Critic Cal

There are some dicey moments in the second of  Stieg Larsson 's ' Millennium Trilogy ' crime thrillers. The one that really  got me was when his arguably- too -brilliant social-misfit-hacker protagonist Lisbeth Salander   finally  (after several weeks of intermittent, amateur endeavour) solves the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem  -- a conjecture which famously remained unproven for 358 years after the tantalising claim by the eponymous theorist , scrawled in the white space of his copy of the ancient Greek mathematical text Arithmetica , that he knew a proof but that it was too large to fit in the margin. Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty metres when suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.  In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.  The

Mr. W's had me watching the oh-so-disturbingly funny ' Inside No. 9 ', a series of disconnected black comedy shorts made by the men what done ' The League of Gentlemen '. It's all mindgames and murders, domestic intruders and sinister secrets and aargh. Tends to be that I enjoy it in the moment and regret it in the middle of the nightmare-riddled night... So the other evening, I opted for the tried-and-tested ' Cabin Pressure ' remedy, and drifted off to the dulcet, charmingly hi-lariously crafted tones of Douglas, Martin, Carolyn and Arthur. Indeed, my sleep was much the sweeter for this I'm-too-old-for-a-bedtime-story-but-radio-4-does-pretty-much-the-same-job stratagem. Except, part way through I was distracted by an onset of thoughtfulness, prompted by the following interlocution between the sharp-tongued Carolyn and her cheerfully be-leagured new-found love interest, Herc: Carolyn: Oh, don't tell me you're a vegetarian.  Herc:

There's something pleasingly 'meta' about the way that  Neil Gaiman  interweaves intriguing fact [1], established myth, wide-ranging allusion [2], and his own ingenious fabrications: the reader is left having 'learned' an awful lot of fascinating stuff which may or may not be 'true', and is forced to confront the generally problematic nature of truth, how to get at it, and when and whether and in what regard it matters. As someone who likes to at least know the origins of the things I think I know, I found my reading of  American Gods  frequently interrupted by the urge to google. But, being as popular and influential as it is, much of the apparently corroborative evidence I turn up turns out to be rooted in the novel as an assumed 'authoritative source' in its own right, so that the internet (and, by extension, humanity...?) simply doesn't 'know' any more whether such-and-such a nugget of information pre-existed or was birthed in Ga

Aargh, stupid flippin' irking sequels; dumb-ass mindless whatsit film industry. These days 's'nothing but an over-promoted sequin-smattered hamster wheel of money-spinning franchises, sparkle flying off with each deteriorating cycle. And of course the audiences flock , 'cause that's just what you do  -- to briefly shush the inner monologue of metaphysical anxiety, and give you all some shallow communal experience with which to fill the silences whilst hovering, disconsolate, by the broken tea urn in the office kitchen. And hype and healthy ticket sales are grist enough to the mill regardless of artistic merit so the wheel turns again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and -- surely not? but yes, indeed, again again, and no-one thinks to stop or ask if anybody actually enjoys or is remotely nourished by a cinematic diet of recycled pap.  OK; enough with the sheepishly-minced oaths and the inadequately-homologous metaphors... Suffice to say that there