Hi. Welcome to Planet Mut. Established in 2004, it’s the perfect outlet for my more sociopathic tendencies. Email me at planetmut@gmail.com.
If you want to read the five years’ worth of archives on the old HTML site, they’re here.
|
1. The house
I, too, am amazed that Mooka has been knocked off the top of the list for the first time but after waiting and saving for seven years to get our own place we finally managed it in April. Or May, we can’t quite remember, as we had to put off our moving date three times thanks to the nutjobs we bought the place off. After investing $[NUMBER REDACTED] on painters, electricians and plumbers the house resembled somewhere you’d actually want to live and not the piss-poorly decorated combination of 1950s kitsch/1970s horrorshow pictured above. I can’t remember the name of […]
Fiction
Three Stations
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
Room
The Wee Free Men
The Graveyard Book
A Hat Full Of Sky
Lost Echoes
Coraline
Wintersmith
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Soul Hunter
Savage Season
Faithful Place
Case Histories
I Shall Wear Midnight
Non Fiction
Mockingbird: A Portrait Of Harper Lee
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Fry Chronicles
Letter To A Christian Nation
1959: The Year Everything Changed
The Authorised Biography of Ronnie Barker
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Hitler’s Empire: How The Nazis Ruled Europe
Family Britain, 1951 – 1957
Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
State of Emergency: The Way We Were — Britain 1970 – 1974
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
How to […]
AS IT’S the end of the year I thought I’d jump on the Top Ten bandwagon. So to kick off the season of lists, here’s my favourite pics of the year; click ‘em for the bigger versions:
First off, a sunset pic I took from May Hill in October. This one was a bit of a fluke — not wanting to be blinded, I just set the camera to f22, held it up in the air, pointed it in the general direction of the sun and pressed the shutter release. And it worked. The halo effect was unexpected but very welcome. It’s just a […]
BOOK blog The Broke And The Bookish does a weekly meme of top 10 lists based around different themes. With it being Thanksgiving this week (or “Let’s Be Grateful The Indians Didn’t Have Gunpowder Day”) the topic is the 10 authors you’d invite to your Thanksgiving feast. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here they are…
George Orwell He fought in the Spanish Civil War, spent a year down and out in Paris and London, went down coalmines in Wigan, worked as a colonial policeman in Burma, produced numerous reviews, essays, columns and articles about anything he wanted and then wrote […]
10
Getting my pics on cbslocal.com and autoblog.com. Fame at last!
9
Seeing Eddie Izzard live in LA. He wasn’t in drag but nevertheless as hysterically funny as always, and it gave Ev enough material to keep her in filthy dreams for weeks afterwards.
8
The KFC Double Down. More than 500 calories and 60% of your daily salt intake combined in one easy-to-hold chicken and bacon sandwich, with the chicken taking the place of the bread. Which in many ways is probably a good thing as adding the kind of “bread” used in fast-food places would have upped the sugar and salt content to near-fatal levels. […]
Fiction
Beat The Reaper
White Teeth
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Mathilda Savitch
The Hakawati
Caramelo
Brick Lane
My Turn To Make The Tea
Childhood’s End
Non-fiction
Moab Is My Washpot
Columbine
George Orwell: A Life
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
The End Of Faith
102 Minutes
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
The Devil’s Highway: A True Story
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons […]
WE HERE at Planet Mut (and by “we” I mean “me”) aren’t averse to leaping on bandwagons when the chance of an easy update presents itself. So as it’s Halloween, here’s the Planet Mut guide to my favourite horror movies — in no particular order:
1. John Carpenter’s The Thing
When I was a young Mut, back in the days of the early 80s, one of my cousins — who shall remain nameless — occasionally got hold of pirate videos. One of these was a double-bill of Tron and The Thing. Left alone one day, I was told to watch Tron as much as I […]
The Trap Door
The plasticine adventures of big blue blob Berk, weird grey spider-thing Drutt, Boni the skull and countless creepy-crawlies, worms and monsters are among the finest and funniest animations ever put on screen. It’s hugely inventive, full of slapstick humour — Drutt is forever being squashed underfoot — and good-natured fun, this is among the best 160 minutes of telly ever made. The childlike glee with which Berk goes about his mundane job of looking after The Thing Upstairs, chasing escaped monsters and cooking pots of slime is magic to watch and the fact that Drutt seems to communicate by farting is […]
Identifying the soldiers of a forgotten First World War battle.
In search of the real Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy.
Why some people are so frigging […]
10: New editor
Seriously, the papers have gone from strength to strength, I got to do a much-needed redesign, our websites no longer feel like they’re being run by monkeys, the office is a much better place to work in and no one’s being screamed at any more.
9: LA Galaxy v FC Barcelona
A fantastic day out with Ev and Mike at the Rose Bowl in August. Beckham got thoroughly verbally abused, Barca won, and some American guy even recognised my Merthyr Tydfil FC shirt. I had such a good time that I even managed to forget that Ticketmaster charged […]
|
|
