Made I think in 1970, and no comedy has surpassed it since. Great performance by Buck Henry, some outrageous songs (and I believe the first public performance by Carly Simon). The 'how to smoke a joint' scene was a classic then, and still is. Not to mention the ending.

A man finds his teenage children tiresome. So he writes a jokey pseudo-scientific book about middle age, which he defines as beginning and ending surprisingly young. And drags in a few poorly understood Darwinian 'explanations' to back up his 'theories' (they don't). Okay for a long flight, I suppose.

This review could apply, probably, to most cameras in this 'bridge' category. Each has a little advantage here, a little downside there, but not being a professional reviewer, I only have this one. At first I was sceptical. Okay, I said, 'in ordinary conditions and in auto mode, it takes perfectly good pictures. But so will a compact at half the price or less. True, you have the zoom here, and it feels nice in the hand, but really that's all you're paying for. But if you want to be creative... You can probably forget it. By the time you've found the function you're looking for, that cute little baby will probably have kids of her own.' This was not fair. You simply have to learn to ignore 90% of the functions. The Manual function itself works fairly easily. And the screen tells you what you're getting. This is real WYSIWYG. The electronic viewfinder (substitutes the screen when the latter is closed -- yes, you can close it) is a real boon, and this is something no compact has, I think. And it can be adjusted to your eyesight, so you can see the display and the scene with the same glasses. You DO need the Manual mode -- the camera seems to think all scenes should look as if they were shot in bright sunshine. I only wish the camera could be stripped of some of its REALLY USEFUL (!) features -- such as colour compensation for pics taken under mercury vapour street lamps (not sodium ones, mind you -- perhaps they don't have them in Japan). My experience is that if you want to take a picture in the street at night, you're probably drunk. And you certainly won't find this feature before your friends collapse. (Incidentally: don't be taken in by a zoom factor of '35', which sounds enormous, but only corresponds roughly to a field-glass magnification of 10x, because it starts from a very wide-angle base, where you have to look for the church tower which in real life is staring you in the face. The wide angle is also useful, of course.)
Edit: After a further six months of use, I can confirm all of the above. Also: In manual mode, the wheel can either be turned or clicked for different functions, and it's very easy to do the wrong one, and find, for example, that you've set it to ISO 3600 by mistake. Perhaps more seriously, there's a definite tendency for the colour rendition in some lights to look much too blue. This can be corrected on the computer, but it does HAVE to be corrected, and colour correction's not everyone's cup of tea.

This is a very entertaining but not exactly heavyweight series. It is never boring and extremely professional (just look at the way the train stops precisely at the moment he's finished each piece on the platform). Possibly you might think it a little too smooth (like his hair), and it's certainly bland. Never a critical word, and only a hint that something might be controversial. But he finds interesting things to talk about in easy-to-digest chunks. Intelligent escapism.

This book received glowing praise in the press, and while I am not saying that it is in any way a bad book, it doesn't deserve the extravagant praise it has got. In particular, it says very little about the picture. You can find out more from Wikipedia. Nor does the author give any opinion on where she stands on the controversies surrounding it. Her history of the picture's reception is the most interesting part of the book, but the problem is, most of the book is taken up with the lives and circumstances of the picture's owners. And when this descends into the dynastic politics of the 16th and 17th centuries, frankly you have to be pretty committed not to skip the numerous pages devoted to this. Even the description of the Peninsular War, which is somewhat more lively, is not exactly gripping.
I hope and presume the author wasn't responsible for the title. (She says herself that the woman -- and no way is she a 'girl' -- seems to be a standard 15th century portrait based on no one in particular; it's the man who's individual and interesting, and it's the symmetry that makes the picture.)

I thought these programmes were unbalanced and in places disingenuous. To start a programme on German Art with Gothic architecture (which is essentially French) is odd, and then, as the archetype of this work of the medieval mind, to choose Cologne Cathedral, which was built in the 19th century and is essentially a pastiche, is very odd indeed. The next oddity was to spend ten minutes of a 60-minute programme on Messerschmidt, and then to imagine that his "character heads" somehow reflected the fragmentation of Germany. That is a view which is not only strange, but was not backed up in any serious way. The middle episode, on the 19th century, was much better, giving due attention to Runge and Friedrich. To try to get all of German 20th-century art into one episode is probably an impossible undertaking. Much of it was well done (the Nazis and art, for example), but why spend so much time on the Bechers? Hilla Becher is a jolly old girl, and enjoys explaining (to TV viewers) the twists and turns of the blast-furnace pipes on the bald b/w photographs she famously took together with her husband. But if this were a 40-something man explaining in an estuary accent the fine points of the different clothes-pegs in his collection, we would soon yawn and wonder if this was art (even if he'd taken good photographs of them). I suppose no review of German art can fail to mention Beuys, and even Grahame-Dixon admitted that many feel this emperor has no clothes. I thought he got too much space, and the result was that others were left out.

I would recommend all those who rave about this book to read the earlier "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. Structurally they are very similar, and in my opinion "Einstein's Dreams" is far more coherent and better written. "Einstein's Dreams" in turn is said by many to owe much to Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" (but I admit that Calvino is not to everyone's taste). I cannot imagine that Eagleman was unfamiliar at least with Lightman's book -- the similarities are simply far too striking to be coincidental.

A splendid re-telling of the Gulliver in Lilliput story, keeping to Swift's story fairly closely but fleshing out the characters in a charming fashion. Pity it's not on dvd.

I have only reached chapter one (Knossos) and already I am irritated. First of all by his statement that Crete is the third-largest island in the Mediterranean. (It isn't, it's the fifth, which seems an odd mistake for a classicist to make, seeing how the classical world revolved around the Mediterranean). So: can I trust his other facts? Another irritation is his punctuation. The Modern Humanities Research Association Style Book (prescribed by Prof. Cartledge's university for dissertations etc.) says: "Long dashes should be used sparingly; commas, colons or parentheses are often more appropriate." You're telling me! This book is bespattered by dashes on every page, and it makes reading it a series of hiccups, as if the professor were thinking aloud and hadn't put his thoughts together. I hope I can reach the end...

This book asks a simple question about a matter of immense importance: Why did the Jews (and only the Jews) become so alienated from mainstream Mediterranean/European culture? And it provides a fairly simple answer: it was all due to the events of 66-70 CE (and in particular the -- possibly unintended -- destruction of the Temple), which themselves were the result of a series of accidents: something as banal as a bad governor, coupled with the political turmoil surrounding and following the death of Nero (which was not in itself connected with Judaea). To bolster his still uncertain power, Vespasian was forced to boast of "Judaea Capta", while his son Titus had of course an even greater interest. The resulting alienation of the Jews from Rome combined with, and fed, the concurrent alienation of the Jews from up-and-coming Christianity. This is the thesis. It is ably and clearly presented, and I find it convincing.