ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Every now and then you see a TV show which seems destined to fail, but yet you personally enjoy. One such was a rather unusual one-off comedy I saw early this year on BBC3 called Being Human, about a vampire and a werewolf who flatshare — and then discover that their house is haunted by [...]

Read: No Heroics - just Being Human »

The first Metallica album I’ve bought for some time. I got into them around the time of the Black album, bought the back catalogue, bought Live Shit, stayed through Load, but I couldn’t really face Re-Load or St Anger, although I was sufficiently intruiged to ensure that the Some Kind of Monster DVD found its [...]

Read: Death Magnetic »

Hilary Mantel’s highly original and very odd novel received much praise when it was published in 2005. Somehow it has managed to escape my attention until nowStephen Lang: Booked Out
My fellow blogger Stephen Lang wrote the above in March of this year. At the time, I commented that I’d picked the book up a couple [...]

Read: Mantel Piece »

I’ve been to see the Dark Knight today, and I took BTP. Yes, my four-year old, to that film.
Parents who have lodged a record number complaints about violence in The Dark Knight, the latest Batman film, have been supported by several MPs.The Telegraph
‘The BBFC have got this wrong and won’t admit it. I don’t think [...]

Read: The Dark Knight »

I read a lot. It’s not uncommon for me to sometimes read two novels in one day. So I get through a fair few books.
Quite a while ago, I came across a book by a chap called Michael Connelly called ‘The Poet’, which covers an FBI investigation into a serial killer. It was all right, [...]

Read: Bish, Bash, Bosch »

I recorded this the other night as I was out when it was on, so decided to watch it tonight instead.
I had been hoping to enjoy this: I’d really enjoyed the BBC Series ‘The Invisibles’, so when they were pushing another drama series, I thought I’d give it a bash.
I had to admit I was [...]

Read: Bonekickers »

I went to see a band at The Jolly Miller the other night. The band were E-Men City, and I needed to go and see them — their drummer used to be a colleague of mine, and I’d been saying for a long while that I’d go and see them as soon as they were [...]

Read: E-Men City »

I’m reading a book called Quirkology by Professor Richard Wiseman. He looks at a lot of studies of quirky little things: how good people are at assessing whether or not someone is lying, how easy it is to suggest memories of events that never happened and so on. Oh, and that I was born in [...]

Read: Quirky, and mostly scientific »

If you’ve not already been to see Dads Army: The Lost Episodes, you’ve probably missed your chance. I saw it at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal last weekend, and as this was on the last day of the second-last location of the tour, and that was a few days ago, you’ve probably missed your chance now.
Now I’m [...]

Read: Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes »

I bought a book about three years ago and finished it just the other week. That’s not because I’m a particularly slow reader (in fact, generally the opposite), but because the book was the first book in a trilogy, and I didn’t want to start reading it until I’d got the other two books.
The problem [...]

Read: The Liveship Traders »