, or perhaps not, but in any case for once the hype is fully justified....   (read more)

Happy 2010. Welcome to the new decade (much the same as the old decade)....   (read more)

"I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant....   (read more)

Fucking great. Now not only are we going to be assailed by sidewalk-hogging, escalator-blocking, over-foot-rolling, twice-the-space-of-normal-people, thumpity-thump-goddamned-thumping, draggy luggage people - but now they're all going to be stopping periodically to get at their coffee in their draggy luggage-mounted *cup holder*. ...   (read more)

So today I ran with the sun on my face. This was my first run in, oh, probably three months. Which is the longest I've gone without running in, oh, probably about 15 years. ...   (read more)

"Dogs are important." - Joe Laltrello...   (read more)

"Adapt yourself to the environment in which your lot has been cast, and show true love to the fellow-mortals with whom destiny has surrounded you." - Marcus Aurelius...   (read more)

"I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." - Winston Churchill...   (read more)

"This is really interesting, Brad. You know, Iraqis don't really seem good at fighting, but then they never really completely surrender either." ...   (read more)

So I just read the new Denis Johnson, which follows up his National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke. I'm sure a lot of people will remember me going on about Johnson - his novel Already Dead, A California Gothic has long been my second favourite novel of all time....   (read more)

If you're just dragging yourself back from the May bank holiday - or if, perhaps, you're celebrating Cinco de Mayo - you may need these....   (read more)

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Here are two extremely energizing political commentators upon whom I've stumbled in my various trawlings of the rightward edges of the InterWebs. Both are young, both are hip, both are right-wing nutjobs, both have beef, and - perhaps most importantly - both are funny as all heck. Seriously....   (read more)

Add in the F&^%ing Royal Mail to the equation - as the only way to get your irreplaceable documents to, or back from, the F&^%ing Home Office....   (read more)

Special for Easter Sunday: hilariously rude t-shirts. This might seem like kind of a strange thing to anthologize. But, back when I was working for the Civil Service, I did find the T-Shirt Humour site to be one of those things I checked in on when I was bored and depressed and needed a laugh. (And sent around when they were particularly good.) And what are rude t-shirts without a good soundtrack?...   (read more)

D.T. Max has a totally stunning piece in The New Yorker: The Unfinished - David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest....   (read more)

Anyone who knows anything about the European Parliament - and you're really better off not - will know that one of the few non-horrifying things about it is that British guys who are totally opposed to the European project can get elected as Ministers to the European Parliament (MEPs) and then turn up and rubbish the place anytime they are allowed to speak....   (read more)

"The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9:00AM and 5:00PM, and since you're trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill that time....   (read more)

"Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because so much of the world seems to conspire to force crap upon you....   (read more)

And but there's this whole Christian Bale blowing up on the set of Terminator: Salvation in this stunning, infantile, megalomaniacal, wildly profane, seemingly unending rant/temper tantrum... And now here's the absolute king of mashups: it's called "Bale Out", by a guy called RevoLucian - and it's a gem, and completely danceable. ...   (read more)

And so you're probably back at work now and probably really have some time to kill. And if you're like me you've probably got a bit of the New Years post-holiday blues and could use a cheer-me-up. And so here are some videos to watch....   (read more)

Well, it was the last walking day, and all we had to do was climb out of this strangely industrial Shangri-La. That of course meant Up....   (read more)

We enjoyed a lovely breakfast in the well-appointed, if slim, West Highland Way Sleeper dining room. The morning train went by outside....   (read more)

We bid farewell to the Crap YHA, and its lovely lochside backyard, on what was already starting to look like a nice day... I realised something today that was already probably obvious to anyone with a head: photography is all about light....   (read more)

At 3295 feet, glowering over the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond is Scotland's southern-most Munro. Today was the day we would pause our northerly march to climb it. ...   (read more)

During our breakfast at the big table in the big kitchen of the bunkhouse-y B&B, we were joined by a man leading a tour... So then it pretty much a matter of getting ourselves down off of Conic Hill, and onto the shores of Loch Lomond - the bonny banks of which we'd be walking along for the next two days....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

Morning, tea in our room, and Tim happily moblogging from his bed. Me: This feels like redemption. I can't tell you how much time on how many trips I've kept people hanging about while I typed, or edited images, or battled net-cafes....   (read more)

I got such a good reaction to the GI Joe PSAs - well, if you can consider comments in the form of "about to get fired due to laughing my ass off at work" to be good - that I'm providing two addenda....   (read more)

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Yesterday I went on a bit of a Suck.com nostalgia trip. Since I'm the very modest and unassuming fellow that I am, I declined to make any mention of the fact that I myself was published in Suck once or twice back in the day....   (read more)

