Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: odd stuff

  • I’m the Axeman, Baby

    Let me get one thing straight. I’m no musician. I don’t play, I don’t perform. But I’ve owned a guitar since I was a teenager and, when no one’s listening, I get pleasure from stumbling my way through the dozen or two chords that I learned back then. I could probably manage a tolerable Kumbayah…

  • On My Radio

    I love the radio ads for casino resorts and hotels here. They all end the same way: “Please gamble responsibly.”

  • STFU, Parent

    Whose blog is it, anyway?

  • My Favourite Headline

    Some headlines just stick in your mind. Like BUDGIE DIES IN FIRE, from the Bolton Chronicle. The Chronicle was the local freesheet that was pushed through our letterbox once a week back when I was living in Bolton and working in Manchester. It featured several pages of classified ads filled out with a minumum of…

  • L A Song

    I’m trying not to worry, but when the kid came to visit I caught her measuring up my apartment.

  • Charlie Brooker Doesn’t Like Hershey’s

    From his column on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury’s in today’s Guardian: “As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it’s swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was ­encased in…

  • Nuggets

    Early last year I completed a questionnaire circulated by the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I was a member of the BSFA for a while, before I found that my changing tastes and inclinations meant that the British Fantasy Society was probably more for me; on moving over,…

  • “Good Sentences, and Well Pronounced”

    Someone once asked me how to go about achieving a writing style. Like the caterpillar challenged about its coordination in walking, I stumbled as soon as I started thinking about it. I think the best answer I could offer was that you should try to state the obvious simply, and the style would take care…

  • Seen on Hollywood Boulevard

    On the open street just along from the Egyptian Theater, this charming and child-friendly scene: And when you look more closely:

  • Happy Holidays

    Most years I’ve just about managed to get all my Christmas cards out by now, but this isn’t most years. Instead of my usual last-minute scramble I’m facing a scramble of another kind – my ticket home is for a British Airways flight, and right now I can’t say whether I’ll be spending Christmas in…