大象传媒

Home and Dry

• Kate Feld
• 23 Feb 07, 03:07 PM

It鈥檚 that low, slow time of the year just before spring begins in earnest. Rainy city bloggers have wisely been staying dry and cosy indoors this week.

Academic and blogger has been visiting Manchester Art Gallery: 鈥淭here are a few pieces there which have haunted me since first seeing them, and so I haunt them back. Manfred on the Jungfrau by Ford Madox Brown is one such piece.鈥� The painting, based on a Byron poem, features a figure teetering atop a snowy cliff.

鈥淲hat drove him to the brink?鈥� Timothy wonders. 鈥淎s Manchester Art Gallery's note card on this painting puts it, 鈥楳anfred's inner turmoil springs from over-education. His quest for knowledge leads to confusion and he summons up spirits through black magic.鈥� Could it be that this man, Manfred, was a kind of extreme example of the terrors of writing a doctoral dissertation?鈥�

Inveterate couch potato(Slogan: Watching TV so you don鈥檛 have to) took a short break from parsing Britney Spears鈥� insane behaviour to mourn the passing of an important man:

鈥淚t is with profound regret that we report the death, at 93, of Robert Adler, the co-inventor of the TV remote. Millions of people would have loved the opportunity of asking him (a) what are some of those buttons for? And (b) where is it? We could have sworn we left on the sofa鈥�. Viewers wishing to pay their respects may press the mute button for a minute鈥檚 silence.鈥�

Poetry blogger has a new poem up, bravely titled 鈥淪alford Women.鈥� It begins:

The women dress like little girls
and the girls dress like little women
and the little girls dress like their
mam's dressed twenty years ago.
But that's fashion on the dole.

Any Salford women out there care to respond to these sartorial observations?

And our friend at Manchester International, , has bravely ventured onto hitherto unexplored ground:

鈥淚 took a trip to the other side. While walking down the concourse I came to the realisation that I have never entered the duty free shop. I see it every day, its glare burning my eyes, its empty, plastic promises slicking my brain. Well, I ventured into that place, preparing for the worst鈥︹��

But what shocking truth did he find there? Oh, you鈥檒l just have to go read it.