Few of you will recall (few indeed probably even noticed at the time) that Suck.com was the web's first daily publication - and, up until its tragic and era-ending demise in 2001, the web's longest-running....   (read more)

One of the strange things about living in the UK is that nobody seems to be familiar with The Onion. I'm not sure how anyone gets through the workday without it....   (read more)

XKCD is the best web comic in the universe - most especially if you're a computer geek, or a math geek, or a romance geek. It's also the most bizarre....   (read more)

I'm finally going to fulfill my pledge of publishing nothing but Non-Stop Fun! for five days, perhaps in a row....   (read more)

It will not have passed the notice of regular readers that I have taken up boxing. I've mentioned that the weekday sessions are fairly light-hearted (if not painless); but that the Saturday sparring sessions can be pretty brutal. Here are some results from my latest sparring session....   (read more)

I grew up listening to George Carlin's Class Clown album in secret. (I seem to recall my aunt buying it, not having a good sense of what she was getting into, and then needing to get it out of my grandmother's house - and into my mother's, and mine.)...   (read more)

29) The rehashing of every ridiculous cliche we've all seen at least 100 times. 28) Could anyone in any of these movies ever, just once, find something without the bad guys appearing that second behind them with guns to take it away? Could somebody just one time find something and go home with it?...   (read more)

Today, May 14th, is Israeli Independence Day. On this day, 60 years ago, the founders of Israel proclaimed a national homeland for Jews, a sanctuary from the slaughter in Europe, and an end to two millennia of wandering. So happy birthday, Israel - and here's to you...   (read more)

I know I've been a little hot and heavy with the political, and also the pro-military, stuff. I've had one or two unsubscriptions from dispatch lately, presumably as a result. I confess these give me pause (and, okay, sting a little, too) - though of course A) I have no expectation that people will always read my stuff, and B) if I weren't annoying anyone, I probably wouldn't be saying anything very interesting...   (read more)

Forty-two year old Pat Dollard is hurtling through the air in the exploding Iraqi night. An IED has just blown up at the back bumper of a Humvee he's riding in - killing the Marine sitting next to him, and sending him shooting 30 feet out of the vehicle, with a broken leg and shrapnel wounds....   (read more)

Since the periodicity of my long-running quotations series has been getting asymptotic with infinity, here are the quotes that have been piling up since the last edition...   (read more)

You know, we all feel a little down sometimes. Some days are better than others. But, lately, whenever I'm feeling blue, I like to think about a little something I have to look forward to: Dancing on that cocksucker bin Laden's grave....   (read more)

43 Actual Names Of Royal Navy Battleships That Very Plainly Suggest You Should Not Fuck With The Royal Navy, And 10 That, Kind Of Confusingly, Do Not : Victory, Revenge, Defiance, Warspite, Lion, Two Lions...   (read more)

So if you haven't been following along, Prince Harry - third in line to the throne - joined the Army....   (read more)

The following story, possibly apocryphal, was related to us by our friend Charles over dinner at a curry house in Clapham Junction a couple of nights ago. ...   (read more)

Lying in my tent in the Lizard, near to the pigs, I dreamt long, vivid, grand, yet frustrating dreams. Really long and involved. I wonder how time compression works in dreams. Are we like Data, reviewing video at impossible speeds?...   (read more)

Morning now, and I am standing on the stairs to the slide of the camp site playground, soaking up the first sunlight. I am not sitting here, nor anywhere, due to the dew, which is just a monster. The surface of the world couldn't be any more drenched if a thunderstorm had stopped five seconds ago....   (read more)

In nomadic camp life, you really do just get into the rhythm of waking at dawn. Badger! badger! badger! What I took to be a badger ran by, along the opposite edge of the field, with a crust of something in her jaws....   (read more)

So - Ali was right. The bus driver really doesn't have anything better to do than tell you where to get off the damned bus....   (read more)

Upon checkout, the nice innkeeper man, Terry (*) , gave me a replacement pen, gratis. Hard to argue with that. The least I can offer in return is some free, and much-deserved, publicity: http://porthcurnohotel.co.uk/....   (read more)

Awoke rather dreamy and refreshed - especially after an extra, post-rollover hour of sleep. The new sun and fresh breeze were both blasting in the window - ah, another glorious day, imagine that. Perhaps I am God. How would you know for sure, really?...   (read more)

I was up early again (camping!), right on time for a truly fab cooked breakfast - and cooked by a really lovely old whiskered gentleman. I felt like calling him "Cookie" and asking if I could carry the tin mugs over from the wagon for him...   (read more)

Awoke ten minutes before my alarm was to go off (I know - but we were meeting for breakfast, and generally wanted to get an early start) to an absolutely glorious morning. While languorously performing my toilette in the sparklingly lit mirrors of the immaculate bathroom, the radio reports: "Twenty-two degrees today, clear skies, cool breezes - and plenty of sunshine!"...   (read more)

