Alex Sheppard’s posterous

If you really stare at this, you can appreciate how brilliant (and terrifying) this Halloween costume is.

"Tigers love pepper. They hate cinnamon."

Hands down the funniest film I've seen this year.

Some excellent reasons - I particularly enjoy No. 4.

...Then I open my eyes and realise that my co-workers are looking at me funny.

Synopsis

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made?

Split into five sections - 'Reading', 'Being', 'Seeing', 'Feeling' and 'Remembering' - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays - some published here for the first time - reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner's care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful.

Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny - a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it's a space in which to think freely.

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Zadie Smith, my most favourite writer in the world, hasn't written much fiction lately. But she is publishing Changing My Mind, a collection of essays which is the next best thing, a week after my birthday!

Seeing as for the least three birthdays and Christmases I've asked for something written by Smith, it seems a shame to stop now.

Domestic Slut Gemma has completely sold this Filofax Beauty Giftbox to me and it's found it's way on to my birthday list. I think every girl needs a pen with a perfume atomiser in the lid. Why didn't anyone think of that before?

I'll have the pink one please.

There are some songs so perfect that I can't do anything whilst they're playing. Literally all I can do is try and take as much of it in as I can. Which is a little weird, I guess.

Anyway, Heatwave is one of those tracks. When it plays, I have to stop what I'm doing and listen. I also have a (barely controllable) urge to cartwheel across the room and go "wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee". It's just one of those songs.

What's your crazy-making song?

Another week, another Posterous entry about Mayer Hawthorne. This time it's about his new music video for Green Eyed Love (not my favourite track on the album).

Don't like it? You know where the unsubscribe button is.

This print (titled Simply Our Love) is a little different from Rob Ryan's usual slightly spooky and fairy tale-esque papercuts, but I love it nonetheless.

Well, possibly. Because chances are it will change between now and November 27th.

Anyway, I stumbled across this black and gold number when I was browsing my local Topshop after work (living just off a high street is teh awesomez, as is finishing at lunchtime). Of course I won't know for sure until I try it on with the shoes. And tights. And obviously lose a dress size between now and then*.

* Hahahaha