In Soho, the walls have noses.
I’d heard a few times from cab drivers and London trivia goons about there being a nose in Admiralty Arch, and that – for example – as part of The Knowledge exams that cab drivers take they’re told to drive from somewhere like “The chimney on the bridge to the nose”… which you wouldn’t be able to do unless you had a particular level of insider information, or were unusually observant.
Stories about the origins of this nose seem to vary wildly, from being a spare …

This is rather a big moment for me – after having had a YouTube account since what I’m assuming is 2006 (that’d be the first video I uploaded there, anyway), I’ve FINALLY had something magical happen.
Nearly 2 years ago my mate Brett & I went along to Wembley Arena to see German industrial rock outfit Rammstein – blogged about on this very website, don’t you know – and the spectacle & over-the-top-ness of it all had me reaching for my camera.  It made for a more illustrative blogpost in the …

I love Tropfest.  It started as an Australian short film festival (now an international event of 20 years) where anyone could enter a 7 minute or shorter film on pretty much anything they liked, provided it somehow featured the “theme item” for that year, in whatever oblique way they wanted.  And whilst watching one of the short films on the 2002 DVD of finalists I had an idea for a sketch for Adelaide Gang Show (for which I was doing a bit of writing at the time) – the film …

We’re back up in Edinburgh this year for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – this time Marty’s over from Australia, and he’s joined Liz, Billy, Myk, Kat & I in a nice centrally-placed apartment for a week of theatrical excess and mayhem.  So far we’ve seen (I suspect I’ll edit this list a few times in the next couple of days to add detail as I get time & inclination):

Powaqqatsi
Andrew Maxwell’s Fullmooners
Three Man Roast
John Hegley / Family Wordship
David Leddy’s Untitled Love Story
Andy Zaltzman’s Political Animal
Simon Callow’s Tuesday at Tesco’s
Andy Zaltzman / …

There’s a chap in South Australia by the name of Ryan (pictured – yes, he’s just a floating head), who I’ve known since I was about 4 years old, and who is a bit of an expert at putting words next to each other.
Recently he posted the following stuff on Facebook, and I thought it was so well expressed that the best thing to do would be to share it here as a sort of guest-post.
It should be fairly clear, but I’ll explain anyway because it feels like a cop-out …

London delivered another of it’s rare and exciting opportunities into my eager grasp last Thursday night with the chance to attend the 2011 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK, to hear from Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research in the Great Hall at Imperial College as he gave a presentation on the 2010 Ig Nobel laureates and their various works.
I’d first heard of the awards when Australia’s Dr Karl Kruszelnicki was awarded one in 2002 for his study on the factors affecting production and collection of belly button lint. …

It’s not strictly a story from this year, but it’s from last Christmas, it’s one of my favourite stories, and seemingly I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it yet… so that makes it more than eligible for the jasonbstanding.com treatment, doesn’t it? Admittedly, I think I’ve already told everyone I’ve ever met, but I don’t think that’s ever stopped me before.
This time last year I was lucky enough to be in Adelaide, Australia avoiding the ludicrously freezing London winter. One of the first afternoons I was there, …

Excellent ludicrous photo from the weekend, taken & edited by Neonwombat.

And now a rare video blogging moment, in which our intrepid hero visits Deepest Reading…

During our 5 day self-guided wander around various parts of Europe, K & I thought that it might be fun to do the obligatory visit to a place with a rude name.  It was a bit of an afterthought, admittedly, and not one which we explored with much diligence.  In fact, the extent of our planning this side trip was me typing a few rude words into Google Maps to see what would come up that was interesting.
I knew that there’s a town in Austria called Fucking, however that was …