And so C&M met us in the morning back at the pub, after Tim and I had broken camp. Here they are looking all cutesy-skippy- happy, and all bad, respectively. I think I can explain the skippy-happiness....   (read more)

Another absolutely enormous breakfast - a pleasingly recurring theme - and then we walked out into a cool, slightly overcast, and windy day. Lovely walking weather....   (read more)

So, previously on our show, we cut the day's dispatch short, leaving our heroes palsiedly perambulating into the port town of Mawgan Porth - one hobbling and whimpering, and the other cackling and rubbing his hands together: "Yessss... yesss... we will walk futher, we will walk more... we will walk up, and down... there will never be an end to the walking... Mua-HaHaHaHaHa!!!"...   (read more)

And so I had this other idea. (Yeah, I know.) But the Coast to Coast walk had been, everyone involved had to admit, except maybe you, pretty completely spectacular. And the UK has got something like a dozen national trails. And the first one hadn't killed anyone. Quite....   (read more)

Hero Shot - Laura Seay & Michael Stephen Fuchs, 2006...   (read more)

So anyone who knows me well knows that Steven Pinker is one of my intellectual heroes....   (read more)

So, nothing like the best single night's sleep ever (as mentioned yesterday), before the last day of the longest walk of your life. We awoke in the clean, pretty, quiet, sunny room together, and rolled over and stretched and yawned languorously and finally roused ourselves to go downstairs for, oh yes, another ass-kicking breakfast....   (read more)

"For many, particularly those who enjoy cosy English villages hidden amongst the finest, gentlest, most bucolic scenery this country has to offer, the 13.5-mile stroll down the Esk Valley from Glaisdale to Grosmont is simply the best section of the walk . . . But first you have to get to the valley, and that means getting down off the moors . . . parts of this short-cut are extremely boggy - up to waist-deep, in my experience - and unless you want to end up like the dead sheep that occasionally litter this part of the moor it's probably safer to stick to the roads."...   (read more)

Early morning in the Schesse-frei pub backyard. The very first light of day glances off of the still and quiet (and glisteningly wet) tents. Mark: I suppose there's nothing for it but to get moving. Me: But we don't have to do it now. Mark: I wonder if we could for once manage not to be excruciatingly early or absurdly late for breakfast . . . Darby Danger, we're up!...   (read more)

Mark: Wow, that's the first time the sun has driven us from our tent . . . It was true, we emerged to a gloriously sunny day in the back yard of the White Swan. This called for shorts....   (read more)

Morning finds Applegarth Camping Barn - and our heroes snug in bed: Mark: I can't tell if that's wind or rain. Me: It's not rain. Go back to sleep. Mark: That's definitely rain. Me: No, you're dreaming . . . I had the most awful vivid dream last night. Mark: Were you trapped three quarters of the way across England with two freaks? Me: That's no dream, that's your reality....   (read more)

Darby: Screw you guys - I'm goin' to the B&B. Us: But- Darby: Eh! Screw you guys - B&B....   (read more)

It appears that on this walk if it's not one goddamned thing, it's another: if you manage to avoid getting blown off the cliff-edge of a fell, you've only survived to later get swallowed whole by a bog. Well, never a dull moment....   (read more)

"Those who struggled to complete the previous stage will be less than delighted to hear that today's hike is, at 21 miles, even longer. Indeed, for many it will be the longest day on the entire route."...   (read more)

So, our acute food problem so far had largely consisted of three parts: 1) breaking camp and leaving town before anything opened; 2) getting into the next town after everything had closed; and 3) not packing nearly enough trail food to get us from one to the other....   (read more)

So the Retained Technical Consultant on our Coast to Coast Walk was one Josh Schroeder - extremely experienced hiker/camper, Eagle Scout, and all around prince of a guy....   (read more)

So did I forget to mention the American? (Aka the Quiet American, aka the Ugly American.) We first met this august gentleman at the station in Carlisle, where our rail connection to St. Bees was cancelled and replaced by a bus service....   (read more)

Awoke in St. Bees to sunshine and breeze and calling seabirds - a very propitious morning indeed....   (read more)

The hop from Amboseli to Nairobi was painless, and our quick drive-by of downtown Nairobi tended to underscore why we weren't being dropped off in the city proper. Lamentably, these days, Nairobi is literally one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden cities on the planet. ...   (read more)

Dawn on the Crater Rim - and major themes seemed to be brutal cold, and sophomoric humor...   (read more)

Dateline: Spartanburg-ish, South Carolina, "Quality Hotel" [sic] FACTOID: The state of North Carolina built its Vietnam War Veterans Memorial as part of one of its Interstate Highway 85 South rest stops....   (read more)